CPM

CPM stands for cost per mille, mille being Latin for thousand. It's the price of attention: how much you pay for your ad to be shown 1,000 times. On social platforms like Meta you're in an auction, so your CPM depends on how many other advertisers want the same people at the same time, how big your audience is, and how the platform rates your ad.

A small audience usually means a higher CPM, and recruitment campaigns often have small audiences: one region, one type of job. Seasonal stuff matters too, when everyone's advertising at the same time, attention gets more expensive.

What I always say: don't judge a campaign on CPM alone. A cheap CPM with an ad that nobody clicks is just cheap invisibility. A higher CPM can be totally fine if the ad then brings in qualified applicants. CPM is the entry price, cost per qualified applicant is the bill that matters.

How to calculate it

Divide what you spent by the number of impressions, then multiply by 1,000.

Example

Two ad sets for the same welder job: one targets a narrow area, the other the whole region. The narrow one has a much higher CPM. But when the team looks further down the funnel, both bring in qualified applicants at a similar cost, so the higher CPM wasn't really a problem. They keep both running and focus on refreshing the creative instead.