How cost per click work?

Cost-per-click is important because it is the number that is going to determine the financial success of your paid search campaigns, and how much Google Ads will cost for you.

Your return on investment, whether you’re over- or underpaying for each action, will be determined by how much you are paying for clicks, and by what kind of quality you are getting for that investment.

Since the overall ROI of your campaigns is determined by how much you’re paying for clicks and the quality of traffic they’re bringing in, it is important to think about cost per click in terms of both cost and value. You want to identify and target clicks that are both inexpensive and valuable. Learn more about CPC and 28 other PPC metrics here.

So how do you go about lowering the price you’re paying for each click, while sustaining (or even improving upon) the value of your visits? Two key paths of action come into play here:

Raise Your Quality Score – Google has created an automated system that offers pricing discounts to well-managed PPC campaigns with high Quality Scores. Currently, accounts with quality scores of 6 or higher (the average score today is 5) are granted a 16-50% decrease in CPC, whereas accounts with a 4 or lower Quality Score see a 25-400% increase in CPC!

Higher Quality Score = Lower CPC, Lower CPA

Boost your chances of a drastically discounted cost per click by adhering to Quality Score best practices:

Expand Your Reach – By discovering new, relevant and valuable clicks, the distribution of your budget will be improved substantially. To do this, you’ll have to find new PPC keywords and search advertising opportunities. But you can’t just expand without also paring back – you need to simultaneously eliminate irrelevant or overpriced clicks from your campaigns.

Refine Your Reach – Continually designating negative keywords in your Google Ads account helps to control your average CPC by filtering out traffic from searchers that are highly unlikely to convert. So as you add new keywords to your Google Ads account, be sure to eliminate the losers. When you target only keywords that perform well and are relevant to your business, it ensures that:

A low cost per click is key to PPC success because it ultimately translates into your cost per conversion.

There are a variety of text, rich-media or social media ads that use CPC as a factor in calculating total paid advertising campaign costs. Some ad types are only displayed on certain networks, such as the Google Search Network (ads at the top of Google’s search engine result pages) and Display Network (Google-owned or partnered sites like YouTube  and Gmail).

Cost per click is calculated by dividing the cost of a paid advertising campaign by the number of clicks. If you want to use a popular online advertising tool like Google AdWords and bid on keywords in order to display paid ads, these tools will often show CPC for target keywords.

Cost per click = Advertising cost / number of clicks

Related metrics that involve CPC include average cost per click and maximum cost per click. Within paid advertising platforms like Google AdWords, there are certain strategies like enhanced cost per click and manual cost per click bidding that marketers may want to utilize depending on their goals.

Average cost per click is the average an advertiser spends for every ad click.

Average CPC = total cost of clicks / total number of clicks

Maximum cost per click is the highest amount you think a click is worth and the highest you want to pay. The maximum CPC set may not be the amount you actually pay for the click. Google recommends setting the maximum CPC to $1 in AdWords if you are unsure of what to choose for the highest amount per click.

Manual CPC bidding is when advertisers set the maximum CPC for each ad by hand in contrast to automated bidding strategies.

Enhanced cost per click is an automated conversion bidding strategy in Google AdWords for certain types of ads that appear on Google’s Search Network and Display Network. Enhanced CPC is used if your goal is to maximize ad conversions.

Cost per click (CPC) is an online advertising revenue model that websites use to bill advertisers based on the number of times visitors click on a display ad attached to their sites.

The primary alternative is the cost per mille (CPM) model, which charges 1,000 ad impressions—or views—of the display ad, regardless of whether or not a viewer clicks on the ad.

The cost-per-click model is also known as pay-per-click (PPC),

Advertisers commonly use cost per click with a set daily budget for a campaign. When the advertiser's budget is reached, the ad is automatically removed from the website's rotation for the remainder of the billing period. For example, a website with a cost-per-click rate of $.10 would bill an advertiser $100 for 1,000 click-throughs.

Most publishers use a third party to match them with advertisers. The largest such entity is Google Ads, which uses a platform called Google AdSense.

A click costs no more than you're willing to pay through a bidding system. For example, you could bid a maximum of $1 per click on Google Ads. The system runs through algorithms that evaluate your ads and charges you no more than your bid. However, there are some caveats.

The Google Ads system applies discounts to advertisers with higher ad Quality Scores. This score is determined by the relevance of the ad and the advertiser's content to the search terms used. You'll also be dinged in the position of your ad the lower you bid, again adjusting for the other factors evaluated by the platform.

A formula may be used to determine the rate you pay per click. One of the most popular ways to calculate your CPC is:

Some publishers or platforms like Google Ads use a bidding process to set their rates. For instance, Google Ads asks you to select the maximum amount you're willing to pay per click. Google's platform then uses Ad Rank thresholds to determine the actual cost when your ad is clicked.

This means your cost varies up to your maximum because the platform ranks your bid, ad quality, position, user signals, search topics, and related auctions and sets the cost per click. You can even have Google automate the bids for you to increase your click-through.

The platform then positions your ad based on your maximum amount, with higher maximums achieving a higher placement on the page.

Because advertising can become very expensive when paying by clicks, you need to have a plan to keep from paying too much per click. This means researching and creating a strategy with keywords to raise your Quality Score, a large measure of how your ads compete with others.

Your Quality Score is crucial to increasing your clicks and decreasing your costs. You can improve your Quality Score by making adjustments to your:

Keywords drive internet searches, so it makes sense to ensure you have keywords in your ads that lead people to your website. Some techniques you can try are:

There are plenty of alternatives to Google AdSense, including Media.net, Infolinks, Amazon Advertising, and Bidvertiser, to name a few.

Some specialize in small or large publishers, and some offer a better deal than Google AdSense to stay competitive.

Amazon Advertising is designed to allow Amazon website affiliates to place ads that reach shoppers on and off the website when searching for specific products.

Meta Ads Manager allows advertisers to run campaigns on Facebook and Instagram.

In the print world, advertisers choose publications that match their customer profiles and place ads in them. They pay more for bigger ads and more prominent placement, but the effectiveness of those ads can usually only be implied by tracking before-and-after sales numbers. Coupons and contests are among the strategies that help them track their ads' effectiveness better.

In the online world, advertisers know how many people are at least interested enough to click on their ads. That has led to two of the primary ways to reach consumers through web advertising:

Demographic targeting of advertising was created offline, primarily by the print magazine industry. It allowed advertisers to choose a specialty magazine that reached the audience that was most likely to be interested in their product.