After you set your overall or daily budget, you must enter your maximum CPM bid. CPM stands for “Cost Per Mille,” which meanscost per thousand impressions. So your CPM bid is the maximum amount that you would be willing to pay per 1,000 impressions.
If you are the highest bidder for the audience you’re targeting, you will win the impressions for that audience — but instead of paying your maximum bid, you will actually pay one cent more than the price of the second-highest bid for those impressions. So think of your CPM bid as the price you would be willing to pay per 1,000 impressions, not necessarily how much you will actually pay for all of your impressions. This means that you will usually end up paying a lower CPM than you bid.
For example, imagine a scenario where three advertisers are targeting the same readers today:
- Advertiser 1: $6.00 bid
- Advertiser 2: $5.00 bid
- Advertiser 3: $4.00 bid
In this example, Advertiser 1 would win the impressions at a $5.01 CPM (one cent more than the second-highest bid). Now imagine that Advertiser 2 finished serving today, leaving Advertiser 1 and Advertiser 3 competing for impressions tomorrow. Advertiser 1 would still win, but that advertiser would now be paying a $4.01 CPM (one cent more than the new second-highest bid).
How much you decide to bid per thousand impressions is entirely up to you. The higher you bid, the more impressions you are likely to win. To provide you with some guidance, when you set your bid, we will show you a range of what other advertisers are bidding on average at that time:
Your campaign results in your Partner Dashboard will show the average CPM you paid throughout your campaign.
Note: You will not be charged for repeat impressions on the same email. If you win an impression in a reader’s Monday deals email, for example, your ad will appear every time that same reader opens that particular email. However, you will only be charged for the first impression from that reader, and not any repeat impressions of that reader’s Monday email.
However, if you win impressions on multiple days, and the same ad appears for the same reader in a different email at a later date — say, Tuesday’s deal email — you will be charged for the additional impression in that new email.
