Metrics and measurement
CPM
CPM is the cost of a thousand impressions, calculated as the fee divided by impressions, multiplied by one thousand. It is the standard way to compare the efficiency of creator deals against each other and against paid media.
Also called cost per mille, cost per thousand impressions.
CPM is useful precisely because it normalises for size. A 5,000 dollar deal delivering 500,000 impressions has a CPM of 10 dollars, and can be compared directly with a 500 dollar deal delivering 50,000. Without it, larger creators always look expensive and smaller ones always look cheap.
Its weakness is that it values every impression identically. A creator with an engaged, well-matched audience and a mediocre CPM will frequently outperform a cheaper creator with a broad, disengaged one, so CPM should be read alongside engagement and conversion rather than on its own.
Common questions
- What is a good CPM for influencer marketing?
- Creator CPMs commonly land between about 5 and 30 US dollars depending on platform, niche, and audience size, with high-intent business audiences running well above that. The useful comparison is against your own paid social CPM and against the other creators in the same campaign.
Related terms
- Impressions
- Impressions are the total number of times a piece of content was displayed, counting repeat views by the same person.
- Reach
- Reach is the number of unique accounts that saw a piece of content at least once. Each person is counted once no matter how many times they saw it.
- CPE
- CPE is the cost of a single engagement, calculated as the fee divided by total engagements. It measures what a brand paid for each like, comment, save, or share.
- ROAS
- ROAS is revenue divided by the spend that produced it, expressed as a multiple. A campaign that returned 30,000 in revenue on 10,000 of spend has a ROAS of 3.
- Rate card
- A rate card is a creator's published list of prices by deliverable, for example a set fee for a feed post, a story series, or a long-form video.
Distinct is the workspace where brands and creators run the work behind these terms. For brands, for creators, or back to the full glossary.