CPM
Cost Per Mille
In one line
Cost per mille (CPM) is the cost paid for 1,000 ad impressions — the default pricing unit for awareness and reach campaigns.
Going deeper
CPM stands for cost per mille — 'mille' is Latin for thousand. Because the cost is tied to impressions rather than clicks, it is the default unit for upper-funnel awareness and reach buys.
A low CPM is not automatically good news. Suspiciously cheap inventory often correlates with ad fraud, invalid traffic or low-quality placements, so always read it alongside viewability and brand safety metrics.
CPC and CPM get compared a lot, but they answer different questions. Use CPC when you need conversions now and CPM when you need category awareness later. Forcing them into the same KPI usually shortchanges one of them.
Related terms
CPC
Cost per click (CPC) is the average amount an advertiser pays for a single click — the default unit of measure for paid search and most performance display campaigns.
MarketingPaid Media
Paid media is any channel where you pay to be seen — search ads, display, social ads, video and OTT all fall under this umbrella.
MarketingBrand Awareness
Brand awareness is the degree to which customers recognise or recall a brand within a category — one of the foundational assets of any marketing function.
MarketingROAS
Return on ad spend (ROAS) is revenue divided by ad spend — the headline efficiency metric for performance campaigns where revenue can be tracked back to the channel.
MarketingCTR
Click-through rate (CTR) is the share of impressions that resulted in a click — the most basic measure of how compelling an ad, link or search result is.
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