What Does Cost Per Click Mean? Our PPC Specialist Reveals All

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a proven tactic for driving traffic to your website and generating valuable leads and sales.

As the name suggests, PPC works on a “cost-per-click” basis. This means you’ll be charged a fee every time a user clicks through from your ad on Google or Bing (Microsoft), in order to land on your website.

Most businesses ask the same question when suggest a PPC campaign: How much does it cost?

Let’s dive in, shall we?

Understanding the cost of a click

As b4b’s PPC specialist, I’ve managed campaigns of various sizes, budgets and in lots of industries and markets. To help you get a clearer picture of how a PPC campaign works, I’m going to delve into the cost of a click.

What determines the price of a click?

The cost of this click will be heavily dependent the industry you are in, the season and your competition.

In the UK, the average CPC on Google Ads is between £0.66 to £1.32, however, in insurance the average CPC can be as high as £7. With location targeting, I’ve seen CPCs as high as £30 in Surrey!

Although advertising platforms, such as Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, work on an auction basis, “highest bid wins” just isn’t the case anymore. Your ad and landing pages need to be highly relevant to the keywords you’d like to show for.

Relevancy will be judged against your competitors and the most relevant website (both in terms of the keywords you’re targeting and your ad itself) will stand a better chance of converting – the right bid comes into it but is no longer the single winning factor. In fact, relevancy is such an important factor now, that the more relevant your site is to the keywords and ad, the cheaper your cost per click will be.

Why run a PPC campaign?

PPC advertising should be a key component of your marketing strategy, because it’s backed by data and is easily scalable (you can manage your budget and tweak campaign settings on a regular basis, adapting your strategy to react to what works – and what doesn’t). PPC also offers a healthy return on investment.