Also called cost-per-response, direct-marketing technique for setting Internet advertising rates as well as for computing the cost effectiveness of advertising on an Internet service (such as the World Wide Web). The technique relates the cost of an advertisement to the number of people, or users, who click on it. It is computed by dividing the cost of designing and placing the advertisement by the number of page views of the advertisement. The fallacy of the technique is that it assumes that those who click on an advertisement are actually interested in more information. However, some users may simply be interested in the graphics or other aspects of the handiwork of the advertisement. The typical Internet advertisement is displayed in two parts: the first is a banner placed on a World Wide Web site with a brief advertising message, and the second part is a link to more information elsewhere. In order to view the second part, the user must respond to the first part by clicking on the link, hence cost-per-response. Often users will click on the link because they are more interested in the transition process than they are in the information displayed.
