CPV calculator

Cost per view for every channel, the view-weighted total, and what each platform counts as a view.

Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored. Updated 2026-09-26.

CPV is ad spend divided by views. $2,400 for 60,000 views is a cost per view of $0.040 — four cents a view. On YouTube it is also how you bid: with target CPV bidding you set the average you are willing to pay for each view.

The hard part is the word view. YouTube counts an in-stream view at 30 seconds of the ad or an interaction, Meta counts a ThruPlay at 15 seconds, and TikTok reports views at 2 seconds and at 6 seconds — three CPVs from three platforms are three prices for three different units. The calculator above takes a row per channel, with the view definition in its name, and returns each CPV next to the view-weighted total: total spend ÷ total views, never the average of the rows.

What each platform counts as a view

A CPV only compares like with like when the views are the same unit, and across platforms they are not. These are the definitions as each platform's own help centre states them, checked on 26 September 2026:

A 30-second YouTube view asks for fifteen times the watch time of a 2-second TikTok view, so it is no surprise when the second looks cheaper per view. That is a difference in the unit, not in how well the channel works. Keep the definition in the row name, as the calculator above does, and compare CPVs only between rows that share one.

Why the total is weighted by views

With the three rows above, $4,800 buys 240,000 views: a view-weighted CPV of $0.020. Average the three rows' CPVs instead — $0.040, $0.020 and $0.010 — and you get $0.023, because a plain average gives YouTube's 60,000 views the same say as TikTok's 120,000.

The weighted figure is the true cost of a reported view across the budget. It is still not a price for one comparable unit when the rows count views differently, which is why it is most useful inside a single platform — across its campaigns and placements — and for pacing a budget across platforms rather than for ranking them.

CPV from an impression buy

A lot of video inventory is bought per thousand impressions even when the goal is views: Meta bills its 6-second ThruPlay goal on CPM only, and its 15-second goal on CPM or per ThruPlay. On an impression buy the effective CPV is CPM ÷ 1,000 ÷ view rate. A $7.20 CPM with 24% of impressions reaching a view costs $0.030 per view, which is what the second panel of the calculator works out.

The same formula shows where CPV really moves. At an unchanged $7.20 CPM, a creative that holds 36% of impressions past the view threshold instead of 24% cuts the CPV by a third, to $0.020, without touching a bid. TikTok's video views objective is built around that effect: it bids per focused view, counted at 6 or 15 seconds or on an early interaction (TikTok Ads Manager help).

A cheap view is not a cheap result

CPV prices attention, the first link in a chain that runs view → click → conversion. A channel with a low CPV and a weak click-through rate can cost more per customer than one with twice the CPV, so read CPV next to cost per click and acquisition cost, not on its own.

For reach buying the useful comparison is often the other way round: turn each channel's CPV back into a CPM at its view rate and compare the price of the attention you actually bought.

Computing this from your own accounts

Every calculator on this page takes numbers you typed. TableBI reads Google Ads and Meta Ads (beta) from the accounts themselves, at campaign level: spend, impressions, clicks, conversions and revenue. Video views are not among those fields, so the views come in the way every platform already hands them out — as a CSV export, which lands with all of its columns intact in a raw table you can query from your terminal.

# views are not a synced field: upload the export that carries them
tablebi connect csv --file youtube_views.csv --platform youtube_views

# every column of the file lands in youtube_views_raw, named as in the export
tablebi ask "SELECT campaign,
          SUM(cost) / SUM(views) AS cpv
   FROM youtube_views_raw
   GROUP BY campaign ORDER BY cpv"

A CSV is a snapshot, so upload a newer export when you want newer views. What refreshes on its own is everything the connected accounts sync — spend, impressions, clicks — and any answer built on them can be pinned to a live URL: here is one running now. No hosted model does the reasoning; your own Claude Code or Codex drives the CLI, which is why there is no inference bill attached to it.

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