​Marketing and performance metrics tell you the number of visitors and the number of impressions, but how this translates into money? Knowing how much revenue your pages generate is critical for a publisher. The reality is that you may be looking at the wrong metric. While site traffic and other advertiser-side metrics are important, they don’t really measure if your business is growing or not. There enters Page RPM.

At CodeFuel, we are committed to increasing the revenue for publishers; therefore, we compiled this guide with an overview of Page RPM and tips to increase it.

Let’s start with the basics.

What Is Page RPM?

RPM is a metric that measures the total revenue generated by a site per every thousand page views. The acronym RPM stands for Revenue per Mille (thousand). Publishers use this metric to estimate how much revenue your site can generate. Knowing how much revenue your site generates per 1000 views helps you refine your site, optimize pages and other site features.

How to calculate page RPM

To calculate your page revenue per thousand views (RPM), you need to know two factors: your estimated earnings and the number of page views you received. Divide the earnings by the number of page views, then multiply by 1000.

Here’s the formula:

Page RPM: (Estimated earnings / Number of page views) * 1000

How do you apply the formula?

  • Example 1: Let’s say you have 2500 page views this month. You estimate the revenue from ads to be $250. Apply the formula: Page RPM: ($250 / 2500) *1000 =  $100
  • Example 2: You earned an estimated $0.20 from 25 page views. Your page RPM will be ($0.20 / 25) *1000, or $8

This metric can be helpful to compare the revenue for different channels and track page performance.

Still, how do you know if it is a good or bad RPM? 

What Is a Good Page RPM For a Website?

One of the most common questions in digital publishing forums is, “what is a good RPM for my site?”. Well, how good your page RPM is different for every company. It will depend on factors like your niche, the quality of your content and traffic, where your audience is located, or if you have seasonal peak demands.

Companies search and compare themselves to sites of the same type to arrive at a kind of benchmark. But a good RPM is always relative. Multiple factors can affect page RPM on a website.

The topic of the content you distribute, what information you give to potential readers help advertisers to define the value of your website. For instance, we researched the top 10 keyword categories in 2020 for advertisers according to Google AdWords:

Top 10 Keywords for Advertising

As a general rule, the more valuable the content, the more valuable the audience your site attracts, it affects the RPM of your pages. Other factors that can affect you are your visitor’s location and the seasonality of your demand.

Which Metrics Can Affect Page RPM?

Besides those factors, two metrics can directly impact Page RPM: 

  • Click-through rate (CTR): this rate measures the number of clicks on a specific ad per thousand ad impressions. The higher your CTR, the higher your page revenue. Why? First, you’d get direct revenue from the clicks. Also, having a higher CTR means your site is a more valuable digital real estate, which means you can get a higher price per click.
  • Cost per click (CPC): this measures how much an advertiser would pay per click on an ad that is placed on your website.

When these two metrics increase, your page becomes more valuable, so your page RPM also increases.

Types of Revenue Metrics (with formulas and examples) 

Before we go into strategies to increase your page RPM, we’ll need to explain the differences between terms that are often confused:

Ads RPM vs. Page RPM

Ad RPM, unlike Page RPM, measures the revenue of an ad per thousand impressions. To calculate it, divide the estimated revenue per number of ad impressions, then multiply by 1000.

Ad RPM =  (estimated revenue / ad impressions) * 1000

The difference with Page RPM

Ad RPM is the cost that advertisers need to pay for every 1000 ad impressions on a given website. Page RPM gives publishers the rate they are paid for ad impressions on their web pages, helping them understand page performance.

CPM 

CPM refers to the cost per 1000 ad impressions for the advertiser. To calculate the CPM, you need to know the cost of the campaign and the number of total impressions. Then, you apply the following formula:

CPM = (cost of the campaign/ number of total impressions) * 1000

Let’s check an example: The advertiser has a $5000 ad budget. The CPM campaign got 10,000 impressions on the ad. Let’s calculate the CPM:

CPM = ($5000/10,000,000) *1000 =  $0.5

eCPM

eCPM is an ad performance metric. That means it measures the revenue that ads generate on their site. eCPM stands for Effective Cost per Mille. To calculate the eCPM, divide the ad revenue per banner or campaign by thousand ad impressions.

eCPM = ad revenue per banner / 1000 ad impressions

Publishers usually use this metric to calculate how profitable is a display ad. A difference from CPM, it doesn’t measure reach, but the effective revenue for every CPM campaign and CPC too.

Why Publishers Should Keep Track of Page RPM?

Page RPM is a key performance metric that allows you to estimate how much are you earning per thousand page views.

Publishers Should Keep Track of Page RPM

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Why is that important? When users browse through your site, not all pages catch the same level of attention. Page RPM helps you detect what are your low earning pages and improve performance. Since RPM is very variable, one day may be high, and the next day falls. That’s why it is critical to measure regularly and use the findings to improve your strategies. The tips in the next section can help to increase Page RPM.  

 4 Tips to Increase Page RPM

To improve Page RPM, there are three main areas you need to work on: your website, the ads you show on your site, and the audience visiting your site. With that in mind, let’s see some tips you can implement to increase your RPM:  

1. Improve your website traffic

    • Use contextual targeting for getting high-intent visitors: Getting high-intent targeted traffic is key to increasing the revenue on your pages. Having enough traffic is not enough to monetize the page. Visitors need to be interested. That’s why contextual targeting — that uses keywords on a website page to display ads—is becoming more important for publishers and advertisers. The ads remain contextually relevant to the users’ queries, attracting more high intent visitors.
    • Optimize loading speed for ads and website: nobody has the patience now to wait for a site to load. According to Google, if your site loads in more than 3 seconds, you risk a 40% bounce rate. Some tips that can reduce your page load speed are optimizing your images, leverage browser caching, and enable compression. Keep in mind you need to optimize your ads too, so they don’t delay your page loading. You can use Google Page Speed Insights tool to check the load speed of your site.

 

Website Speed Test

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2. Improve the quality and relevance of your content

  • Focus on the quality of your content: Good quality content not only attracts visitors, but increases the time users stay on your site. Strong content that your audience can go back to influences all the other metrics. 
  • Relevant suggestions increase engagement: use a content recommendation tool to give your visitors relevant content. This not only increases their time on page but also drives more page views. Tools like CodeFuel present relevant ads that answer the user queries on your page, helping improve page RPM.

3. Improve the ads you are showing

  • Use Ad Refresh – with this feature, you serve multiple ads on the same advertising place to the same user. After a certain time on the page, scroll down, or other activity, the ad is replaced with other different ads. This attracts the viewer’s attention and can increase the clickability of your ads. 
  • Optimize ad viewability – ensuring the ads get seen is critical to increasing revenue. More when, according to eMarketer, the viewability on a desktop is only 50%. That means half of the ads pass without being noticed by the user. Improve your ad layout and placement — for example, place ads between the content — so the users notice them.  
  • Optimize ads, formats, and sizes – play with different formats, combining text and images, video, rich media, and expandable ads. Naturally, some ad formats will be more expensive per click than others, therefore, increasing your page RPM. 
  • Make sure ads are relevant to your audience – set the right targeting for your audience. Show ads that relate to the keywords they are looking for, so they’re more likely to click on it. If your site caters to different audiences, you can set different targets for different sections or topics. 

4. Give a great user experience

The audience probably didn’t come to your site to suffer non-stop ads and notifications. They came to consume your content, research, and buy your products. A great user experience makes your audience more loyal. (Don’t you find yourself going back to the same sites over and over?) Exactly, you want to be the go-to website for your users. You can measure repeated visits and bounce rates to make improvements in user experience. Loyal visitors will increase your RPM over time. The key is to make it as simple as possible for the user to achieve their goal on the page. 

Increase your Page RPM with CodeFuel

CodeFuel offers higher ROI for publishers through solutions that increase page RPM, optimizing search traffic, and engage users. The idea is to monetize the website while keeping visitors engaged and interested by providing relevant ads for searches. 

Learn how Codefuel helps publishers to engage their users and monetize their content. Contact us today.