What is CPC?
Cost per click: what you pay each time someone clicks an ad. Set by auction, so it depends on what you sell and who else is bidding for the same search.
Cost per click is what you pay each time someone clicks your ad. Take what you spent and divide it by the number of clicks you got, and that is your average CPC.
It varies enormously. The price is set by an auction, so it rises with how much a customer is worth in your industry and how many businesses are chasing them. Legal, financial and emergency trade searches are expensive because one customer is worth a lot. Searches with little commercial value are cheap.
The trap is judging a campaign on CPC alone. A cheap click that never becomes a customer costs more than an expensive one that does. What matters is the cost to win a customer, which comes from CPC and conversion rate together. Improving the ad’s relevance lifts your Quality Score, which is the legitimate way to pay less for the same position. We give real Irish figures in how much Google Ads costs.
Paid media measured on what it returns, not what it spends.
Google, Meta, LinkedIn and TikTok campaigns built on search terms, creative testing and conversion tracking, not impressions.