What CPC, CPM, CPA, CPI, CPL, and CPS Actually Mean, With Real Ranges
Six pricing-model acronyms show up across the platform's campaign-type catalog, and most people outside ad buying couldn't reliably tell you the difference between them. Here's what each one actually charges you for.
Piskes' ads app ships a catalog of 32 campaign types across five platforms — Google, Meta, TikTok, X, and Telegram — for planning purposes (the app is upfront that live campaign management is still "Coming Soon"). Browse that catalog and you'll run into six different pricing-model acronyms attached to different campaign types. If you don't buy ads for a living, they're easy to skim past without registering that they mean genuinely different things — and paying attention to which one a campaign type uses changes how you should think about its cost.
CPC — Cost Per Click
You pay when someone clicks your ad, not when it's shown. This is the most intuitive model for most people because the cost is tied to an action that clearly signals interest. In the catalog, Google Shopping campaigns run around $0.66 per click. CPC is the right lens when your goal is driving traffic to something — a product page, a landing page — and you're comfortable optimizing for clicks rather than views or purchases.
CPM — Cost Per Mille (per thousand impressions)
You pay for exposure, regardless of whether anyone clicks. TikTok reach campaigns in the catalog run around $10 CPM. CPM is the model for awareness plays — you're buying eyeballs on the theory that repeated exposure builds recognition, not necessarily that today's viewer clicks today.
CPA — Cost Per Acquisition
You pay when someone completes a defined conversion action — a signup, a purchase, a lead form. This is a stricter, more expensive-per-unit model than CPC because the platform is only charging you for outcomes it judges valuable, which means it's also doing more optimization work on your behalf to find people likely to convert.
CPI — Cost Per Install
A specialized case of CPA specific to mobile apps: you pay when someone installs your app. If your business has an app, CPI campaigns are usually the most direct route to measurable app growth, since the pricing model is already aligned with the outcome you actually want.
CPL — Cost Per Lead
You pay when someone submits contact information — a form fill, a phone number, an email signup — short of a full purchase. CPL sits between CPC and CPA in both cost and commitment: cheaper and easier to generate than a CPA-style acquisition, but a more qualified signal than a raw click.
CPS — Cost Per Sale
The strictest model: you pay only when an actual sale closes. This shifts nearly all the risk onto the platform and typically commands the highest per-unit cost of the six, because you're asking to pay only for the outcome that matters most to your revenue.
Why the spread between platforms matters
Even within one pricing model, cost varies meaningfully by platform — Meta catalog-sales campaigns run around $0.70 per click in the catalog, close to Google Shopping's $0.66, while TikTok's CPM figures sit in a different range entirely from Meta's. General 2026 benchmarking puts Meta's typical CPM in the $7-15 range against TikTok's $3-10, a gap that's reportedly been narrowing by more than a third since 2022 as TikTok's ad inventory has matured. None of that is a live number pulled from your account today — Piskes' ads dashboard doesn't sync live spend yet — but it's a real, useful planning reference for sizing expectations before you brief anyone or set a budget.
Knowing which pricing model a campaign type uses tells you what you're actually paying for, which is the first question worth answering before comparing costs across platforms at all.