CPM is the cost per 1,000 ad impressions — the base price of attention on a platform, and the metric that tells you whether performance changes are a market problem or an account problem.
Definition
CPM = (spend ÷ impressions) × 1,000. It's the native pricing unit of social and display auctions: platforms sell impressions, and everything else (clicks, conversions) is what you convert those impressions into. CPMs move with competition and seasonality — Q4 retail, election cycles — independent of anything in your account.
Why it matters
When results worsen, CPM is the first split: if CPMs spiked, you're paying more for the same attention (market condition); if CPMs are flat but results fell, your creative or targeting is converting attention worse (account condition). Teams that skip this split fix the wrong thing.
In agentic execution
Adlyse's agents read CPM shifts across platforms as part of the signal set — so when attention gets expensive on one platform, budget reallocation toward cheaper equivalent outcomes elsewhere is proposed and, once approved, executed.
Related terms
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