Cost per View

When video advertising was bought on impressions, there was no way to know whether what you paid for got through. An impression means the video appeared on screen, so somebody who skipped after five seconds counted the same as anybody else.

That was Ravi's month running the product video on an impression basis. Two million impressions registered, and a survey asking whether more people recognized the brand came back flat. Opening up the watch-time data showed that 3 percent of those impressions ran past thirty seconds. The other 97 percent left before the first sentence finished, and money went out for that share too.

So the moment of payment moved later. The charge now lands not when the video appears but when somebody has watched a set amount of it.

Divide the ad spend by the number of views. Spend $2,000 in a month and record 50,000 views and each one cost $0.04.

The thing to verify here is what that particular platform counts as a view, because the thresholds vary.

1. Thirty seconds or more of watching — or the full video if it runs shorter than thirty seconds. Clicking through to the site also counts. Skipped impressions carry no charge.
2. Two or three seconds of exposure — the threshold used in feeds that autoplay without sound. Run the same ad against this definition and the view count multiplies while the unit price drops to match.

Which is why you can't put the figures from two platforms on different thresholds side by side and call one cheaper. Whether $0.04 at thirty seconds beats $0.01 at three seconds is not something these numbers settle.

View rate belongs next to it. That's views divided by impressions, and a low unit price with a falling view rate means the same people are seeing the ad repeatedly. To convert for comparison against CPM, multiply the unit price by the view rate and then by 1,000. CPM is the cost per thousand impressions.

"CPV on this creative is $0.04, but that's on a thirty-second threshold. Don't compare it straight against the other platform."

The charging thresholds differ, so the unit prices aren't comparable.

"Putting the product name in the first five seconds pushed CPV up. Fewer people skipped."

More impressions qualified as views, so the cost rose with them.

"It's an awareness campaign, so buy on views; if we want signups, CPA is the right basis."

Match the pricing basis to whether the goal is watching or converting.

Pagedeck runs its product video on a view basis. Ravi built two creatives and split the budget between them; the one that opened with five seconds of screen recording had both the higher unit price and the higher view rate. On price alone it lost, yet the same budget bought more people who watched thirty seconds. Clicks get checked against CPC as well, though clicks happen far more rarely than views on video.