CPM
Cost per thousand impressions. The usual buying unit for remnant display. Not a quality score.
Published 2026-09-09 · Search job: what is CPM advertising
CPM is cost per mille: what you pay for one thousand impressions. If you bid $5.00 CPM and you buy one thousand impressions, you owe five dollars of media, before data fees or vendor add-on fees.
Remnant display is usually bought on CPM. You are paying for the chance to be seen, not for a click and not for a conversion. CPC and CPA are different pricing or optimization ideas. They are not automatically better, and they are not live on every Adprime Zero campaign just because the words exist in a schema.
CPM is also a bidding-strategy name on the exchange. Plain CPM and CPM_PACED are different strategies. The paced variant is what even daily delivery actually uses. We spent months treating a "CPM is not enabled for pacing" error as a seat refusal. It was the unpaced strategy declining a pacing field.
A low CPM does not mean good inventory. Our Supply Bench cells used a $5 CPM on open exchange and still bought a long tail of zero-click placements. Judge the traffic on visits and IVT, not on how cheap the thousand was.
Related: pacing and daily pacing, not lifetime pacing.