What’s Happening with Google CPMs?

Google is among the most mature digital advertising platforms in the space, which can lead to more predictable and stable CPMs. However, with previous changes in iOS tracking and upcoming cookie deprecation, advertisers are becoming more wary and cautious of analytics and measurement.

To help shed light on industry-wide trends, we have partnered with Varos to dig into and analyze advertising data across industries and verticals. Our goal is to help advertisers understand whether the price increases they're seeing are specific to their account, or a result of industry-wide trends.

While we saw a slight increase of 8% during the summer months in 2023, Google CPMs remained relatively similar to the previous year, unlike Facebook CPMs. This could be due to a variety of factors including the nature of its ad inventory and market position. 

As one of the oldest and most mature digital advertising platforms, supply and demand growth is less volatile compared to newer, high-growth platforms, such as TikTok. In addition, its wide range of ad formats (including search, display, and YouTube) gives advertisers more to choose from, which could help spread demand more evenly, leading to more predictable movements in CPM.

What does this mean for advertisers?

Google is often the first platform advertisers invest in as part of their paid marketing strategy. Most advertisers build and maintain a steady baseline spend using paid search before experimenting with other ad formats such as programmatic display or YouTube. However, many Right Side Up clients are also diversifying into lower CPM channels such as TikTok. 

If you're interested in chatting about Google ad performance or channel diversification, reach out to us. We'd love to discuss your growth strategy, no strings attached.

Varos offers real-time benchmarks for digital marketing and revenue metrics (CAC, retention, CPM, CTR, Conversion Rate, etc.) compared to similar companies. We're a data co-op that has 6,000+ companies sharing data with us ($4bn annual ad spend tracked).