What is RPM and How is it Calculated?
If you're a publisher and monetizing your site, you should understand how much money you can make as a publishing partner. To calculate your revenue you need to understand your RPM.
What is RPM?
RPM stands for revenue per mille (mille = thousand in Latin. It is the estimated amount you will earn for every 1,000 views. The SHE Media Dashboard shows both your Pageview RPM and a Session RPM.
Traditionally RPM was measured using pageviews, but we’ve started to see Advertisers, Google Search, and Social Platforms shifting their focus to rewarding content that a user values based on visit and engagement behavior, which means Publishers and Media companies like ours are adapting our focus on Sessions. Signals like time-on-site, bounce rate, pages per session, repeat visits, and overall interaction with the content are used to measure the user’s satisfaction (and thus value) of your content.
Focusing on sessions leads to a lift in user experience signals which is directly aligned with those partners and rewards. To drive the point home, assume you improve your site’s user experience by optimizing your ads, improving site speed, improving SEO, and overall optimizing the user experience & monetization opportunity by partnering with SHE Media. You’ll see an increase in pages per user, increased time-on-site, and lower bounce rates. All of these satisfy the things advertisers, search engines, and social platforms are eager to reward with showing your content to more users and delivering more visitors to your content — which ultimately drives more revenue to you!
What Factors Impact the RPM?
Many different factors can impact a publisher’s RPM, some in your control and others not. Here are a few examples of what will impact your RPM.
1. Geography – This is why, at the application phase, we ask if your traffic is mostly U.S. or International. International traffic tends to receive lower RPMs.
2. Advertiser rates – Direct vs. programmatic, level of quality, budgets, so many things.
3. Seasonal trends – Big one, understand the trends. Certain months are better than others, certain times of the year.
4. Device type – Most of the time, desktop traffic gets RPMs that are higher than mobile.
5. Ad format – Certain ad formats, like video or sticky placements, get higher RPMs.
6. Viewability – If your users aren’t actually seeing the ad, you won’t be paid for those impressions.
How is RPM Calculated?
Looking at your revenue from the last 30 days, RPM is calculated by dividing your earnings by your number of monthly sessions divided by 1,000.
Session RPM = (revenue) / (# of sessions/1,000)
Calculating out an example for you, let’s pretend that last month you earned $5,000 on ad revenue and your website had 200,000 sessions. Following the formula above, your RPM would be $25.00. In other words, for every 1,000 sessions your website delivers, you will be earning $25.00.
Keep in mind that the amount you earn will vary by campaign, traffic, seasonality, and a few more variables we’ll go into, but it will always be shown in your dashboard.
Tips to Increase RPM
You can find a list of various ways to increase your RPM here, but the best thing you can do is partner with SHE Media. As a part of Penske Media with sister brands such as Rolling Stone & Variety as well as our own fully staffed properties (Sheknows.com, Stylecaster.com, Soaps.com), we have collectively spent hundreds of millions of dollars to understand what works and what doesn’t. When you work with us, we put those years of experience, hundreds of exclusively commissioned data studies, and enterprise-level relationships with Google as a GCPP-certified partner, and social platforms to work for you without any additional hidden fees or consulting charges.
Together we’ll work on things like ad optimization, webpage optimization, SEO, video production, audio (podcast) production, licensing, content marketing, influencer marketing, branded content, and more.
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Find out more information on the SHE Media Collective and apply today!