Enter any two of cost, impressions and CPM to get the third. Then check what a creator's quote really costs per 1,000 views, and how it compares with your paid ads.
CPM is the cost of 1,000 impressions. Rearrange the same formula to find your budget or how many impressions a budget buys.
Example: a campaign costs $500 and gets 200,000 impressions. $500 ÷ 200,000 × 1,000 = $2.50 CPM.
CPM stands for cost per mille, from the Latin word for thousand. It's what you pay for 1,000 impressions of an ad or a post. Because it's priced per thousand, CPM lets you compare channels and creators of very different sizes on the same scale.
An impression is one time your content is shown on a screen. One person can see an ad more than once, so impressions are usually higher than reach (the number of unique people who saw it).
Paid ads report impressions for you. With creators, you work it out from the quote and their typical results:
CPM tells you what attention costs. The others tell you what action costs. Track both: a cheap CPM that never drives clicks or sales isn't a good deal.
There's no single good number. CPM changes with the platform, ad format, audience, location and time of year, and it often rises in busy shopping seasons. The most useful benchmark is your own: compare a new channel or creator against the CPM you already pay in your ads manager. That's what the influencer deal mode above does.
If a creator's CPM is close to your ads but their content is something you'd run as an ad, they may be the better buy. Use the influencer rate calculator to sanity-check a quote, and the ROI calculator once results come in.
Search 30M+ creators by niche, platform, engagement rate and location. Then brief them, send a contract and pay through escrow in one place. Free 7-day trial.