Ad spend
Ad spend is simply the amount of money you are spending on advertising campaigns. Depending on how you account for ad spend, you may simply measure actual spending on ad placements, or you may include costs for agencies and ad operations personnel.
Ad spend can be measured in multiple ways, including:
- CPM: Cost per thousand impressions
- CPC: Cost per click
- CPL: Cost per lead
- CPA: Cost per action
- CPS: Cost per sale
- CPI: Cost per install
While cost is a simple concept, aggregating cost across multiple channels is not. Often, ad spend data is fragmented, and even when you manage to pull it together it won’t map properly to your revenue data because each of your ad networks uses different schemas or terminology.