CPS

CPS is the amount spent to generate one completed sale or purchase — the strictest, most revenue-adjacent cost metric in the CPx family.

CPS sits at the bottom of the CPx ladder (CPM → CPC → CPL → CPS), and it's the one that maps most directly to profit. Affiliate and performance-based media (where a publisher only gets paid when a sale happens) is priced almost entirely in CPS terms, because it shifts risk from the advertiser to the publisher.

CPS still isn't profit. A ₹300 CPS on a ₹350-margin product is barely break-even; the same CPS on a ₹1,500-margin product is excellent. Read it against contribution margin, not in isolation.