Cost per click (CPC): what it is, how it is calculated and what it costs in the UK

Cost per click (CPC) is the amount an advertiser pays each time someone clicks on their ad.

You do not set that amount. It is set by the auction the ad enters every time someone types a search, and the figure you enter in the campaign is only the ceiling you do not want to go past. The gap between that ceiling and the price you are actually charged is the first thing to get clear, because that is where almost every report gets misread.

How cost per click is calculated

The formula is a division: total spend divided by the number of clicks received.

An example with real numbers rather than round ones. Over twelve months of Search campaigns for three Italian companies we manage, spend was €115,984 for 63,936 clicks: €1.81 a click. The same data, broken down by sector, is in the Google Ads statistics we publish every year.

The result of that division is always an average, never the price of a click. The individual clicks within those 63,936 cost anything from a few cents to several euros each, depending on who was competing on that query at that moment. When someone tells you "the CPC for this keyword is £2", they are squeezing a distribution into a single number.

Max CPC, actual CPC and average CPC

They are three different numbers and they often appear on the same screen in reports. Google Ads documentation is clear about the first: "Your max. CPC is the most you'll be charged for a click, but you'll often be charged less, sometimes much less."

Metric	What it is	Who decides it	Where you read it
Max CPC	The ceiling you accept to pay for a click	You, in the bid settings	Bid column, at keyword or ad group level
Actual CPC	The amount actually charged for that click	The auction, at the moment of the search	Cost divided by clicks, on the individual row
Average CPC	The average of actual CPCs over the period	Nobody: it is an outcome	"Avg. CPC" column in the report

There is one case where actual CPC can exceed max CPC, and Google says so: it happens with Enhanced CPC switched on or with bid adjustments set. Outside those two conditions, the ceiling holds.

Who decides what you really pay

Every search opens an auction. For each ad Google calculates a value called Ad Rank, which takes in the bid, the quality of the ad and landing page, the Ad Rank thresholds, the competitiveness of the auction, the context of the search (location, device, time of day) and the expected impact of assets.

The price comes out of that. In Google's words, you pay "only what's minimally required to clear Ad Rank thresholds and beat the Ad Rank of the competitor immediately below you". If nobody below you has cleared the thresholds, you pay the reserve price. The amount is rounded up to the billable unit, which in the UK is a penny.

Two practical consequences. First: a more relevant ad can sit above one that bids more, and pay less. Second: the slots above the search results have higher Ad Rank thresholds and therefore higher actual CPCs, even when there is no competitor right behind you. Asking for the top position costs money regardless of who is in front of you.

There is a myth about Quality Score that needs taking apart. Google's documentation states that "Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction" and that it "is not a key performance indicator and should not be optimized". It is a diagnostic from 1 to 10. The three components behind it, expected CTR, ad relevance and landing page experience, very much do enter the auction. The aggregate score you read in the column does not.

How much a click costs in the UK

Most of the benchmarks you find online are American surveys, repeated in other markets as if they applied there. It is worth keeping them apart, and the same goes for our own data, which comes from Italian accounts.

Survey	Market	CPC	Basis
Visilay, Search Network	Italy	€1.81	63,936 clicks, Sep 2025 - Aug 2026, 3 accounts
Visilay, Performance Max	Italy	€0.19	156,077 clicks, same accounts and period
WordStream, median	United States	$5.42	13,474 campaigns, Apr 2025 - Mar 2026
WordStream, legal services	United States	$9.87	most expensive sector in the survey
WordStream, arts and entertainment	United States	$1.63	cheapest sector in the survey

The American click costs roughly three times the Italian one. The density of advertisers on the same queries and the average customer value in the sectors that dominate that sample both weigh in. Anyone quoting $5 as "the average CPC" to a UK business owner is handing over a number measured somewhere else.

For the UK, the most useful reference is the auction data per query. The table shows the estimated CPC on Google UK for a few typical commercial searches, from trades to legal services.

Query	Monthly searches (UK)	Estimated CPC
personal injury solicitor	2,400	£49.65
divorce solicitor	2,900	£20.59
conveyancing solicitor	9,900	£17.14
emergency plumber	12,100	£16.25
car insurance	450,000	£6.72
accountant near me	12,100	£6.62
dentist near me	246,000	£3.97
hotels in london	49,500	£1.73
florist near me	135,000	£1.00

Within the same country the spread is about fifty to one: a click on "personal injury solicitor" is priced like fifty clicks on "florist near me". Search volume has little to do with it. What drives the price is what one new client is worth to the advertisers bidding, and on legal queries that value is high enough to support CPCs no florist could pay. We went through the numbers for legal searches in the guide to Google Ads for lawyers.

With automated bidding, CPC stops being a lever

This part is missing from almost every definition in circulation, and it is the part that changes day-to-day work. If the campaign uses Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximise conversions or is a Performance Max campaign, you do not set a max CPC at all: the algorithm builds the bid auction by auction. CPC remains a metric to read, not a command to give.

That leads to the most common mistake in mixed-account reports. Over the same twelve months, the same three accounts paid €1.81 a click on Search and €0.19 on Performance Max, because those clicks come from Display, YouTube, Discover and Gmail, where nobody was searching for anything. Adding everything together gives an account-level average CPC of around €0.66, which describes neither. Segment by network before looking at any figure, including when you read the data in Google Analytics.

The CPC you see in tools is not what you will pay

The Google Ads Keyword Planner shows a "top of page bid" with a low and a high range: for "personal injury solicitor" on Google UK, roughly £13.93 to £49.90 (DataForSEO, September 2026). Semrush and Ahrefs show a CPC next to search volume. They are all estimates built on historical auction data, not quotes.

They are still useful for two things: sizing a budget before opening the account, and seeing which queries have a paying market behind them. A keyword with a high CPC is one where someone has already checked that there is money in it, which is useful even when you do keyword research for organic. It is the most readable signal of commercial search intent.

CPC, CPM, CPA or CPV: which model when

Model	You pay for	Makes sense when	Where you find it
CPC	Each click received	You want traffic to a page and know what a visit is worth	Google Ads, Microsoft Advertising, Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Amazon Ads
CPM	A thousand impressions	The goal is reach and awareness, not the click	Display, YouTube, brand campaigns
CPA	Each completed action	Conversions are tracked properly and have a known value	Automated bidding, affiliate marketing
CPV	Each video view	The content is a video and what matters is that it gets watched	YouTube, video campaigns

CPC won on the Search Network for a simple reason: you pay when someone raises their hand. It is the first of the benefits of Google Ads, and it holds as long as the click you buy leads to a page that can do something with it.

Before deciding how much you are willing to pay for a click, you need to know what it is worth: the sum runs through conversion rate and margin, the same reasoning you apply when you calculate return on investment. If you want us to do it on your numbers, that is part of our Google Ads service.

A falling CPC is not always good news

In the industry, cost per click is treated as a cost to squeeze, and nearly every guide ends with a list of ways to lower it. It is worth saying the opposite at least once. When a campaign's average CPC drops without anyone touching anything, most of the time you have not improved: you are winning cheaper auctions, meaning broader and less qualified queries, often because a match type has loosened or the algorithm has shifted delivery to search partner sites, where inventory costs less. Click-through rate holds, cost falls, and meanwhile cost per conversion rises.

CPC on its own does not tell you whether a campaign is working. Always look at it next to cost per conversion: if they fall together you have gained efficiency, if they move in opposite directions you have changed audience without noticing.

Frequently asked questions about cost per click