CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)

Definition

The cost to display your ad to 1,000 people, regardless of whether they click it. The advertiser's relationship with a brick wall—you pay to exist, whether anyone looks or not.

Example Usage

Display banners run around $2-5 CPM, which means we're paying roughly $0.002-0.005 per person to show them an ad they'll ignore.

Origin

Traditional advertising metrics adapted to digital; 'M' is Roman numeral for 1,000

Fun Fact

CPM varies wildly by industry and audience—finance/insurance CPM can reach $50+, while entertainment sits around $5-10

Source: Digital Advertising Standards

Related Terms

Beginner

virality

The Holy Grail metric measuring how quickly content spreads across the internet like a digital contagion. Every marketer dreams of achieving it, most fail miserably, and the few who succeed usually have no idea how it actually happened. It's basically controlled chaos with a fancy epidemiological name.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

demographic targeting

Directing marketing messages based on statistical characteristics like age, gender, income, and education—the paint-by-numbers approach to audience segmentation. Simple, measurable, and often wildly reductive.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Intermediate

fighting strategy

A media scheduling approach where advertising runs in bursts with gaps between flights, as opposed to continuous presence. Perfect for brands that want intermittent relevance and confused consumers.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

popup

The universally despised website element that appears uninvited like a digital door-to-door salesman, blocking content you actually want to see with newsletters you'll never read. Marketing teams swear they increase conversions while users develop involuntary muscle memory for locating tiny X buttons. The internet's most successful experiment in training an entire generation to have lightning-fast reflexes.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Beginner

Eyeballs

A crude measure of how many humans eyeballs are looking at your ad—basically a less scientific way of saying 'impressions' that sounds cooler in meetings.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Intermediate

Behavioral retargeting

Following a user around the internet to remind them of that product they looked at once, because apparently digital amnesia is unacceptable.

📣 Marketing / Advertising

Translate This Term

See “CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions)” in Corporate Speak, Gen-Z Slang, Pirate Speak, and more.

Try the Translator

Share This Term

Post on X Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn

Discover a Term

Intermediate

incurred

Corporate-speak for 'we spent money' or 'we're now responsible for something unfortunate.' It's the passive-aggressive a...