What does eCPM stand for?
Q: What does eCPM mean in my Google AdSense account? I don't understand it.
A: eCPM stands for "Effective Cost Per Thousand." Think thousand as in one thousand millimeters making a meter, and it'll make a little more sense. It's basically telling you how much money you're making off of AdSense per thousand visits to your site. But how can this information be useful?
Well, this is primarily useful in figuring out how much you can spend to drive traffic to your site. Lets say that you have an eCPM on a site of $80, meaning you make eighty bucks per thousand visitors. If you can find a way to buy a thousand visitors to your site at $40 per thousand, then do the math and see that you're going to make money off of that investment. There are a few things you want to keep in mind with this, though:
- Your eCPM can be misleading if you've got a small sample size. If you've had just twenty visitors to your site, your eCPM isn't likely to be accurate. Monitor it over a time period, tracking it carefully, and eventually you'll see your eCPM level out and get a real feel for what your eCPM actually is.
- Before you start buying any sort of traffic, you want to maximize your eCPM. Try changing the colors on your AdSense ads, moving around your ad placement, and tweaking your content for more profitable keywords to maximize your eCPM before buying any traffic for your site.
- Finally, remember that if you start buying traffic, it's going to change the dynamic of the visitors to your site and could very likely change your eCPM (most lowering it). Yes, your site's layout and content are very important in determining how many people are going to click through your ads, but at the same time the reason they're visiting your site is important, too. Visitors who are genuinely interested in your site are likely to be more responsive than visitors who have been routed to your site. Remember that before you purchase any sort of traffic generation for your site.