CPM means Cost Per Mille or also RPM - Revenue Per Mille - this is the cost of a thousand units of advertising, for example, clicks on a smartlink and popunder views..
CPM is a crucial metric for determining the profitability of paid web and mobile traffic, and it's no wonder that many publishers pay great attention to the high CPM advertising networks.
Understanding the cost of a thousand impressions across different ad networks theoretically allows for the construction of profitable traffic arbitrage schemes. However, affiliates and publishers often face unexpected difficulties.
If an ad network declares or displays a chart of CPM rates, often this chart does not reflect reality. For example, a publisher may be promised a rate of 10 US dollars, but in reality, when the publisher starts sending precisely this traffic, even if it is of good quality, it turns out that the high cpm ad network pays much less.
An ad network might, to show high CPM rates, cut clicks sent by the publisher or affiliate marketer - unfortunately, this situation can often be observed among some big and respected market players.
Web traffic that the affiliate marketer bought for arbitrage purposes turned out to be of low quality, in the case of traffic arbitrage, buying traffic can lead to problems with such a high percentage of bots that most of them do not even reach the redirect link.
We recommend publishers and affiliate marketers use additional trackers when reselling traffic (such as Voluum, Binom Tracker, and others) and always assess the overall results of traffic monetization profitability across different advertising platforms regardless of CPM.
Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Even if you are satisfied with your ad network, always test multiple ad networks and maintain good transparent relationships with them, then your revenue picture will significantly change for the better.
