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Nobody should run a campaign off CPM. It is the cost of a thousand impressions, and impressions are not leads. But it arrives before anything else does, which makes it a useful early read on whether a new campaign is going to work or not.
| CPM | Reading |
|---|---|
| $20 to $40 | Fine. Stop looking at it and look further down the funnel. |
| $40 to $60 | Worth a look. Usually a creative fatiguing or an audience Meta is struggling to find. |
| $100 and up | Something is wrong, and it is almost certainly the creative. |
| $200 | The example from the video. Nobody needs a second metric to know this campaign is broken. |
Why the fix is the creative
CPM is the top of the funnel. At the point Meta charges for an impression, nobody has clicked, landed, filled anything in or spoken to a rep, so none of those things can be the cause of a bad number. What is left is what the ad looks like and who Meta can find to show it to, and in this market the second is mostly a function of the first: the creative is the targeting. A high CPM is Meta telling you the ad is not stopping anyone, and the response is to make more and better creatives rather than to fiddle with audiences.
It is worth being clear about what a good CPM does not tell you. A campaign at $22 can still be producing leads at $80 and funding nothing, because everything that decides that happens after the impression. CPM being in range earns you the right to look at the click-through rate, and no more than that. The full list of six is ordered that way deliberately.
Questions brokers ask
What is a good CPM for merchant cash advance ads on Facebook?
About $30 per thousand impressions, plus or minus $5 to $10. Anything from $20 to $40 is fine and is not worth reacting to. That is the range our own campaigns run in.
What does a high CPM mean on an MCA campaign?
That the creative is not working. Nothing else in the funnel has happened at the point an impression is charged, so the ad itself is almost always the cause. A $200 CPM is a broken campaign, and the fix is better creative rather than different targeting.
Should I optimise my MCA campaign for CPM?
No. It is the least important of the six numbers that matter and it is not a lead metric at all. Use it as an early warning in the first days of a campaign and then move your attention down the funnel to cost per lead and cost per funded deal.
Is a low CPM good?
Only if the numbers below it are also good. A cheap impression shown to the wrong business owner produces an expensive lead that does not fund. A $22 CPM is a reason to check the click-through rate, not a result.
Why does CPM vary so much between MCA campaigns?
Mostly creative quality and how fresh it is, and partly the audience Meta has to find to serve it. Within one account it should sit in a fairly narrow band, and a sudden move out of that band usually means the current creatives have fatigued.
Alex Makowski
Founder, Infinite Bookings
Runs the lead generation operation behind Infinite Bookings — paid traffic, the funding application, and the delivery pipeline that puts records into brokers’ CRMs.
Reachable directly at alex@infinitebookings.com or 732-609-7182.