All terms
— Metrics & economics
CPM (cost per thousand impressions)
CPM is the cost of one thousand ad impressions — the native pricing unit of social and display auctions.
— In practice
On Meta and other social platforms, you effectively pay for attention (CPM) and convert it into outcomes through creative. Rising CPMs with stable auction pressure usually mean the platform is showing your ads to a narrower or more contested audience; falling CTR at stable CPM means the creative is fatiguing.
CPM is a diagnostic, not a target: the same $25 CPM can produce brilliant or terrible CPA depending entirely on creative and offer. Media buyers who optimize CPM in isolation end up cheap and invisible.
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