What is CPM Advertising?

What Does CPM Advertising Stand For?

I know I already covered this in the snippet at the top but CPM stands for (Cost Per Mille)

‘Mille’ means One Thousand in latin & essentially you’re paying for 1,000 impressions on your ad

I’ll cover Impressions Vs Reach later in the article but for any ad platform where you’re showing images or videos,

You’ll be paying for each impression on your ad

So you really should be optimizing for clicks on the landing page because unlike a PPC campaign you need an enticing reason to click below

Impressions Vs Reach

Now you may be wondering what I mean by you’re paying for an impression, what does an impression mean, what does reach mean?

See impressions are simply views on your ads and it would be best explained in a visual example;

Say 10 people saw your ad 10 times, aka 100 views

In your ad manages for the platform you’re using they’d say it was 100 impressions (100 total times viewed) & 10 reach (10 unique people saw it)

That’s the difference between impressions & reach and oftentimes,

It may take multiple views of your ad & multiple attempts at getting their attention before the end user finally decides to submit the form and get a free quote or buy your product or whatever you’re selling.

What To Optimize For CPM Advertising

Now you may be asking yourself, well why am I simply paying for a view on my ads that’s not what actually drives revenue for the company.

See when running ads where it’s on a view based platform (Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, Tiktok) and honestly any time you’re running ads in general, you need a good offer.

And if you don’t understand why, if you offered everyone a Free Roof Replacement even if your landing page sucked, your video wasn’t very quality & your form won’t even submit, they’ll figure out a way to get in touch with you

Now on the other hand if you sound just like everyone else they’ll just go with the biggest brand aka the most trustworthy.

So if you’re running CPM advertising you must be giving the person a real & good reason to click YOUR landing page out of everyone else’s and work with you instead.

So #1 Offer

#2 if Visual

I mentioned offer first since it matters more but if your creatives look like the manufactured picture perfect content you see celebrities or movie stars having online, people don’t see that as genuine and authentic & won’t be as compelled to click on.

Not only that the more the content fits in with the rest of the feed the more likely they are to trust the ad more & click on it.

Now the final one & still super important #3, landing page.

See the landing page also needs to be good since you’re not just getting clicks on the landing page like you would in PPC campaigns so once you get those clicks,

You should have a congruent landing page to whatever you’ve been saying a moment ago so that people who land on the landing page actually think they have clicked the right thing.

It doesn’t need to look too polished, but it must be high converting and you’ll find out what that means as you A/B test more and more.

What Platforms Support CPM Advertising?

Some of the biggest platforms in order that support CPM advertising are:

Meta Ads – A Classic for advertisers

Youtube Ads

Tiktok

Snapchat

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