In my life, before the Internet became the center of my business and professional life I was a Financial Advisor with one of the largest firms in the US. I wanted to crunch the numbers and find the opportunities and help people actually retire. If you would have asked me about CPA online advertising at the time I would have probably responded that a CPA’s advertising options online are pretty limited, since they are such a highly regulated group. As a Financial Advisor the industry jargon defined CPA as Certified Public Accountant.
In online advertising with Google AdWords CPA stands for cost-per-action/acquisition. It is a bidding system that requires the use of conversion code, and a specific number of conversions per month. CPA is essentially an autopilot for bidding and daily budgets where Google automatically sets bid level, position and budget levels to meet a target cost per action set by the user. This type of structure is set up for use with campaigns that generate large numbers of conversions. Foe example, an e-retailer that sells designer hand bag shoe sets can utilize CPA pricing to optimize their campaign for buyers of a new item in stock, or last season’s items by properly organizing and targeting their keywords, ad groups, and campaigns.
The lesson here for B2B advertising is to be aware of that other industries use the same terms as yours. Usually a few Google searches of individual words can really open up ones eyes as to the true complexity of the English language and the meanings we assign to words.
