Cost Per Mille (CPM) is the price an advertiser pays for one thousand impressions of an ad, where mille is Latin for thousand, used as the standard pricing unit for awareness-focused advertising.
Also written as CPM.
CPM is the right yardstick for awareness campaigns. When the goal is to be seen rather than to get an immediate click, CPM tells a small business what that exposure actually costs.
It reveals how expensive an audience is to reach. A tightly targeted local audience often carries a higher CPM than a broad one, because fewer people fit, so CPM is partly a measure of how specific your targeting is.
CPM alone proves nothing. Cheap impressions to the wrong people are still wasted, so CPM only matters read alongside whether the right audience saw the ad and whether it did anything.
A florist runs a local awareness campaign before Mother's Day. It pays a CPM of 12 dollars to reach people within its delivery area.
A 600 dollar budget therefore buys roughly 50,000 impressions of the ad across the local audience in the lead-up.
The florist is not chasing instant clicks here; it is buying presence in front of local people at the moment of year that matters most, and CPM is how it priced that presence.
In-House uses CPM to plan and judge awareness campaigns through the advertising agent, while still tracking whether the exposure translated into real local demand.