CPC (Cost-per-Click).

CPC (cost-per-click) is the price an advertiser pays when a user clicks on their ad. Unlike models that charge for impressions alone, the CPC model bills only for actual clicks — that is, for people who make it as far as the website. It is the dominant billing model in Google Ads and in paid search generally, which is why almost every conversation about search advertising budgets ends up denominated in cost per click.

The price of an individual click is set in an auction and does not depend on your bid alone. Through Ad Rank, Google also takes the Quality Score into account: advertisers with more relevant ads and better landing pages frequently pay less for the same position. That is why an advertiser with a strong Quality Score can undercut a competitor who bids more. It also means that improving the ad and the landing page is a pricing lever, not just a conversion lever.

How high the CPC runs varies enormously by sector and competitive pressure. In heavily contested fields such as law, insurance or finance, click prices are a multiple of those in hobby or leisure categories. What decides success is not the CPC on its own but the relationship between the cost of a click and the value an average click brings in — conversion rate, order value and ultimately return on ad spend. A campaign with expensive clicks and a high order value can be far healthier than one with cheap clicks and nothing behind them.

An example: a trades business pays CHF 4 per click, and on average every twentieth click leads to an order worth CHF 2'000. That puts the advertising cost of one order at roughly CHF 80 — a sound piece of business. A CPC that looks 'high' in isolation therefore says very little. It only becomes meaningful once you set it against what a click is actually worth to you. The same arithmetic run the other way explains why cheap clicks can still ruin a budget: money spent on clicks that never convert is money lost, whatever the per-click price happens to be.