How good are the impressions you buy

If you’ve been working with online advertising for a long time, you know for sure that low CPMs don’t always work well.

The end price that brands pay for 1,000 impressions has been steadily increasing in recent months, and often this is a prerequisite to put more pressure on optimizing CPM pricing. The result is the positioning of ads on inferior sites and apps, with extremely low visibility, and with competing brands in close proximity, etc. After all, if you do a more in-depth analysis it goes without saying that the old maxim Cheap comes out expensive, so does digital marketing.

Therefore, in developed markets, metrics like eCPM and qCPM are becoming increasingly talked about. In this article, we will cover the topic of qCPM, which is a lesser known abbreviation.

qCPM – quality CPM

qCPM is a term that literally translates to quality impressions for 1,000 views. These are impressions that are visible and delivered to your audience target in the brand safety environment at the right frequency and in the right region. It helps advertisers analyze the impact of their ad well beyond the price they paid.

qCPM emerges as a term in 2014 during the advertising fraud crisis. WhiteOps analyzes then say that 23% of video impressions, for example, have been manipulated (ie, fraud). The qCPM metric emerges to account for campaign optimization levels and performance.

When to use qCPM

• Some major brands and agencies in developed countries use qCPM to compare different types of ad buying. For example, Google Ads vs. Developer vs. Direct Deals. As an agency, we often hear that Direct Deals are not effective or that programmatic advertising is very expensive. But if we look closely at the data, this is not always the case.
• qCPM is used to make comparisons across parallel digital advertising campaigns across multiple channels. For example direct programmatic deals in several media. Of course, you need a 3rd party code to monitor this, but this will allow you to analyze your investment performance.
• qCPM is also used in brand awareness campaigns. The metric helps brands evaluate campaign results in more detail than just the cost per 1,000 impressions. With programmatic campaigns, you can also stake additional metrics like reach and make comparisons and analytics to help you follow up.
• Some of the international agencies in the US and Western Europe apply in measuring the size of banners and the effect that it has on consumer perceptions. It is normal for larger banners to be more impactful, so when reading the qCPM, the index applied to a 300 * 600 px banner is larger than that for a 300 * 250 px banner, for example.
• Analyzing data also helps you determine the effectiveness of individual campaigns if you work with different agencies, for example. It is a practice for some agencies to chase down a low cost to deliver more impressions, but if they are of poor quality (with low viewability, inappropriate environment, etc.), then in practice their cost is quite high for the advertiser.
• qCPM is a way for agencies to combat the perception that programmating advertising only buy bad inventory. In practice, improving the quality of the online environment as a whole should be a priority for all of us working in the industry.

In addition, CPvM – cost per valuable impression. is introduced in more in-depth analytics. This abbreviation is understood to mean the value delivered to customers – the right targeting, with the right frequency, visibility and the right demographics. CPvM is often used in so-called post-campaign analysis can be an indicator of both the success of the campaign and the quality of the media in which the banners appeared.

Calculating both metrics is complex and requires combining data from ad servers and data-management platforms, event integration, and 3-rd party monitoring of ad visibility. That is, the brand should have developed its infrastructure well and aimed at optimizing its results, not just a better price.

But it’s important to remember that the final CPM or CPC bid doesn’t have to be the only one to look for from your agency or marketing team.