Monetised click (paid click)

Not every click in an arbitrage funnel earns money. The click on the bought ad costs money. The click on a related search term is free. Only the click on an advertiser's sponsored listing is monetised, and only if the feed accepts it as valid.

That last condition is the important one. Search engines filter clicks continuously. Duplicates, obvious bots and many accidental clicks are discarded before they are ever billed, and the publisher never sees revenue for them. Further clicks may be invalidated later, with the advertiser credited and the publisher's earnings reduced. So the count of monetised clicks in a report is provisional until revenue is finalised.

Monetised clicks are the denominator of feed RPC and the point where an arbitrageur's fate is decided by someone else's results. Each one is a real charge to a real advertiser. If those advertisers get customers, bids hold up. If they do not, the value of future clicks falls through smart pricing or the site is excluded.

An example

Say 1,000 visits produce 450 keyword clicks and 280 ad clicks, of which the feed filters 10 as invalid. Monetised clicks: 270. At $1.00 each, revenue is $270, or $0.27 per visit.