Advertisers buying pop-under traffic in the United States through PPCmate paid an average of $5.31 per thousand impressions between September 30 and October 29, 2026, according to country-level price data the ad platform published on October 30. In Pakistan, the cheapest of the 15 countries in the ranking, the same format averaged $0.19, a spread of almost 28 to 1.

The post, titled "Pop and Push Ad Prices by Country: Real CPM and CPC Benchmarks (October 2026)", also splits pop-under prices by device and gives average cost per click for push notification ads in eight countries, led by the United States at $0.069. Every figure comes from PPCmate's own marketplace over a single 30-day window. The company says it will refresh the numbers every quarter.

In Short

PPCmate, a company that sells cheap ad formats such as pop-under windows and browser push messages, published what advertisers actually paid on its platform over one month, country by country. A thousand pop-under ads cost about $5.31 in the US, $1.88 in the UK and only $0.19 in Pakistan, and mobile cost more than desktop. If you buy these formats, the numbers are a rough price guide, but they come from one company's marketplace and say nothing about how many advertisers or impressions sit behind each average.

What PPCmate measured

PPCmate presents the post as a correction to the price lists that circulate among media buyers. "Most 'average CPM' lists online are guesses, or they're copied from a network's rate card," according to the post. "This post uses real data instead: what advertisers actually paid on PPCmate over the last 30 days, broken down by country, format and device."

The method section is brief. CPM is defined as what advertisers paid per 1,000 valid impressions. All prices are in US dollars. Push is reported as cost per click because, according to PPCmate, that format is usually bought per click. Two rules shape the sample beyond that.

The first concerns traffic quality. "We only counted traffic that passed our filters. Impressions we flagged and didn't charge for are left out." Impressions the company classed as invalid traffic, and did not bill, are therefore absent from every average. The post does not say what share of delivered traffic was removed this way.

The second concerns concentration. "A country is only included if at least 3 different advertisers bought there, so one big buyer can't skew the number." Three is a low threshold. It keeps a single buyer from setting a country's price on its own, but it does not stop two or three large buyers from dominating a market, and the post publishes no advertiser counts, impression volumes or spend totals for any country. Nor does it say whether each country average is weighted by impressions, by spend or by advertiser.

PPCmate's traffic quality page, which says it was last updated on September 29, 2026, gives more detail on the filtering. According to the company, it runs checks before bidding against data centers, proxies, bots, fake browsers and spoofed domains, and checks ads.txt and sellers.json authorization. After delivery, it looks for clicks that arrive too fast or from hidden frames, duplicate clicks and views, and clicks with no matching view. Any view or click refused after delivery is excluded from the bill and shown as not charged in reports, according to the page. No outside verification vendor is named.

Pop-under prices by country

Country Average pop CPM (USD)
United States $5.31
Canada $4.59
United Kingdom $1.88
Germany $0.77
Philippines $0.69
Turkey $0.66
Japan $0.60
Bangladesh $0.47
Brazil $0.47
India $0.43
Russia $0.40
Egypt $0.27
Algeria $0.25
Indonesia $0.23
Pakistan $0.19

Source: PPCmate advertiser data, September 30 to October 29, 2026.

Only three markets cleared $1. The United States sat 16% above Canada, and both stood well clear of the United Kingdom. PPCmate puts the North American premium over Britain at "2-3x"; on the published figures, the US average is 2.8 times the UK's and Canada's is 2.4 times.

Below the UK, prices compress quickly. Germany, the fourth most expensive market, averaged $0.77, less than half the British figure. The 11 countries beneath Germany all came in under 70 cents, and the median of the 15 averages is $0.47, the price shared by Bangladesh and Brazil. Those last two calculations are PPC Land's.

Tiers without definitions

The post sorts markets into tiers but never says which countries belong to which. Japan is described as "surprisingly cheap for a tier-1 country, at about $0.60", which places it below the Philippines at $0.69 and Turkey at $0.66. At that price, a thousand Japanese pop-under impressions cost about 11% of the US average.

At the bottom, Pakistan, Indonesia, Algeria and Egypt are grouped as tier-3 markets that "sit at $0.19-0.27". PPCmate's comment on them is that they suit volume testing but should be judged "on conversions, not on how cheap the clicks are", even though the table prices them per thousand impressions rather than per click. Where Germany, Turkey, Russia or India sit in the scheme is not stated.

Mobile costs more than desktop

Device Average pop CPM (USD)
Mobile $2.09
Tablet $1.65
Desktop $1.34

Source: PPCmate advertiser data, September 30 to October 29, 2026.

"Mobile pop costs about 55% more than desktop across all countries," according to the post. The exact gap from the published averages is 56%. Tablet traffic falls between the two, 23% above desktop.

PPCmate offers a partial explanation: "That's partly because more tier-1 traffic is on mobile." The device figures, in other words, blend all countries together, and the country mix is different on each device. The post shows no device prices within any single market, so it is not possible to tell from the data how much of the mobile premium is about the device and how much is about geography.

The device averages also hint at how the figures are built. The unweighted mean of the 15 country averages is $1.15, below even the desktop figure, and 12 of the 15 countries sit under $0.80. Device averages between $1.34 and $2.09 therefore imply that traffic from the expensive North American markets carries heavy weight in the totals. That is PPC Land's inference; the post does not publish the country mix behind any device.

Push clicks: eight countries, a different map

Country Average push CPC (USD)
United States $0.069
Canada $0.035
Thailand $0.034
Brazil $0.021
Singapore $0.020
New Zealand $0.020
Indonesia $0.020
Nigeria $0.016

Source: PPCmate advertiser data, September 30 to October 29, 2026.

The push ranking is shorter, and its geography is not the same. Thailand, Singapore, New Zealand and Nigeria appear only here. The United Kingdom, Germany and Japan, all present in the pop-under ranking, are missing, and the post does not say whether they failed the three-advertiser rule or were left out for another reason. Indonesia appears in both lists, at $0.23 per thousand pop-under impressions and $0.020 per push click. The bar chart that accompanies the push table labels Indonesia at $0.019, a rounding difference.

US push clicks averaged $0.069, nearly double Canada's $0.035, with Thailand just behind at $0.034. Nigeria, at $0.016, is the cheapest market listed, under a quarter of the US price. "Push clicks in the US cost about 3.5x more than in Brazil or Indonesia," according to PPCmate. Against its own table, the US figure is 3.3 times Brazil's and 3.45 times Indonesia's.

The company attributes the US premium partly to engagement. US push "also gets clicked far more often: around 3.3% CTR, against well under 1% in most tier-3 markets," the post says. "So the higher price buys more engaged users, not just a more expensive click." The click-through rate claims come without a table. No CTR is given for any named country other than the United States, and "most tier-3 markets" is not defined.

What a 3.3% click rate implies

The US figure allows a rough conversion. At $0.069 a click and a click-through rate of 3.3%, a thousand US push impressions would cost about $2.28, less than half the $5.31 that advertisers paid for a thousand US pop-under impressions. That number is PPC Land's calculation, not PPCmate's, and it rests entirely on the "around 3.3%" estimate.

PPCmate published no push CPM figures. Its method section says that "for push, we also show the CPC", wording that implies a push CPM table alongside the cost-per-click one. None appears.

How PPCmate says the data should be read

The post ends with four recommendations under the heading "How to Use These Numbers". According to PPCmate, bids below the published averages will mostly win leftover inventory, the remnant impressions that higher bidders passed over. The company argues that mixing markets distorts the price, since a campaign that runs the United States and Pakistan together produces "a meaningless blended CPM". It says cost per conversion, not CPM, is the figure that counts: "A $0.20 CPM market that never converts is more expensive than a $5 one that does." The fourth point favors raising bids on individual traffic sources that perform, rather than across a whole campaign.

That advice lines up with features PPCmate shipped in the same week. A release note dated October 26 says the bid field on PPCmate's own formats now suggests a price, which the company's FAQ defines as the median winning price with the 25th to 75th percentile range. The same note introduces a Missed Traffic report listing bid requests that campaigns did not bid on, with reasons such as falling below the floor, budget pacing or a blocked placement. PPCmate says those counts are estimates.

The October 26 note also says pop-under campaigns can now be priced by CPM, CPC or CPV, a day after an October 25 release introduced pricing per single view for the format. Both changes fall inside the September 30 to October 29 measurement window. The benchmark post does not say whether, or how, pop-under campaigns bought per click or per view were converted into its CPM averages.

The post closes with a sales pitch for live competition data in the PPCmate dashboard, a $25 minimum deposit and a first-deposit bonus for new advertisers. "We'll update these benchmarks every quarter," it adds. The October post does not refer to any earlier edition.

Who runs PPCmate

PPCmate describes itself on its About page as a programmatic marketplace that gives advertisers access to traffic from multiple supply-side platforms through a single self-serve demand-side platform. It lists native, display, push notification, pop-under and video formats, and says it uses in-house and third-party fraud prevention technology without naming the third parties. The platform is developed and managed by 3DMA Ltd, which holds the PPCmate trademark, according to the site. The About page gives no traffic volumes and no advertiser or publisher counts.

The company's reach now extends beyond its own pop and push inventory. Its release notes from the last week of October describe YouTube video ads, and the October 28 note says campaigns on Google, ChatGPT and other ad platforms need at least one target country. The benchmark post itself covers only pop-under and push.

Why this matters

Published prices for pop-under and push traffic are rare, and the formats sit at the edge of mainstream ad buying. Google barred AdSense publishers from using any type of pop-under in 2017, while allowing no more than three pop-ups. A pop-under opens behind the browser window; a pop-up opens on top of it. The formats are sold instead through specialist networks. PropellerAds, for example, listed push notifications and onclick pop-under among the formats its NIKO agent can configure when it rebuilt the tool in July 2026, saying it serves advertisers in more than 195 countries and regions.

Fraud is part of the context for any price drawn from this kind of traffic. On October 27, ADEX, a verification company that belongs to AdTech Holding, the group that also operates PropellerAds, said AI played a significant role in 52% of the ad fraud schemes it identified across eight unnamed platforms between January and September 2026. PPCmate's averages exclude what it flagged and did not bill. They describe the traffic the company accepted, not everything that was delivered, and without the excluded share there is no way to judge how much the filter changed the price.

The figures also sit well below what mainstream channels report, although none of the methods are comparable. Adjust put US app advertising CPMs at $20.54 in the first half of 2026, the highest in its dataset. In April, ChatGPT ad CPMs were reported to have fallen from $60 to as low as $25, with Gupta Media benchmarks in the same coverage putting Facebook at $4.82 and Google Display at $10.33. Next to those figures, PPCmate's top market price of $5.31 is modest, and most of its countries trade at well under a dollar.

Timing matters for display prices as well. AdRoll reported in September that display prospecting CPMs fell 45% year on year in its third-quarter data and said CPMs typically rise through early Q4 to a peak near Black Friday, which falls on November 27 this year. A year earlier, AdRoll's numbers showed display retargeting CPMs up 11% between September and November 2025. PPCmate's window closes on October 29, so it catches only the start of the holiday buying period. The next quarterly update, if it arrives on schedule, would show whether pop and push prices follow the same seasonal curve.

For publishers who carry these formats, one more number is missing. The averages are what advertisers paid. The post does not say what share of that reaches the sites where the pop-unders open or the push subscriptions are collected.

Timeline

Summary

Who: PPCmate, a self-serve ad platform operated by 3DMA Ltd that sells pop-under, push notification, native, display and video traffic, and the advertisers who bought pop-under and push inventory on it.

What: PPCmate published average prices paid on its marketplace: pop-under CPMs for 15 countries, from $5.31 in the United States to $0.19 in Pakistan; pop-under CPMs by device, with mobile at $2.09 and desktop at $1.34; and push cost per click for eight countries, from $0.069 in the United States to $0.016 in Nigeria. Only countries with at least three advertisers were included, and impressions the company flagged and did not bill were excluded.

When: The data covers September 30 to October 29, 2026, and was published on October 30, 2026. PPCmate says it will update the figures every quarter.

Where: The post appeared on PPCmate's marketing blog and covers markets across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Why: Prices for pop-under and push traffic are rarely published, and PPCmate says most average CPM lists are guesses or copies of rate cards. The figures give buyers and publishers a reference point, but they come from one network, a single month, and a method that discloses no volumes, advertiser counts or weighting.