‘eCPM’! You may have seen this term many times in your AdSense accounts, but do you know exactly what does eCPM stand for and how you can take control of it? Basically, eCPM is the “effective cost per thousand impressions” and acts as an excellent performance measure for our advertisement units.

According to Webmaster World, now you can use the Google Ad Manager to restrict your eCPM or you can also set a minimum level of eCPM via Google Ad Manager. However, before you rush to the Google Ad Manager, you need to keep one thing in mind, that there should be other advertisements in your Ad Manager inventory, for you to compete with your AdSense advertisements. When you specify the minimum eCPM with house or remnant advertisements in Ad Manager, your AdSense advertisements will start competing on the lowest limit that you’ve set.

Here are some useful excerpts from Webmaster World:

“My main long-running gripe with Adsense has been that it isn’t possible to set a minimum eCPM rate for Adsense. Instead a publisher had no choice but to take the good paying ads with the bad.

However, if you decide to implement Google Ad manager as your adserver, you’re now able set a minimum eCPM by assigning a “house” or “remnant” ad with a minimum CPM of whatever floor you want.

Once you’ve set the floor as desired, you set Adsense to compete in the realtime auction with these slots and the ads will only appear if they will earn you more than the value of the remnant or house positions.

While the immediate result will probably be a drop in your Adsense income, as long as you’re running other, better paying ads (from direct advertisers, another network or whatever), your end resultant income for the total number of impressions, should be higher.

While there’s other pros and cons to using the server, this alone is a very big pro.”

“I believe it’s both cpm and cpc ads. It doesn’t guarantee you higher paying ads, but it does allow you to set a floor.

For example, in the past, if you had a direct advertiser who pays $4CPM, and you had them in rotation with Adsense, you just had to take whatever Adsense dished out.

Now, you can set a floor by setting a remnant/floor advert as $4CPM in which case the Adsense will only show if it’s going to pay $4CPM (or more) — if it isn’t going to pay more, then it doesn’t show and you can run down the better paying adverts from the direct advertiser, thus allowing you to squeeze more out of your impressions.

As I said in the OP, this could result in a drop in your adsense income, but, as long as you’ve got other direct advertisers paying more, that doesn’t matter.”

“It’s working perfectly for me. I’ve not had a single Adsense impression below the threshholds I set. Obviously you need to have other adverts (in my case direct advertisers) who pay over the threshhold, if you don’t, then as Bddmed says — there’s nothing to show.”

“I do sell directly. Leftovers goes to an agency averaging above $2/CPM and leftovers from leftovers are between our default ads and AdSense. Our default ads are set to $1/CPM and I never see any AdSense ads unless I turn off our default campaign promoting our other websites.

Technically AdSense can compete with the rest of the inventory however how I said, AdSense is not even beating our default $1/CPM campaign.

To be honest, for our default campaign I did not try anything lower than $1/CPM as I can get better from any ad network. Maybe if I would set our default campaign to $0.05 CPM I would see some AdSense ads.”

Author

Navneet Kaushal is the Editor-in-Chief of PageTraffic Buzz. A leading search strategist, Navneet helps clients maintain an edge in search engines and the online media. Navneet is also the CEO of SEO Services company PageTraffic which is one of the leading search marketing company in Asia.