What are AdSense RPM and Why Does It Matter?

Google AdSense RPM is a metric that tracks the revenue per thousand impressions from advertising on publisher websites.

It’s a metric that publishers use that runs parallel to the CPM or cost per thousand impressions that advertisers use. It’s the identical amount of money for both, but the tag conveys another meaning for both. It is the opposite side of the same coin.

The two most important examples are”Page RPM” and”Impression RPM”.

The page RPM monitors the average revenue per thousand impressions for a whole page (or pages), regardless of the amount of ad impressions on that page.

The impression RPM tracks the average for just a single ad place. By way of instance, a site has five ad positions on each page. Each place averages $2 for each one thousand impressions. If all five positions average $2 per cent, that means the pages on the site average a $10 RPM.

Other Uses of RPM Reports
The RPM metric is especially helpful in analyzing site revenue performance in many different ways. They include:

• Platform revenue including cellular, tablet computers and background
• Location revenue like state
• URL channels such as sports versus weather on a news site
• Placement methods like manual versus auto ads
• Position tactics like top of page versus appropriate column

Publishers who look at these available AdSense RPM reports can make comparisons. Then they can decide what to emphasize or de-emphasize on a site to maximize AdSense revenue. For example, they might want to put more effort into mobile if mobile has a higher RPM than tablets or desktops. Likewise, they may want to delete or move ad positions that have remarkably low RPMs.

Time Frame Matters
AdSense reports often default to the latest seven days. They also have options such as the current month, past month or past 30 days. Time frames like these are useful in understanding RPM functionality, but they are not always the best options to use.

Instead, publishers may want to customize longer time periods to get the most accurate results. Longer time periods get rid of unusual variances such as season advertising, such as the peaks right before Christmas for retailers and valleys right after Christmas. Travel, sports and event advertising have peaks and valleys throughout the year.

So publishers should look at a complete year of data to find the best possible averages. Then they can run reports on shorter time intervals to compare them to the complete year and gain useful insights in how to improve AdSense RPMs.