Web Advertising Glossary

What is CPM?

Our ads are sold based on CPM. CPM means Cost per Thousand impressions. The cost of placing an ad on Apartment Therapy’s network of sites is the number of impressions divided by 1,000 and multiplied by the CPM. CPM is not based on how many people click on an ad.

Here´s an example: If our traffic is 1,000,000 page views per month, and a banner ad has a rate of $10 CPM that means that an ad with 100% of the exposure for 30 days would get 500,000 impressions. When you divide this by 1,000 and multiply by a CPM of $10, you get a total of $10,000 for the month.

Sound confusing? Think of it this way: we charge clients for how many times their ad is shown. Usually advertisers don’t have the budget to buy all impressions for a particular space over a certain time period. So what we do then is sell the space by impressions, and put the ad in rotation with other advertisers.

If you give us a budget, time frame and location you are interested in, we will figure out how many impressions we can provide you. This will depend on the inventory available.

Check out this CPM calculator to help determine your needs.

What is a page view?

A Page View is a key way that web traffic is measured. A pageview occurs when a user’s browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari etc) requests a web page. In other words, if you visit a website’s homepage, that counts as 1 pageview. When you click on the homepage to go to another page or section, that is 1 more pageview.

What are unique visitors?

Unique visitors are the number of different people who visited a site over a certain time period, typically 1 month. It’s meant to help you understand how many people will view your advertisement. The larger the number, the more popular the site.

What is an Impression?

An impression is when an advertisement displays on a webpage viewed by a reader. It is meant to represent the number of times an advertisement is viewed by a reader.

What do “above the fold” and “below the fold” mean?

“Above the fold” refers to what the typical reader will see on their screen when they visit the site without scrolling down. It refers to the top part of the website. “Below the fold” is simply the rest of the page or what you see when you scroll down.

What is “Click Through Rate”?

The click through rate is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click through. A click through is when a reader clicks on an advertisement and is taken to the advertiser’s website.

It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions. For example if a banner was clicked on 40 times after being displayed 1000 times, the banner would have a click rate of (40 ÷ 1000 = .04 ) or 0.4%. This is also commonly know as a banner’s click rate. These can vary greatly depending on the design of the ad, the fit to the audience and the nature of the offer.

Apartment Therapy loves to work with clients who can provide us with a number of variations of the ads they run such that we can see how each banner performs and then optimize their campaigns.