What is Cost Per Completed View?

Cost Per Completed View (or CPCV) is a payment model in video advertising. With Cost Per Completed View, advertisers only pay when a video ad plays through to completion, as opposed to paying when viewers start (and/or skip) the video ad with payment models such as CPV (Cost Per View).

With Cost Per Completed View campaigns, advertisers and publishers agree on standard performance metrics that have to be met in order to be paid for the video ad. These performance metrics can be watching the video through to a milestone (first 3 or 10 seconds) or completion (the whole video), clicking through or performing another meaningful action.

The main benefit of Cost Per Completed View for advertisers is the fact that they can now pay only for ads which have had an impact on viewers, instead of paying for each impression, no matter the performance.

Despite the Cost Per Completed View model being relatively new, an increasing number of ad networks and monetization platforms are including it in their programmatic advertising offers to attract more advertisers and provide them with more meaningful impressions.

Cost Per Completed View can be calculated by diving the cost by completed views. The formula is:

Cost Per Completed View = Cost / Completed views