While some factors are outside of your control, there are six ways you can drive up the CPM…

Limiting Your Audience

The first three are related to times when you make decisions that limit your audience pool.

1. Using original audiences instead of Advantage+ Audience.

2. Restricting your audience by age range or gender. You can only set a minimum age when using Advantage+ Audience (age maximum and gender are only suggestions). But these are strict restrictions when using original audiences.

3. Limiting geography by state or region. If you’re a local business, this tends to be necessary. But, limiting by state or region because you believe your ideal customer lives in these places is often overthinking.

It limits your audience pool and drives up costs.

Editing Placements

This one made the most sense in years past, but less sense now.

4. Manually editing your placements.

You should only consider this when optimizing for a top of funnel action. When optimizing for conversions (especially purchases), the algorithm will adjust in real-time based on which placements lead to results. That won’t be a problem with conversions, but it can lead to low-quality results when optimizing for link clicks, landing page views, and other top of funnel actions.

Auction-Related Issues

There are a couple of mistakes that you can make that are tied directly to the Meta ads auction.

5. Having a bad estimated action rate, which measures the likelihood someone will convert.

6. Low quality ads that have been flagged for click bait, engagement bait, or spam.

If estimated action rate and ad quality are an issue, you’ll need to spend more.

Always Exceptions

I get that there are times when targeting restrictions and removing placements may be necessary. And even though it drives up costs, there may be a tradeoff. Just be sure that there is a benefit rather than driving up your costs unnecessarily.

A primary example is when optimizing for purchases. You often don’t need to isolate your primary customer by demographic as much as you may think you do.

For more on the impact of CPM on results, check out my recent blog post.