At GRV Media, as part of our commitment to provide metrics that matter, we’re soon to be implementing a new metric on the PROP dashboard to show RPMs calculated based on sessions.
What are Session RPMs?
Session RPM is a metric used to demonstrate the total ad earnings generated by 1,000 visitor sessions on a publisher’s website.
It is one of the best metrics for publishers to use when determining how much they are actually earning per visitor and provides better insight into understanding a website’s traffic.
The PROP dashboard currently displays Pages RPM (which is a metric used to demonstrate the total ad earnings generated by 1,000 pageviews), and this isn’t going away any time soon, but the addition of Session RPM will allow you (and us) to identify the true value of a user to your website.
There are a number of reasons as to why we are implementing this addition, but one thing to take into account is this: Pageviews can be manipulated.
A single user could click on a site and spend 5 minutes reading an article, counting as one pageview, or they could click on across multiple slides in the same article, generating multiple pageviews and spending seconds on each slide.
In the second instance, the User Experience is negatively impacted by having to click through multiple slides to get their information, pages are viewed for only brief moments, and advertisers aren’t drawn to the idea of having low viewability on their ads. Nobody is a winner.
And whilst the majority of sites are moving away from slides as a form of consuming content, the example above shows how easy it is to manipulate any meaningful data from pageviews. And don’t get us started on duplication of tags and double counting page views via the analytics tracker, which is a lot more common than you would think.
How do these additions affect earnings?
Well in short, they don’t. You will still be earning the exact same amount.
We track ad impressions completely separately from your site analytics- they’re found in the “ads” tab on the performance section of the PROP dashboard.
We’re only providing more data for you by changing one portion of the RPM equation which compares revenue to sessions to give you an understanding of how much each user makes you in ad revenue.
The aim is to continue to provide you with the tools and data to understand your traffic, identify the value of your users and provide opportunities to grow your revenues, all of which can be achieved through understanding Session RPMs.
Summary
In short, they key difference between page RPM and session RPM is that the first measures pageviews, and the second measures sessions. And for you to have greater levels of insight, from which you can make better decisions about your content strategy, you will see the Session RPM metric on the PROP dashboard from 2023.
