LensPriceCompare Blog

Many of us remember the days when the Web was in its infancy and many sites were created from passion alone, simply to share information. And then around the mid nineties the Web experience underwent a transformation with the appearance of flashy graphics, tacky banners, and crass commercialization. With the advent of Google the web experience improved considerably, and the number of Web users and commercial marketers grew. Competition forced sites to pay for advertising, and to vie with each other for exposure and traffic. The principal methods of paying for traffic became pay-per-click and pay per action.

Pay Per Click
You may have arrived at this site through a pay-per-click search engine or sponsored advertisement. Advertising copy should address the problem you are trying to solve, e.g. where to purchase cheap contact lenses. If you arrive at this site and your questions and concerns are not addressed, it is quite likely you will leave and never come back! Because we paid for the click that brought you to our site in the first place, it is imperative that we provide you with the information and tools you expected to find here.

Performance Marketing (Pay Per Action)
The purpose of our site is to help you save money. We inform you about using coupons, free shipping, and contact lens rebates. Then we list online stores in order of final average cost for your lens type and quantity. The lens prices on our site are calculated based on your needs/criteria and presented in a convenient, easy-to-compare format that allows you to make an informed decision about which retailer you buy from. When you click through our links to the online store of your choice, the store knows you came from our site and records the resulting transaction as a referral. When the retailer processes your order, they pay us a referral –or performance—fee. Known as “pay per action” or “performance based marketing”, this system pays the referral fee only when a purchase is made.

Online referral services incur operational costs such as website development, programming, site maintenance, coupon and price updates, and marketing. The referral fees we earn when visitors click through our retailer links allow us to cover these ongoing costs and still make a profit so we can continue to provide a valuable service to price-conscious lens shoppers.

You now have a better understanding of how online lens price comparison sites make money, and also how important it is that you click through the store links to generate referral fees from your purchases.