CPC
Also called Cost per click.
A price paid per click rather than per view, shifting delivery risk to the publisher.
Under CPC the publisher is paid only when someone acts, so a placement that gets seen by fifty thousand people and clicked by none costs nothing. That makes CPC attractive to buyers and unattractive to publishers with strong audiences who know their readers act off-platform rather than through a link.
The number that matters is not the CPC but the cost per outcome behind it. A $0.40 click from a general audience and a $4 click from a buying committee can be the same deal, or the cheap one can be worthless. Judge CPC only after the conversion rate is known.
CPC deals need a click definition both sides accept before money moves: whether repeat clicks from one visitor count, what window deduplicates them, and what happens to clicks from bots.
How LinkBourse handles it
Clicks are deduplicated per visitor and filtered for invalid traffic at the moment they are recorded — the same filtered count both sides see, and the one the escrow releases against.
Terms it depends on
- CPM
- The price of one thousand ad impressions — the standard unit for buying reach rather than outcomes.
- CPA
- A price paid per completed action — a sale, a signup, a booked demo — rather than per click.
- Invalid traffic
- Clicks and impressions that did not come from a real person acting on the ad — bots, prefetchers, repeat automation, and traffic from somewhere other than the booked property.
- Click-through rate
- Clicks divided by impressions, expressed as a percentage.