Cost per impression

Internet marketing
Search engine optimization Social media marketing Email marketing Referral marketing Content marketing
Search engine marketing
Pay per click Cost per impression Search analytics Web analytics
Display advertising
Contextual advertising Behavioral targeting
Affiliate marketing
Cost per action Revenue sharing
Mobile advertising

Cost per impression, often abbreviated to CPI or CPM (Cost per mille) are phrases used in online advertising and marketing related to web traffic. They refer to internet marketing campaigns where advertisers pay for every time that their advert is displayed to a user usually in the form of a banner ad on a website, but can also refer to advertisements in Email advertising.

An impression describes the instance when an advert downloaded by a user when viewing a web page. A single web page may contain multiple adverts and in such cases a single pageview would result result in one impression for each advert displayed to that user. In order to count the impressions served as accurately as possible and prevent fraud, an ad server may exclude certain non-qualifying activities such as page-refreshes or other user actions from counting as impressions. When advertising rates are described as CPM or CPI, this is the amount paid for every thousand qualifying impressions served.

Cost per mille is one of the most common marketing strategies used on the internet along with Cost per click (CPC/PPC) and Cost per action (CPA) (including CPL and CPS). CPM advertising is often preferred by publishers because they can be more certain about the revenue they will generate from their website traffic, but CPM can be compared with different marketing strategies by examining their Effective cost per mille (eCPM). eCPM informs the publisher what they would have received if they sold the advertising inventory on a CPM basis by taking into account the Clickthrough rate (CTR) and/or Conversion rate (CVR) of the campaigns.

Cost per mille is the closest online advertising strategy to those offered in the more traditional media such as on television or in print which sell advertising based on estimated viewership or readership, and as such is popular with advertisers as it is simple to measure campaigns and can be compared and contrasted with their advertising in other media.

See also

• Cost per mille (CPM)
• Cost per click (CPC)/Pay per click (PPC)
• Cost per action (CPA)
• Effective cost per mille (eCPM)
• Effective cost per action (eCPA)
• Click-through rate (CTR)
• Internet marketing
• Compensation methods
• Performance-based advertising

Further reading

• Chaffey, Dave; et al. (2006). Internet Marketing: Strategy, Implementation and Practice (3rd ed.). Harlow, England: Prentice Hall. ISBN 0273694057.