eCPM

eCPM is an ad monetization metric that stands for “effective cost per mille,” or revenue earned per 1000 ad impressions (“mille” is from the French for “thousand.”) eCPM is commonly used by publishers in order to measure the performance of their ad monetization efforts and can be used to measure ads displayed on both mobile and desktop devices. eCPM provides publishers with an overview of how much they’re earning from each ad unit on their site or mobile app.

eCPM is calculated as follows:

eCPM = Total Ad Revenue / Impressions * 1000

For example, if a mobile app is earning $500 per day and has 100,000 daily impressions, the eCPM would be $5.

eCPM is similar to CPM (cost per mille), although the difference is that eCPM is the value of 1000 ad impressions regardless of the method the ads were purchased. For example, eCPM can be calculated for ad campaigns that are purchased based on cost-per-click (CPC) or cost per acquisition (CPA), or any other purchasing method. This makes eCPM particularly useful in comparing costs or revenue from various types of ad campaigns, regardless if they are bought by the advertiser on a CPM basis or another method.

As Publift highlights, the importance of eCPMs for publishers can be summarized as follows:

This is a key metric because it helps publishers to estimate their future revenue. Using the average eCPM from your past campaigns, you can set up targets and use it as a benchmark for testing the best performing ads on your site.

Even a small change in eCPM can be a meaningful difference for publishers, assuming they have a large number of ad impressions each day. Given that increasingly eCPM slightly can lead to significantly improved ad monetization, below are several ways that publishers can improve their results highlighted by Smaato:

• Provide more data to advertisers, where privacy-safe: Advertisers will always pay a premium for valuable data about the audience. For example, providing location data, gender, age, or other demographic data to advertisers ensures that their campaigns are targeting the people, which can ultimately lead to higher eCPMs. Note: this is safer to do in aggregate than individually or at device-level, and can only be done with user knowledge and permission.
• Improve ad viewability: Advertisers also want to ensure that their ads are actually being seen. In other words, they want to achieve a high viewability rate. Improving user engagement in your app, for example, generally means that they are more likely to sit through more ads. In turn that increases your profitability.
• Try different ad formats: Another way to increase eCPMs is to experiment with different ad formats. One major trend is that video ads are much more lucrative for publishers, so adding this ad format can be an effective monetization strategy. Another good option: rewarded ad units that require attention for a reward to be given.
• Use an ad monetization platform: Finally, having the right tools in place to attribute and analyze an app’s ad monetization is essential to increasing eCPMs over time.

In short, with the right tools to experiment and analyze new ad monetization strategies, publishers are able to make the most from their ad inventory.

Singular helps mobile marketers and publishers improve their eCPM with leading ad monetization attribution and analytics. This helps publishers quickly reveal insights and opportunities to optimize their monetization efforts by automatically collecting, normalizing, and aggregating ad revenue data across monetization partners. With this cross-platform data, publishers are then able to better allocate ad inventory to maximize sales by analyzing the performance of each monetization partner. In addition, by accurately attributing ad revenue data, this helps publishers calculate and understand their true ROI. Ultimately, this helps marketers make better decisions about the performance of each monetization partner, ad format, and more. By combining ad monetization data into a single dashboard, this also helps publishers to scale more intelligently and improve their eCPMs over time.