The two primary types of Internet advertising costs are those needed to create an advertising campaign and those needed to host advertisements on various websites. Most advertising, or ad, campaigns begin with initial costs to create the campaign itself. This usually covers the salary of those who create the campaign, such as advertisers and graphic designers, as well as any expenses related to transferring that campaign to a digital medium for Internet usage. The rest of the Internet advertising costs a company should expect to encounter are the payments made to a website to host advertisements on that site.
Internet advertising costs are expenses a company pays to get advertisements on the Internet. These costs usually begin with the expenses of creating an ad campaign, which can be similar to those expenses needed to create a traditional print campaign. This usually begins with an advertising or marketing agency coming up with ideas for an ad campaign and then pitching those ideas to a client. Once an idea is approved, then remaining Internet advertising costs usually go to paying personnel to actually create that campaign.
If a company has an internal advertising department, then Internet advertising costs may include salaries for those employees in that department and the equipment needed to create a campaign. This can include computers, software, and any other resources used in making a campaign for use online. Companies that work with an external advertising agency typically pay a set fee based on an entire project, rather than individual salaries and equipment expenses. These Internet advertising costs usually cover those other fees, though a client might not actually see documents indicating what all of those individual fees entail.
Once the ad campaign has been created, then further Internet advertising costs usually go to paying for ads to be hosted on various websites. There are different structures used by websites to charge companies to host ads, though most sites use a cost per mile (CPM) or cost per click (CPC) method. CPM refers to websites that charge companies for advertising based on the number of times a page with that company’s ad is loaded or viewed; this may also be referred to as cost per thousand (CPT). CPC rates, on the other hand, are charged by a website to companies based on the number of times an advertisement on a website is clicked to redirect a user from the initial website to the advertised page. There are other rates that can be used to generate Internet advertising costs, though they are usually similar to these and often rely on scalable “cost per” approaches.