Cost per engagement (CPE)
What is cost per engagement?
Cost per engagement, or CPE, is the total cost of a post or campaign divided by the number of engagements it gets: likes, comments, shares, saves and sometimes clicks. It prices interaction rather than views.
It sits next to CPM, which prices views. A post with a cheap CPM but few interactions has an expensive CPE.
Why cost per engagement matters
CPE rewards creators whose audience actually responds, which usually matters more than raw views for building interest in a product. It is also a simple way to compare campaigns across platforms.
Related marketing terms
CPM, cost per mille, is what you pay for every thousand impressions or views. It lets you compare the price of creators and ad channels.
Engagement rate measures how much an audience interacts with posts: likes, comments and shares divided by followers or views, as a percentage.
A sponsored post is content a creator publishes because a brand paid or gave them something for it, and it must be disclosed as an ad.
Earned media value estimates what the attention from organic or influencer content would have cost to buy as advertising.