Free tool
CPM Calculator
Work out what a thousand impressions costs you. Spend $2,400 for 300,000 impressions and your CPM is $8.00. Fill any two of spend, impressions and CPM, and the third one fills itself in.
Last updated: 2026-08-06
CPM is the price of a thousand impressions. Divide what you spent by the impressions it bought, multiply by a thousand because the price is quoted per thousand rather than per one, and that is the whole formula: $2,400 across 300,000 impressions is an $8.00 CPM. It is the rawest number in an ad account, the price of attention before anybody has clicked anything.
Half of that price is the market and half of it is you. Some audiences are simply scarcer than others, which is why a thousand impressions in front of LinkedIn professionals runs near $33 while a thousand on Pinterest runs near $6 on all-industry blends. The rest moves with decisions you control: how narrow the targeting is, which placements you allowed, what season you are bidding in, and how much the auction likes the creative it is being asked to deliver.
This calculator links all three numbers rather than just one of them. Enter spend and impressions to price a campaign that already ran. Enter a CPM and a budget to see how much reach next month actually buys. Enter a CPM and an impression target to find the budget that reaches it. Same formula every time, solved for whichever box you left alone, updating as you type.
The trap is treating a lower CPM as a win by itself. Nobody sells impressions. A $6 CPM in front of people who will never buy is more expensive than a $33 CPM in front of people who will, so the benchmark table below is a sanity check on a bid rather than a scoreboard to climb. What CPM is genuinely good for is diagnosis: when it moves 40% in a week and you changed nothing, something in the auction, the audience or the delivery changed on your behalf.
Fill any two fields, the third one calculates
Cost per 1,000 impressions. Edit whichever box you want to solve for and the calculation moves to the field you touched longest ago.
CPM = spend / impressions x 1,000
Enter any two of ad spend, impressions and CPM to see the third.
Every benchmark and worked example this page uses is printed below, so the numbers are readable without entering anything.
Everything here runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere and there is no email step: the platform benchmark table and the worked example below are free to read without entering anything at all.
The formula, worked three ways
One relation, solved for each of the three fields in turn. These are the same three solves the calculator above runs, printed here on real numbers so the page works with JavaScript switched off.
- 1What did a thousand impressions cost?
CPM = spend / impressions x 1,000
$2,400 / 300,000 x 1,000 = $8.00
The multiplication by a thousand is the whole reason CPM confuses people. Cost per impression here is $0.008, which is an unreadable number, so the industry quotes it per thousand.
- 2How much reach does a budget buy?
impressions = spend / CPM x 1,000
$3,000 / $14 x 1,000 = 214,286 impressions
Priced at the Meta (Facebook and Instagram) benchmark. This is the version worth running before a launch rather than after one.
- 3What does a reach target cost?
spend = CPM x impressions / 1,000
$8.00 x 300,000 / 1,000 = $2,400
Reach targets come from PR and brand teams far more often than from media buyers, and this is the line that turns one into a budget.
What a thousand impressions costs on each platform
All-industry blended estimates, and what each one buys on a fixed budget. Read them as the shape of the market rather than as a target: a platform is expensive per thousand because of who it is selling you.
| Platform | Benchmark CPM | Impressions on $3,000 | Cost of 200,000 impressions |
|---|---|---|---|
| Meta (Facebook and Instagram) | $14.00 | 214,286 | $2,800 |
| Google Ads | $38.00 | 78,947 | $7,600 |
| TikTok Ads | $10.00 | 300,000 | $2,000 |
| LinkedIn Ads | $33.00 | 90,909 | $6,600 |
| Pinterest Ads | $6.00 | 500,000 | $1,200 |
Benchmarks are estimates blended from public advertising benchmark roundups and platform-published averages, last reviewed 2026-08-03. They are all-industry blends, so your vertical, offer and creative can move every number here. Use them as a planning starting point, not a forecast.
Where these numbers come from
Benchmarks are estimates blended from public advertising benchmark roundups and platform-published averages, last reviewed 2026-08-03. They are all-industry blends, so your vertical, offer and creative can move every number here. Use them as a planning starting point, not a forecast.
The CPM you calculate above is arithmetic on your own numbers and never touches that table: the benchmarks are only there so you have something to compare against. Nothing on this page is measured from your ad account or from any private dataset, and the derived figures are labelled as derived wherever they appear, because a number chained out of three estimates carries the error of all three.
How to read a CPM without being fooled by it
- Compare CPM inside one platform and one audience, never across two. It is the price of a specific set of people at a specific moment, so a $14 Meta impression and a $38 Google impression are different products, not the same product at two prices.
- Check frequency before you blame the auction. Once a prospecting audience has largely been covered, the platform has to work harder to find someone new and charges you for it, and the fix is a wider audience rather than a lower bid.
- Expect the fourth quarter to cost more. Retail bidding from October into late December raises the price of the same impression for everyone, so compare a November CPM against last November rather than against October.
- Ignore the first three days after any change. A budget move, an audience edit or a fresh creative restarts the learning phase, and those are the most expensive and least representative impressions the ad set will ever buy.
- Use CPM to price reach and nothing else. If a launch needs 300,000 people to see it and your CPM is $8.00, the budget is $2,400 and the conversation is finished. That is the one question it answers exactly.
- Look at placement mix when CPM moves and you did not touch anything. Feed impressions cost several times what an audience network or a sidebar impression does, so delivery drifting between placements moves a blended CPM without a single auction behaving differently.
Frequently asked questions
How do you calculate CPM?
CPM = spend / impressions x 1,000. Divide the money spent by the number of impressions it bought, then multiply by a thousand because CPM is quoted per thousand impressions rather than per one. A campaign that spent $2,400 and served 300,000 impressions has a CPM of $8.00. The same formula run backwards prices reach: at an $8.00 CPM, 300,000 impressions costs $2,400, and $3,000 buys 375,000.
What is a good CPM?
It depends almost entirely on who you are buying, which is why a single good number does not exist. On all-industry blended estimates, Pinterest sits near $6 and TikTok near $10, Meta near $14, and the two expensive audiences are LinkedIn near $33 and Google near $38. Those are planning anchors rather than targets: a niche B2B audience on Meta can cost more per thousand than a broad consumer audience on LinkedIn, and both can be the right buy.
Why did my CPM suddenly go up?
Five causes cover almost every case. The audience is saturated and the platform is reaching further to find someone new. It is a high-demand season and every advertiser is bidding against you. You changed something and the ad set is relearning. Delivery shifted toward more expensive placements. Or the creative has fatigued, and the auction quietly charges more to deliver something people have stopped responding to. Check frequency first, because it is the one you can act on the same day.
Is a lower CPM always better?
No, and chasing it is how accounts end up with cheap impressions and no revenue. CPM only measures what attention cost, never what it was worth. Broad targeting, cheap placements and low-quality inventory all reliably lower CPM while making everything downstream worse. Treat a falling CPM as good news only when the cost per customer fell with it.
Are impressions the same as reach?
No, and mixing them up will make your CPM look wrong. An impression is one delivery of the ad, so one person who sees it four times is four impressions and one reach. CPM is always priced on impressions, so if you divide spend by reach instead you get cost per person, which will be a much larger number and is not comparable to any published CPM benchmark.
Is this calculator free, and is anything stored?
It is free, there is no email step, and it runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent anywhere, and the benchmark table and worked examples below are printed in full on the page, so you can read every number without entering anything at all.
See the real number instead of the estimate
Postify Ads runs campaigns across Meta, Google, TikTok, LinkedIn and Pinterest from one place, with spend, clicks and conversions from all five in a single view. This calculator prices the plan; that is where the account reports back.
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