Influencer Marketing CPM: What You Need to Know About The Cost of Impressions

For influencer marketing campaigns, marketers prefer to use CPM, or cost per mille (cost per thousand impressions), as the metric for the cost-effectiveness of the campaign.

CPM is a popular metric not only in influencer marketing. It is commonly used in paid marketing and advertising. For example, in Google or social media ads, you'll often see advertisers discussing the optimal price for 1,000 impressions for a specific industry, country, or search query.

One might say that CPM is sort of a pricing model: it is being used to pay influencers per thousand impressions. For example, if the agreed CPM is $15, it means that the influencer will get paid $15 for every 1,000 impressions or views of the sponsored post.

Since running an influencer campaign is a complex process, CPM in influencer marketing is not as straightforward as it might seem at first glance. When calculating the real cost of impressions for influencer campaigns, brands need to differentiate between the cost of setting up a campaign, running and managing it, and the cost of partnering with a particular influencer.

Imagine that you run a campaign together with an agency. The total cost is $10,000 and it generated 1,000,000 impressions. In this example, it's easy to make the mistake of calculating the CPM of $10.

In reality, $10,000 includes content creation fees, agency fees, legal contract creation services, and so on. The real CPM will be higher than $10.

How much you have to pay per 1,000 impressions will vary across influencers and content categories. In some cases, the number of followers is the driving factor. In other cases, an influencer might have above-average engagement rates. They can also be in high demand or they are already an avid advocate for your product. In other words, how much an influencer charges for impressions depends on many different factors, not only their performance.

Depending on what you expect from your campaign, individual attributes of the influencer's profile can also impact how much they charge for impressions. For example, if you want the majority of their audience to come from a very specific location, whether you are targeting a niche market, need a particular language, content category, or political beliefs.

On top of that, you might need a multi-channel campaign which means that your posts will be promoted across several social media platforms. The content formats are very different there, the number of impressions will be different as well as CPM.

The price of partnering with an influencer will also depend on your requirements. Do you want exclusivity rights? Will you be helping with creating content? Do you want to have complete creative control? Do you expect the influencer to work on tight deadlines?

As you can see, there are lots of factors to account for when predicting how expensive an influencer campaign will be or how much those impressions will cost you.

HypeFactory has launched over 1,000 campaigns around the world and worked with thousands of influencers. From our experience, a higher CPM doesn't always guarantee better performance.

Depending on your preferences, you can either go for an influencer in a higher CPM tier or partner with multiple micro-influencers. At HypeFactory, we usually recommend a mix of both: if your budget allows it, it's better to run a campaign with a few macro-influencers and a few micro-influencers whose CPM is usually much lower.

The optimal CPM rate will depend on your marketing budget and strategy. If influencer marketing is your main channel for now, then you can afford a higher CPM. If there are budget restrictions or if you need to promote content across marketing channels as well, then you're more likely to go with an influencer who has a lower CPM.

In other words, there's no one-size-fits-all solution when determining the optimal CPM for your campaign. To predict the total number of impressions and their price, it's better to partner with an agency.

Influencer agencies have data on their previous campaigns and a large database of influencers. This gives them a significant edge. A good agency can advise you on the optimal CPM across countries and categories, determine whether an influencer is asking for a fair price, forecast how many impressions you can expect.

Some agencies, like HypeFactory, also offer full-cycle support which means that they'll not only consult you on how to run a campaign but can also manage it for you, including the negotiation and pricing process.

Compared to other types of marketing and advertising tactics, influencer marketing CPM can seem too high. But if done correctly, these campaigns target a very specific audience, generate many impressions, and also yield better results.