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CPM calculator
CPM is the cost of 1,000 ad impressions: total cost ÷ impressions × 1,000. A campaign that spends $500 for 250,000 impressions has a CPM of $2. Fill in any two values below and the calculator gives you the third.
By Alain Abulafya, founder of PPCleaner · Updated
PPCleaner
Impressions are cheap. Wasted clicks are not. PPCleaner reads your Google Ads search terms every night and blocks the ones that were never going to buy.
Start 7 days freeHow to calculate CPM
CPM stands for cost per mille, mille being Latin for a thousand. It is the price of 1,000 impressions, whatever the ad format.
The same formula works the other way round. To find what a number of impressions will cost, multiply the CPM by the impressions and divide by 1,000. To find how many impressions a budget buys, divide the budget by the CPM and multiply by 1,000.
CPM in Google Ads
On Search campaigns you pay per click, not per impression, but CPM is still a useful way to compare channels: divide the cost by the impressions and multiply by 1,000 to get an effective CPM. On Display and YouTube, you can bid on impressions directly, with viewable CPM (vCPM) bidding, which only counts an impression when the ad was actually visible on screen.
CPM or CPC: which one matters?
CPM tells you what visibility costs. CPC tells you what attention costs. A low CPM with a very low click-through rate can end up more expensive per click than a high CPM on a well-targeted audience. Use the CTR calculator and the CPC calculator to compare the two on your own numbers.
And once you pay per click, the price of a click is only half of the story: a click from a search that was never going to buy costs the same as a good one. That is what PPCleaner removes, every night.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good CPM?
It depends on the channel, the country and the audience. Compare your CPM over time and between your own campaigns, and judge it against what the impressions bring in clicks and sales rather than against a universal benchmark.
What is the difference between CPM and vCPM?
CPM counts every impression served. vCPM, used on Google's Display and YouTube campaigns, only counts viewable impressions: at least half of the ad on screen for one second for display, or two seconds for video.
How do I convert CPM to CPC?
Divide the CPM by 1,000 to get the cost per impression, then divide by your click-through rate. A $5 CPM with a 1% CTR gives a CPC of $0.005 ÷ 0.01 = $0.50.
Is my data stored?
No. The calculation runs in your browser.