What is CPMAV in AdSense reports?

Last month a new term started appearing in publisher reports, and it has sparked a flurry of enquiries to our AdSense team asking “What is CPMAV?”.

The new heading has appeared in the Bid Types report, highlighting that advertisers now have a new way to bid on your ad inventory.  The CPMAV initials stand for Cost Per MilleActive View. Slightly confusingly this is currently referred to as Active View CPM in Google’s internal help (shouldn’t that be AVCPM ??)

We’ve discussed Active View on the blog before, but to recap it is a means for advertisers to bid only on impressions that are actually seen by end users. When at least 50% of an ad is visible on screen for at least one second it is considered viewable. This allows advertisers to be sure that they are not paying for impressions that are tucked away in parts of the page that users never scroll down to.  The hope is that this pushes up bid prices by giving advertisers more confidence in the inventory.

CPMAV then are the bids that are being made on a viewable impression basis only.

So far we are seeing very mixed results from these bids from site to site.  In the above example the CPMAV closing price has been much higher than CPM bids. Even with the lower CTR that has brought up the Ad request RPM.  This indicates that, as previously predicted, Active View metric might be number to keep an eye on if you hope to attract higher paying CPM rates.