Programmatic Ads: Understanding Your Metrics
What the numbers in your programmatic campaign reports mean, and how they fit together.
Overview
Once your campaign is live, you'll start seeing numbers roll in. This article explains what each one means in plain terms, so you can tell at a glance how your campaign is doing and what your spend is returning.
New to programmatic advertising? The Programmatic Ads Overview gives you the bigger picture of how campaigns work.
The Core Metrics
These are the numbers that come up in almost every campaign. Once you know them, the rest of your reporting falls into place.
Impressions
The number of times your ad is shown. This is the base unit of delivery: one impression means your ad was displayed to one person once. Impressions tell you how much your ad is being seen.
CPM (cost per 1,000 impressions)
How programmatic ad space is priced. "Mille" is Latin for thousand, so CPM is simply the cost for every 1,000 times your ad is shown. For example, a $12 CPM means you pay $12 for each 1,000 impressions. If your campaign serves 500,000 impressions at a $12 CPM, that works out to 500,000 divided by 1,000, times $12, which is $6,000 in spend.
Spend
The total amount of money your campaign has used so far. Spend is driven by how many impressions you've delivered multiplied by your CPM.
CPA (cost per acquisition)
The cost to drive one conversion, whether that's a signup, a purchase, or whatever action your campaign is going for. It's your total spend divided by the number of conversions. For example, $6,000 spent to drive 120 conversions gives you a $50 CPA. This is usually the number customers care about most, because it ties your spend directly to results. Put simply, CPM is what you pay for ad space, and CPA is what each result costs you.
How they fit together
If you remember one thing, make it this:
- Impressions times CPM equals spend: how much you've spent to show your ad.
- Spend divided by conversions equals CPA: what each result cost you.
Your daily budget governs how quickly spend builds up over the course of your campaign, pacing delivery so you don't use everything up at once.
Pacing and timing terms
- Flight: the start and end dates your campaign runs between.
- Daily budget: the most your campaign can spend in a single day, which paces delivery evenly across the flight.
- Dayparting: limiting your ads to certain days or times. For instance, a business-focused campaign might run only during weekday business hours, concentrating your budget on the windows when your audience is most likely to act.
How conversions are measured
Your campaign connects ad exposure to what people do afterward, so you see real outcomes rather than just delivery. Conversions are credited two ways:
- Click-through: someone clicks your ad and later takes the action you're after. This is tracked directly, so it's reliable, but it only captures people who actually clicked.
- View-through: someone sees your ad without clicking, then converts later. This is how impact is measured where there's nothing to click, which is most of the time on connected TV.
This matters a lot for connected TV. Because CTV ads usually can't be clicked, looking at clicks alone will make your results look far weaker than they really are. Most of the value there shows up as view-through, so it's worth framing your expectations around that from the start.
A few things to expect
- Your numbers update on a regular basis rather than in real time, so a short delay between activity and reporting is normal. Your reports show when they were last updated.
- Recently reported days can shift slightly as final numbers settle. This is expected and not a sign anything's wrong.
To influence these numbers, it all starts with who you reach. See Targeting Your Audience for how to shape your campaign's audience.