Overview and core concept

Cost Per Mile was a concept well before the dawn of digital advertising. When newspapers and magazines were the most popular ways to advertise, there was a need for standardize the amount of money they could charge for placements. This was long before the days of cookies and pixel tracking, so the only metric that the industry could offer was distribution. "Cost per Mile" referred to the cost to reach 1,000 readers.

As the digital age emerged, the metric stuck. It was useful for media buyers who were running campaigns across different channels to

CPM vs. CPC 

Cost Per Mile measures reach regardless of user action. CPC (Cost Per Click) measures every time that a viewer clicks on an ad. CPM is better for measuring reach, and is useful for assessing brand awareness campaigns or for a general assessment of channel influence. But for measuring action, CPC is more useful.

CPM vs. CPC vs. CPA 

CPM measures reach, CPC measures click, and Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) measures how often an action is taken. The action will depend on the goal of the campaign. The goal can be tied to top or mid funnel initiatives, like signing up for a newsletter or downloading an app, but it can also be bottom-of-funnel, like making a purchase.

Formula for calculating CPM 

You can calculate CPM on a single platform (ex., all efforts run on Meta), on a single campaign (ex., a particular effort you ran on Meta), or an effort that spanned multiple efforts and campaigns (ex., all online advertising efforts in Q1).

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         Total Cost
________________________     x    10,000

     Total Impressions

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So, for example, if you spent $10,000 on advertising and reached 400,000 people, you'd calculate your Cost Per Mile as follows:

$10,000
________     x 10,000   =    $25

400,000

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So, you know the CPM for this effort is $7.43. But is this good or bad? To answer this, we have to look at benchmarks.

CPM benchmarks

Abe is a LinkedIn-only digital consultancy, so we can't help you with broad CPM benchmarks, but we can tell you what good CPM looks like to us*.

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LinkedIn ad Cost Per Mile low end: $30.44

LinkedIn ad Cost Per Mile median: $59.29

LinkedIn ad Cost Per Mile high end: $104.22


*Taken from a sample size of 151 accounts and $57.1 million in ad spend.

Translating CPM to business value

CPM is a top of the funnel metric, which can be a bad word around marketing circles. But marketing is at its best when it's symbiotic. If we're keeping with the analogy of the funnel, that utensil would actually be useless if it was too narrow at the top and didn't allow for a wide capture.

When conveying business value, it's important to put CPM in context. It's a measure of how cost-efficient it is for you to get your brand in front of an audience of a certain size. It's different from brand penetration because brand penetration only happens the moment somebody becomes a customer.

Optimizing CPM performance

It's in your best interest as a marketer to try out different tweaks to achieve a stronger CPM. Not only does a more cost-efficient CPM mean that you're reaching more people, it also means that you're not using your entire marketing budget up on awareness and instead have some to use lower down the funnel.

If you're starting to optimize, here are some different angles you can try: 

Platform

Platform-wise, choose channels with efficient delivery algorithms and robust targeting capabilities—Meta Ads and Google Display Network, for example—while using A/B testing to identify which placements yield the lowest CPMs.

Audience

Audience optimization involves narrowing your targeting to high-value segments using custom audiences, lookalike models, and exclusion lists to avoid wasting impressions on low-performing users. Regularly refresh your audience pools to prevent ad fatigue and frequency inflation.

Material

For material, craft high-impact creatives that align with platform best practices—such as short, thumb-stopping videos for mobile and strong CTAs. Ensure assets are optimized for speed and engagement to boost relevance scores or quality rankings, which often lowers CPMs by increasing ad efficiency.

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