Average CPM in Google Ads

Source: Google Ads Help, About YouTube ads and view metrics.

On Display, video and Demand Gen, it is the price of reach. On Search it is a by-product: you pay per click, and CPM equals CPC times CTR times 1,000. A €2 CPC at a 5% CTR is a €100 CPM.

Viewable CPM is a different figure. It counts only the impressions Active View counted as seen. Display campaigns can even bid on viewable CPM and pay only for those.

What moves it

Demand for the audience: the more advertisers after the same people, the higher the price. Season: retail audiences cost more in November and December. Placement: YouTube and well-known apps cost more than small sites. Targeting: the narrower the audience, the dearer each thousand.

A low CPM is not a win in itself. Cheap impressions are often the ones nobody sees, on placements at the bottom of a page or inside apps tapped by accident.

A worked example

A board game publisher runs Display and Search. Display costs €600 for 400,000 impressions, a €1.50 CPM. Search costs €2,600 for 40,000 impressions, a €65 CPM.

The account shows €3,200 over 440,000 impressions, an average CPM of €7.27. That figure describes no campaign that exists. The publisher reads CPM on Display alone, where it is a price it actually pays.

1. Open Campaigns, click the Columns icon, then Modify columns.
2. In Performance, tick Avg. CPM, with Cost and Impr. beside it.
3. For Display and video, add the viewable CPM column from Viewability.
4. Filter the table by campaign type before you compare.

Optizads works out Avg. CPM from the period's spend and impressions, both summed from each campaign's stored days. It sits in the Costs group of the metric picker. Viewable CPM is in the Active View group, worked out from viewable impressions and what they cost.

Because Optizads reads every campaign type, removed ones included, the account figure matches Google's account total for the same days. That makes it a fair check against Google, and a poor guide on a mixed account, as the example shows.

A report's Performance chart of Avg. CPM by month, with about 25 months read on connect, shows the season of your audience's price year against year. Pair it with Avg. CPV or Interaction rate so the reader sees what the impressions brought.

• Reading an account-wide CPM that mixes Search with Display.
• Calling a low CPM good when most of the impressions were never seen.
• Comparing CPM across countries or seasons without that context.
• Judging a campaign bought on clicks by its CPM.

• Cost per click (CPC): What you pay when someone clicks an ad.
• Display Network: Websites and apps where Google shows image and text ads.
• Impression: One showing of an ad.
• Frequency cap: A limit on how many times one person sees a Display or Video ad in a period.

• Viewable impressions (Active View): Viewable impressions are the impressions Google's Active View counted as seen: at least half of the ad on screen for one second, or two seconds for a video.
• Average CPV: Average CPV is what you pay for one video view on average in Google Ads: the cost of your views divided by the number of views.
• Interaction rate: Interaction rate is how often people interact with your ad once it is shown: interactions divided by impressions.