eCPM Calculator

What is eCPM?

eCPM is how much money a website makes for every 1,000 ads it shows (each time an ad is shown is called an impression). The "e" stands for effective — it rolls all your different ad earnings into one simple number, so at a glance you can see what showing 1,000 ads is actually worth to you.

It's the mirror image of CPM: CPM is what an advertiser pays to show 1,000 ads, and eCPM is what the website earns from showing them — the same "per 1,000 ads" measure, seen from the two opposite sides.

The eCPM formula: how to calculate eCPM

To calculate eCPM, divide your total ad earnings by the number of impressions, then multiply by 1,000:

eCPM = (Earnings ÷ Impressions) × 1,000

For example, $800 earned from 200,000 impressions gives an eCPM of $4.00. Because the formula links three values, you can rearrange it to solve for whichever one you're missing — which is what the calculator above does:

• Find eCPM — Earnings ÷ Impressions × 1,000 ($800 ÷ 200,000 × 1,000 = $4.00)
• Find Earnings — eCPM × Impressions ÷ 1,000 ($4 × 200,000 ÷ 1,000 = $800)
• Find Impressions — Earnings × 1,000 ÷ eCPM ($800 × 1,000 ÷ $4 = 200,000)

A worked example

A blog serves 200,000 ad impressions in a month and earns $800 from them across all its ad slots. Its eCPM is:

$4.00 = $800 ÷ 200,000 × 1,000

Every thousand impressions earned $4. Working the other way: to reach a $1,200 monthly target at the same $4 eCPM, the calculator shows the site needs 300,000 impressions — a quick way to translate a revenue goal into the traffic behind it.

How to use this calculator

1. Choose which value to solve for — eCPM, earnings, or impressions.
2. Enter the two values you already know. Results update instantly as you type.
3. Switch currency if you report in something other than dollars.
4. Use Copy shareable link to send the exact scenario to a colleague — the numbers are saved in the URL.

eCPM vs RPM

The number people most often mix up with eCPM is page RPM. Both are "earnings per 1,000," but they count different things:

• eCPM — what you earn per 1,000 ads shown (impressions).
• Page RPM — what you earn per 1,000 page visits, counting every ad on the page together.

Since one page visit usually shows several ads, page RPM is normally the bigger number. Use eCPM to see how well a single ad slot or ad network is doing, and page RPM to see how well a whole page earns. For the full breakdown, see CPM vs RPM explained.

eCPM vs CPM

They sound alike but sit on opposite sides. CPM is the price an advertiser pays to show 1,000 ads. eCPM is what you, the website owner, actually earn per 1,000 ads. If you only ever sold ads at one flat price the two would match — but most sites earn from a mix of ad types, and eCPM is the single number that lets you compare them all fairly.

What's a good eCPM? And what's the average?

There is no universal "good" eCPM, and we won't quote you an average. Not because we don't have one to hand — because publishing a single figure here would mislead you. eCPM swings by more than ten times between a finance site with United States readers and an entertainment site with worldwide readers, and the same site can halve in January after the Christmas advertising rush ends. Any "average eCPM is $X" you read is a blend of sites nothing like yours.

Judge yours against three things instead, in this order:

1. Your own last month — the only fair comparison, because everything else about the site is held constant.
2. The same month last year — this strips out the seasonal swing, which is the single biggest distortion.
3. Your own best-performing pages — if some pages earn several times what others do, the gap tells you more than any external benchmark would.

For the publisher-side view of the same question — including why the number you see in AdSense is usually higher than your eCPM — see what is a good AdSense RPM.

Why is my eCPM low?

A low eCPM is almost never one broken thing. It is usually a combination of the five below, and they are worth checking in this order because the first two account for most of the gap:

• Where your readers are. The country your audience sits in moves eCPM more than anything else you control. Advertisers bid far more to reach some markets than others, so two identical sites can earn very differently on the same traffic.
• What your pages are about. Topics that lead to expensive purchases — finance, insurance, business software — attract advertisers with real budgets. Casual reading topics don't, however much traffic they pull.
• Whether the ads are actually seen. An ad served at the bottom of a page most readers never scroll to still counts as shown, but advertisers pay less for slots that rarely enter view.
• How many advertisers are competing. If only one ad network is bidding on your slots, you get that network's price rather than the best available one.
• The time of year. Advertising budgets peak before Christmas and fall off a cliff in January. A drop in the new year is usually the calendar, not a fault.

Work through them one at a time. Changing several things at once leaves you unable to tell which one moved the number.

What is an eCPM floor?

An eCPM floor — sometimes called a price floor — is the minimum you are willing to accept for showing an ad. Set a floor of $2 and any advertiser bidding less simply doesn't get the slot.

The trade-off is the whole point, and it cuts both ways. Set the floor too low and you sell ad space cheaply that someone would have paid more for. Set it too high and slots go unsold — which means an empty space earning nothing, and an empty slot at a high floor pays less than a filled one at a low floor.

This is also why floors distort comparisons. A site running an aggressive floor can post an impressive eCPM while earning less overall, because the figure only counts the ads that sold. If you raise a floor, watch your total earnings rather than your eCPM — that is the number that pays you.

How to increase your eCPM

• Make sure ads get seen — advertisers pay more for ads people actually look at, so place them where they're visible rather than buried at the bottom of the page.
• Let more advertisers compete — the more advertisers (or ad networks) bidding for each ad slot, the higher the winning price you get.
• Write for a valuable audience — topics and countries that attract big-spending advertisers lift your earnings more than raw traffic does.
• Don't overload the page — too many ads hurt your traffic and can even lower earnings; too few leave money behind. Find the middle that earns most without driving readers away.