Cost per Engagement (CPE)
01 Definition
Cost per Engagement (CPE) meaning: The average cost for each interaction with an ad, such as a like or expand.
Cost per Engagement is total spend divided by the number of engagements, where an engagement is a defined interaction like a click, like, share, or ad expansion. The exact action counted depends on the platform and format. It measures interaction efficiency, not sales.
Why it matters
How Cost per Engagement (CPE) fits the work
CPE helps you gauge how efficiently a campaign earns active interactions, which is useful for social and interactive ad formats.
In context
A social campaign spends $300 and records 1,500 engagements, so the cost per engagement is $0.20.
Practical note
Because platforms define "engagement" differently, CPE is hard to compare across channels. Confirm which actions count before reading the number as performance.