Add any two of cost, impressions and CPM and we will work out the third. Pick ads or sponsorship to compare with rough market ranges, or work out what to charge a sponsor.
CPM means cost per 1,000 impressions. The formula is cost ÷ impressions × 1,000, so £500 for 50,000 impressions is a £10 CPM. For newsletters, count opens, not subscribers. A high CPM is not bad on its own. What matters is how many leads and clients those impressions turn into.
Who this is for: Founders and coaches buying ads, and newsletter, podcast or YouTube owners pricing a sponsor.
| What it does | Works out CPM, total cost or impressions from the other two, and suggests what to charge a sponsor. |
| Who it is for | Founders and coaches buying ads, and newsletter, podcast or YouTube owners pricing a sponsor. |
| You put in | Any two of cost, impressions and CPM. For a sponsor rate: your audience, open rate, a CPM range and how many placements you sell a month. |
| You get | The missing number, the sum written out, where it sits against a rough market range, and a rate per placement and per month. |
| Ranges used | Meta $6 to $14, Google Display $2 to $5, YouTube ads $2 to $10, LinkedIn $30 to $40, newsletters $10 to $30 (B2B $50 to $75) per 1,000 opens, podcasts $18 to $25 per 1,000 downloads, YouTube sponsored segments $10 to $50 per 1,000 views. All rough, in US dollars. |
| Runs | In your browser. Nothing is sent or stored. |
| Price | Free. No sign-up. |
Last reviewed 29 October 2026 by Mohamed Bashir. Benchmarks change, so check them against your own numbers.
CPM stands for cost per mille. Mille is Latin for thousand, so CPM is the price of 1,000 impressions. An impression is one time your ad is shown. For a newsletter it is usually one open, and for a podcast it is one download.
The CPM formula is CPM = total cost ÷ impressions × 1,000. You can turn it around to find either of the other two:
CPM is how most reach is priced and compared. It lets you put a Facebook campaign, a newsletter ad and a podcast spot side by side, even though they are bought in very different ways.
Take what you spent, divide it by the number of impressions, then multiply by 1,000. Three quick examples:
In a spreadsheet, put cost in A2 and impressions in B2, then use =A2/B2*1000. Use the same date range for both numbers, and use impressions, not reach. Reach counts people once. Impressions count every showing, so a person who sees your ad three times adds three.
There is no single good CPM. It depends on the platform, the country, the audience and the time of year. Prices often rise in the run up to Christmas when more advertisers compete for the same people. Treat the ranges below as rough guides, not targets. They are in US dollars and drawn from public sources that often disagree with each other.
| Where | Rough CPM range (USD) | Where the figure comes from |
|---|---|---|
| Google Display | $2 to $5 | 2025 benchmark roundups, averages near $3 |
| YouTube ads | $2 to $10 | 2025 benchmark roundups, wide spread |
| Meta (Facebook, Instagram) | $6 to $14 | 2025 benchmark roundups |
| $30 to $40 | 2025 benchmark roundups | |
| Newsletter, general readers | $10 to $30 per 1,000 opens | Rough publisher norms, see our newsletter ad rates guide |
| Newsletter, B2B or finance | $50 to $75 per 1,000 opens | Rough, direct deals. Ad networks often pay less |
| Podcast, 60-second spot | $18 to $25 per 1,000 downloads | AdvertiseCast monthly averages ran about $21 to $25 from 2020 to 2024 |
| YouTube sponsored segment | $10 to $50 per 1,000 views | Rough, from creator marketplace guides |
Your own history beats any of these numbers. If your Meta CPM was £9 last quarter and is £15 now, that change tells you far more than a benchmark does. Google Search is left out on purpose. It is bought per click, so cost per click and cost per lead are the numbers to watch there.
Sponsors pay for the people who actually see the ad. So you price on opens, downloads or views, not on your total list or subscriber count. The formula is price = (audience × open rate ÷ 1,000) × CPM. For a podcast or a YouTube video, use average downloads or views per episode in the first 30 days in place of opens.
Say you have 5,000 subscribers with a 40% open rate. That is 2,000 opens. At a $10 to $30 CPM, one main ad is worth roughly $20 to $60. Small lists often set a floor of around $50 to $100 per ad, and justify it with a sharp niche and good click numbers. The tool above does this sum for you once you switch to a sponsorship option.
What moves you to the top of the range is fit, not size. A list of 3,000 finance directors can out-earn a general list ten times bigger. Clicks from past sponsors, clear audience data and a top slot all push the price up. Our guide to getting newsletter sponsors covers how to find buyers and pitch them.
One honest note. For most coaches and creators, sponsorship is one revenue line, and rarely the biggest. If 1 in 100 people who open an issue bought a £500 offer of yours, 2,000 opens would bring in £10,000. A sponsor might pay £50 for the same email. Selling your own offer to your audience is usually worth far more. Our guide on turning your audience into customers shows how.
Not on its own. CPM is the price of being seen. What you actually care about is the price of a lead or a client, and that depends on what happens after the impression. The chain looks like this: cost per lead = CPM ÷ 1,000 ÷ click rate ÷ page conversion rate.
Take two campaigns. One runs at a £10 CPM with a 1% click rate and a page that turns 10% of clicks into leads. That works out at £10 per lead. The other runs at £35 on LinkedIn, but the audience is a much better fit, with a 1% click rate and 25% of clicks becoming leads. That is £14 per lead. If those LinkedIn leads close three times as often, the expensive CPM is the better deal.
So if your CPM looks high, check three things before you cut spend. Is the ad getting clicked? Is the page turning clicks into leads? And are those leads being followed up fast enough to become clients? Our cost per lead calculator shows the most you can afford per lead, and the funnel leak calculator shows which step is losing the most.
The calculator uses one formula and turns it around for whichever number is missing.
It then places your CPM against the rough range for the platform you picked. Below the bottom of the range it says "cheaper than usual" for ads and "you may be undercharging" for sponsorships. Above the top it says "above the usual range" or "premium rate". Inside it, the range is normal. Google Search has no range, because it is bought per click. The ranges are in US dollars and are not converted when you pick £ or €, so treat the comparison as rough.
For a sponsor rate it works out how many people see the ad, then prices them: rate = audience × open rate ÷ 1,000 × CPM, at the low and high end of your range. For podcasts and YouTube it uses downloads or views per release in place of opens. If you add the price of your own offer, it also shows what you would earn if 1 in 100 of those people bought it once. That 1 in 100 is an assumption to change in your head, not a promise.
The sum is simple. The inputs are where it goes wrong.
CPM stands for cost per mille, where mille is Latin for thousand. It is the price an advertiser pays for 1,000 impressions of an ad, or 1,000 opens, downloads or views in a sponsorship.
No. CPM is the cost of 1,000 impressions, whether or not anyone clicks. CPC is the cost of one click. You can link them: CPC = CPM ÷ 1,000 ÷ click rate. A £10 CPM with a 1% click rate gives a £1 CPC.
Put the total cost in one cell and impressions in another, then divide cost by impressions and multiply by 1,000. With cost in A2 and impressions in B2, the formula is =A2/B2*1000.
Opens. Opens are the people who actually see the ad, so pricing on them is fair and easy to defend. Some email apps inflate opens, so share your click numbers with sponsors as well.
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