CPM
Last updated September 2026
Cost per mille (CPM) is the price an advertiser pays per one thousand ad impressions, regardless of clicks. It is the standard pricing model for display, video, and awareness-focused campaigns, where the goal is reach and exposure rather than an immediate click or action.
Mille is Latin for thousand. The formula is spend divided by impressions, multiplied by one thousand, and it is used wherever the objective is being seen by a defined audience rather than driving an immediate click.
01
When CPM makes more sense than CPC
Brand awareness campaigns, upper-funnel content, and video pre-roll or connected TV and OTT placements are typically priced on CPM, because paying per impression aligns cost with the actual goal in a way per-click pricing does not.
02
What drives CPM up or down
- 01
Audience targeting specificity, narrower and higher-value audiences cost more per thousand impressions
- 02
Inventory quality and placement, premium publisher inventory costs more than long-tail network placements
- 03
Seasonality and competitive demand
- 04
Ad format, video and CTV generally command higher CPMs than static display
03
The measurement challenge with CPM campaigns
Since the goal is not a click, standard last-click conversion tracking undersells what a CPM campaign actually contributes. View-through conversions, brand lift, and assisted-conversion paths matter more here, and reporting on a CPM buy using only click metrics can make it look like nothing happened even when it worked exactly as designed.
Conduit builds view-through and assisted-conversion tracking into the GA4 and GTM setup for any client running awareness or CTV and OTT campaigns, so a CPM buy gets judged against the metric that actually reflects what it was bought to do.
04
A misconception worth correcting
Clients new to awareness campaigns sometimes compare a CPM buy's cost per click unfavorably against a search campaign's CPC, as though the two were the same currency. They are not. A display or CTV placement priced on CPM was never meant to be judged by click volume, since most people who see a video pre-roll or a connected TV spot are not going to click anything at all, they are being reached, not asked to act immediately. Judging a CPM campaign on click-through rate is close to judging a billboard by how many people scanned a QR code on it; it measures the wrong behavior against the wrong goal. The right comparison is not CPC at all, it is whether reach and frequency goals were hit at an efficient price, and whether downstream signals like branded search and direct traffic moved afterward.
