What is cost per engagement (CPE)?

Cost per engagement (CPE) is an advertising pricing model in which advertisers pay only when a user completes a specific interaction with an ad, as defined by the platform or the campaign.

An “engagement” typically includes actions such as tapping or clicking an ad, swiping through interactive formats, expanding rich media, interacting with playable ads, or watching a video for a set duration.

As mobile apps are designed for active use, many ad formats prioritize interaction over passive viewing. For video, playable, rewarded, and rich media ads, impressions alone do not show whether users truly engaged with the ad. By focusing on user interaction, CPE can help reduce wasted ad spend and give marketers greater control over budget allocation.

Cost per engagement is calculated by dividing total advertising spend by the total number of engagements generated during a campaign.

Cost per engagement is often compared with other pricing models. The table below summarizes how CPE differs from cost per mille (CPM), cost per click (CPC), and cost per action (CPA).

While ad platforms some count clicks as engagement, more recently, it’s also becoming common for video views that have a specific duration to be considered as “engaged views”. As with any metric or pricing model, understanding your CPE data and taking action to effectively optimize your campaigns requires unbiased measurement and attribution. Mobile measurement partners (MMPs) like Adjust provide this by piecing together data from all your sources into one, easy-to-interpret view. From here, you can see what needs to be paused, where you should scale, and where your budgets can make an impact.

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