Not All CPM’s Are Created Equal
What does CPM mean in marketing? It is the Cost Per Thousand impressions that an ad or piece of content will receive. The acronym CPM technically denotes Cost Per Mile, with the Latin word ‘mille’ meaning a thousand. Any brand that is operating at scale will use the CPM metric as the north star to optimize for when running brand awareness campaigns. The CPM metric is normally talked about in the context of running paid media campaigns, but it is applicable to all forms of content.
Perfume brands that are running paid advertising campaigns need to understand how to effectively allocate their marketing budget. We have already covered how to effectively run Google ads branded campaigns. We have also covered why traditional paid advertising is very difficult for perfume brands here. The conclusion that we have drawn through analysis of consumer trends in perfume buying is that perfume brands need to be optimizing for brand awareness. As mentioned earlier in this post, the most important metric for a brand awareness campaign is the CPM metric.
Let’s take a deeper look at the best way to optimize your CPM’s.
Paid Ad CPM’s Have Major Drawbacks
Both Facebook and Google can natively measure your CPM cost within their dashboards. The more engaging your ad is, the lower your CPM will be. Facebook and Google want to keep people on their platforms. The best way to achieve this goal is to serve users content that they like and engage with. When perfume brands can create content people like, it aligns with the goals of these platforms. Thus, they will reward you with cheaper CPM’s.
The problem with the paid advertising CPM metric is that your cost will scale linearly with reach. Regardless of how engaging and targeted your ad content is. The bottom line is that if you want to reach more people with your ad, you have to pay more money. There is no way around this.
Non-Native Ad Placements
When you publish an ad on Facebook or Google, it will enter the ad auction for numerous placements on the platform. Facebook allows more control with ad placements, even with smart bidding. Google does not give advertisers much control over ad placement locations, especially with the Display Network.
Here are the various Facebook ad placements
Here are the various Google ad placements
What you will notice is many of these ad placements are non-native, meaning the ad appears somewhere other than the user’s feed. Both Facebook and Google calculate an Impression based on ‘if the ad appeared on the user’s screen’. Both Facebook and Google aren’t using eye-tracking software to see if the ad was actually seen (thankfully). This means that they are calculating ad impressions based on estimates.
You can see how this can be a problem for ad placements in non-native ad locations.
Video/Image Feed Ad (1) vs Right Column Ad (2)
Which ad placement is going to generate more REAL impressions (users who actually saw the ad) when someone is scrolling?
Answer: The ad that is placed natively in the feed. Learn more about how ad placement position affects ad performance metrics on Facebook here.
Google offers even less control over where ads are placed, especially in regards to the Display Network. And we also need to consider the effect of Ad Blocking software and extensions which further distorts ad impression data.
Served vs Viewable Impression
Impressions can be more granularly defined in two ways. Served impressions and viewable impressions.
Viewable impressions only tally a new ad impression when the user most likely saw the ad. Served impressions count the number of times the ad was loaded. Some ad blocking software prevents the script or page element from loading the ad. In this instance, this would disqualify the ad from being counted as a served impression. Some ad blocking software still loads the ad, however, the ad blocking software prevents the ad from rendering. In this instance, the ad would be tallied as a served ad, even though the user didn’t see anything because the ad wasn’t rendered.
The effects of ad blockers can clearly distort ad performance data and waste your money on ad spend that doesn’t result in real ad impressions. Roughly 35% of people use ad blockers. Business intelligence companies have estimated that up to 11% of advertising budgets are wasted on ads that are counted as ‘served’ but were actually blocked.
Users Are Less Likely to Engage With Sponsored Posts
With all of the different types of Google ads, people know that it is an ad. Google labels it.
Google Shopping ads:
Facebook and Instagram also label all ads as ‘Sponsored’. Content labeled as ‘Sponsored’ will receive less engagement than organic listings according to numerous user behavior studies including this by the UC Riverside School of Business. This further illustrates that paid advertising CPM’s are not only inaccurate based on ad blockers but also less likely to be engaged with based on their labeling.
Why Organic Content Impressions Are Better Than Paid Ad CPM’s
Lets start off with the negative news. Social media platforms have throttled organic posts’ reach. You will be lucky if 12% of your Instagram followers see an image that your account posted. The organic reach is no better on Facebook.
However, we now live in the age of video content. Specifically short-form video content. The rise of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and Youtube Shorts has revolutionized the ability of good video content to organically receive huge amounts of impressions, regardless of the total number of followers the account has. No other social media platforms offer organic distribution at the scale of Shorts, Reels, and TikToks. These platforms optimize for engagement metrics with a focus on content discovery. This means these platforms will heavily promote organic video content with good engagement metrics. For anyone in the perfume industry who has been paying attention, this has helped level the playing field for smaller niche perfume brands with smaller followings. These platforms allow great content to reach millions of people, and most importantly, you are not paying extra to reach these people.
The only price incurred is the cost of the content creation. The cost to reach more people is a flat cost that doesn’t scale linearly with reach. This provides a hugely asymmetric opportunity curve for any brand that is trying to increase brand awareness while operating with a limited marketing budget.
Organic Video Content Has A Home On Your Social Profile Page
When you publish video content to your brand TikTok, Instagram Reels, or Youtube Shorts profile, it stays there.
This has several advantages:
If the video content is engaging, it will get recirculated. We have talked to brands who have had a specific Reel, Short, or TikTok that they posted months ago suddenly start to get major traction and new views.
The video content posted on your profile is social proof and also provides more opportunities to convey your brand to users who are viewing your profile. Your content is all right there.
The content is searchable if you use good keywords in the title and description of the video (and the video content is good). If you post a video about your perfume getting reviewed by a bride who wore the perfume at her wedding, and you use well-researched keywords, you can expect that video to show up whenever a user searches for, ‘wedding perfume’ in-platform.
All social media platforms heavily favor accounts that consistently post content. You should do everything that you can to optimize for these platform’s algorithms.
This is unlike running paid video ads that only exist in your Facebook Ad Manager Account and whoever happens to be targeted by the ad. Organic video content is always viewable.
Influencer Marketing CPM’s
The trust factor needs to be considered when analyzing the quality of the impression. People subscribe to influencer accounts because they are entertained by the influencer, or they trust the opinion of the influencer. A brand impression generated through a fragrance influencer is going to carry more weight than a paid ad impression that a brand paid for through Facebook Ad Manager. The best data point that we have to illustrate this is that 42% of people do not trust messaging from a brand they have not purchased from before while 69% of people trust influencer recommendations, regardless of if they are personally following the influencer.
Perfume advertising can take many shapes. As far as brand marketing and running awareness campaigns, we believe that perfume brands that can consistently create short-form videos that highlight bottle design, ingredients sourcing, customer avatars, and brand storytelling will be poised to receive outsized brand awareness at a fraction of the costs of running paid ads.