Which Countries Have The Highest CPM
Payout Rates?
When operating a website, your goal is to generate revenue from it. To achieve this, you'll want to employ advertising methods that yield the highest possible returns.
Among these methods are CPM ads, which fall towards the lower end of the earnings spectrum. CPM ads are essentially display advertisements that pay you based on the number of times real users view them, without requiring them to click on the ads. In comparison to other types of advertising, such as CPA, CPC, or Affiliate advertising, CPM display ads typically offer lower payouts. However, they demand the least amount of effort to monetize your audience since you merely need to attract visitors to your page.
It's worth noting that our discussion today isn't strictly about CPM. CPM, or Cost Per Mille, usually pertains to the amount an advertiser pays to display their ads. The CPM of an ad network, on the other hand, represents the cost of showing your ads to a thousand people.
When discussing the operation of display ads and the generation of income, particularly regarding an ad network's payout rates, we refer to RPM, or Revenue Per Mille. RPM signifies the amount of money you earn for every thousand views.
It's crucial to distinguish between RPM and CPM. The ad network you utilize will invariably take a portion of the profits, unless they charge the advertiser for additional services. You often come across ad networks claiming to pay 80% rates or similar figures; this denotes the portion you receive from what the advertiser pays. For instance, if an advertiser pays the ad network $100 for 1,000 views, their CPM is $100. If the ad network subsequently pays you $80 for the same 1,000 views, your RPM is $80. The ad network has retained a 20% share of the transaction.
This is why many websites opt to manually sell their ad space or use an open market platform like BuySellAds. By handling the process themselves, they can potentially earn more because the ad network doesn't take a cut. However, this approach necessitates investing time and effort in managing advertisers, along with implementing fraud protection and other systems to ensure the quality of their traffic. There are trade-offs to consider with every transaction.
Mitigating Factors
There are, to put it simply, a ton of different factors that go into the calculation to determine your CPM.
Here are just some of them:
- Ad Network. Every ad network will have different CPM rates, even for the same site. This is because they calculate everything based on all of the other factors, up to and including the size and demographics of their advertisers. The same site will get different RPM on different ad networks, even without changing a thing.
- Country of Traffic. The main focus of this article, the country your traffic comes from tends to have a huge impact. Some countries pay better than others, though of course that in turn depends on how well suited the traffic you refer is to that country. If you’re a website in Spanish talking about Spain tourism, you’re going to get the best ad rates from a Spanish-focused advertising network, rather than something like AdSense or AdMob.
- Language of Traffic. Similar to the country of traffic, the language of the traffic matters. Globalization aside, generally English-language content will pay the best, though it also often pays the worst. As usual, suiting your language and location to the content is ideal. In some areas, secondary languages are useful and can be valuable, such as Spanish content in states bordering Mexico, or French content in ads that target Quebec.
- Display Location. Ads showing above your content in a top bar are going to make more money than ads showing in the footer. Ads in the sidebar are generally, but not always, going to make more than ads showing sporadically within content. Ads showing in targeted lists, like an email newsletter, are likely going to make more. The display location matters.
- Device Type. PC ads and mobile ads have different rates, and this will in turn affect rates from other elements on this list. If your content is more focused on mobile topics like apps, you’ll earn more from ads reaching mobile users than from desktop users, for example.
- Site Statistics. All kinds of demographics and statistics go into calculating the RPM of your potential ads. If you have a lot of traffic, or are highly positioned in your industry, you can likely command higher rates than much smaller sites and generalist blogs. If you have a narrow demographic, your users are more valuable to certain advertisers, and you can get higher rates from those – but lower rates from less relevant advertisers.
- Traffic Volume. Worth noting separately, the more traffic you have, the more doors are open to you. Many of the best, highest paying display advertising networks will only work with sites that have 500,000 or more monthly average views. Some start at a million. These tend to command a premium, because they’re large and valuable to advertisers. Smaller sites have to make do with smaller payouts.
- Content Industry. Different general industries tend to have different average rates. For example, , industries like Entertainment will range from 30 cents to $4.50 for RPM, while something like Parenting might range from $1 to $5. Finance tends to have high rates, due to the average value of a conversion. Something like sports, gaming, or food will have lower rates, again due to the average value of the conversion.
- Spam Percentage. The more bots and the more fake views your site sends, the lower your rates are going to be. This is some relatively minor variance, though, for one reason: you get cut off at a certain point. If you refer too much spam, many ad networks would rather ban you from their network entirely than have to deal with the potential reverted payments or unhappy advertisers. Suffice to say, the more spam you have, the lower your rates will be.
So as you can see, there are far too many factors to reliably say anything about any rate. You can isolate one factor and show some metrics for it, but those metrics can have a very wide range based on the other factors.
Looking Into Data
There are a ton of different sources of data for average CPM or RPM rates, throughout the last few years and across different ad networks. The fact is, it’s pretty hard to get any consistent source of reliable data. Everyone has to work off of the data set available to them, and the sources – like AdSense directly – aren’t entirely likely to publish complete access to data sets.
WebRash in 2016 of average CPC rates for various countries. The top ten countries they found were the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Germany, Thailand, Japan, the United Arab Emirates, Switzerland, and Italy.
From this list, the top few are fairly standard. The United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom are all generally going to top the lists. They’re the major English-speaking countries – along with the missing Australia, which is at position number 77 on their list – and they tend to have the most purchasing power for their audiences.
A couple of these entries are a bit of a surprise. Thailand isn’t a country we usually think of as having a lot of money or purchasing power, but within their own sphere of influence, they’re one of the largest available options.
