Google Ads statistics are the average cost per click, click-through rate and conversion rate measured across samples of advertising accounts. They are good for one thing only: telling you whether your numbers are within or outside the order of magnitude for your sector.
The problem is that almost all the ones in circulation come from US surveys, quoted without saying where they were measured. In the comparison further down, the US median cost per click is three times what we recorded on three Italian accounts.
Below, every number comes with its source, year and market. At the end there are twelve months of our own data, €145,808 of real spend on Italian accounts, to use as a point of comparison.
How much search advertising is worth in the UK
IAB UK's Digital Adspend study, produced with Oliver Wyman and published on 3 March 2026, puts UK digital advertising at £40.5bn in 2025, up 10% year on year.
Search advertising accounts for £17.9bn of that, 44% of the total, and grew by 6%. It grows more slowly than social, up 21% to £11.5bn, and video, up 20% to £9.3bn, but it is still the largest single format in UK digital advertising.
Within that 44%, Google is almost everything. StatCounter, which measures real traffic across more than 3 billion page views a month, gives Google 91.75% of the UK search engine market in August 2026, against 5.67% for Bing, 1.25% for Yahoo and 0.71% for DuckDuckGo. Advertising on search in the UK means, in practice, running Google Ads.
The US benchmarks, and what they actually say
The most-quoted survey in the world is WordStream's. The edition by Susie Marino, dated 19 May 2026, analyses 13,474 Search campaigns on Google Ads and Microsoft Ads between 1 April 2025 and 31 March 2026, across 23 industries, with at least 52 active campaigns per subcategory. The values are medians, not means, precisely to limit the effect of outlier accounts. The sample is from the US.
| Metric (median, Search Network) | Value | Highest industry | Lowest industry |
|---|---|---|---|
| Click-through rate (CTR) | 6.64% | Arts and entertainment 12.75% | Automotive repair and parts 5.56% |
| Cost per click (CPC) | $5.42 | Legal services $9.87 | Arts and entertainment $1.63 |
| Conversion rate | 8.18% | Animals and pets 16.22% | Finance and insurance 2.64% |
| Cost per lead | $66.69 | Legal services $131.63 | Arts and entertainment $26.84 |
Alongside it, two others circulate, with very different numbers. Databox aggregates data from more than 4,700 companies and updates it monthly: as of 3 September 2026 it reports a median CTR of 4.70%, a CPC of $1.53, a conversion rate of 2.55% and a cost per acquisition of $52.08. It does not state the geographic market.
42 Agency, which publishes benchmarks drawn only from the B2B accounts it has managed since 2022, arrives at a CTR of 1.30%, a CPC of $6.29, a conversion rate of 0.31% and a cost per conversion of $606.
Three serious sources, a CPC ranging from $1.53 to $6.29 and a conversion rate ranging from 0.31% to 8.18%. They do not contradict each other: they measure different samples with different definitions of a conversion, the same problem you find in SEO statistics. That is why a statistic without its methodology attached is useless, and why it is worth looking at how to read marketing statistics before using them in a proposal.
Twelve months on three Italian accounts
These are our own numbers, taken from the accounts we manage, from 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026. Three Italian companies, three different sectors, targeting Italy. The names stay out, the figures do not.
| Sector | 12-month spend | Clicks | CPC | CTR | Conv. rate | Cost per conv. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Solar PV installations | €84,889 | 44,146 | €1.92 | 13.44% | 1.51% | €127.73 |
| Solar shading | €21,538 | 11,710 | €1.84 | 17.37% | 1.26% | €146.52 |
| Large-format digital printing | €9,557 | 8,080 | €1.18 | 11.85% | 2.14% | €55.24 |
| Total Search Network | €115,984 | 63,936 | €1.81 | 13.78% | 1.54% | €117.80 |
Three accounts are not a statistical sample and do not claim to be. They are an order of magnitude measured outside the US, which is exactly what is missing when you look for a point of comparison closer to home.
What stands out is the internal spread. Three companies, same country, same period, and the cost per click ranges from €1.18 to €1.92: a 63% difference. The cost per conversion ranges from €55 to €147, almost three times as much. Anyone who gives you "the average CPC" for a country as a single number is squeezing this variability into a figure that describes none of the three.
Why the gap with the US numbers is so wide
€1.81 against $5.42. The US click costs almost three times ours, and it is not a question of exchange rates. What weighs is the density of advertisers on the same queries, the average customer value in the industries WordStream surveys (legal services and insurance, where a contract is worth tens of thousands of dollars) and the size of the market feeding the auction.
On click-through rate the comparison flips: 13.78% for us against a 6.64% US median. That does not mean we write ads twice as good. It means that in the three Italian accounts, campaigns on tight keywords and brand terms carry a lot of weight, and CTR there is naturally high. If you want to understand what really moves this number, the reasoning on click-through rate applies outside SEO too.
The most misleading comparison of all is conversion rate: 1.54% for us, 8.18% in the WordStream median. The difference is not skill, it is definition. An account that counts a form submission as a conversion gets different percentages from one that counts a purchase, and different again from one that also counts phone calls. Before comparing two conversion rates you need to know what was counted: it is the same caution you need when you calculate return on investment or set numerical targets at the start of the year.
Search and Performance Max do not belong in the same average
Over the same twelve months, on the same accounts, we spent €29,825 on Performance Max campaigns. Putting them in the same table as the Search Network produces numbers that describe nothing, and the same goes for traffic from search partners, which should always be segmented separately.
| Network | Spend | Impressions | Clicks | CPC | CTR | Conv. rate | Cost per conv. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Search | €115,984 | 464,045 | 63,936 | €1.81 | 13.78% | 1.54% | €117.80 |
| Performance Max | €29,825 | 3,768,282 | 156,077 | €0.19 | 4.14% | 0.67% | €28.64 |
Performance Max generated eight times the impressions of Search with a quarter of the spend, at a cost per click ten times lower. There is no magic: those impressions come from Display, YouTube, Discover and Gmail, where nobody was searching for anything. The lower cost per conversion, €28.64 against €117.80, does not mean Performance Max converts better. It means it is collecting conversions of a different kind, often downstream of demand already captured elsewhere.
If a report shows an average account CPC of €0.66, as ours would with everything added together, you know Performance Max is pulling the average down. Segmenting by network before looking at any figure is the first check to make, and it applies when you read the data in Google Analytics too.
Three statistics that circulate and do not hold up
"Raising Quality Score cuts CPC by 30-50%." The official Google Ads documentation says the opposite: "Quality Score isn't an input in the ad auction" and "Quality Score isn't a key performance indicator and shouldn't be optimised or aggregated with the rest of your data". It is a diagnostic on a scale of 1 to 10 at keyword level. The three components that make it up, expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience, matter a great deal in the auction. The aggregate score you read in the column does not.
"A good conversion rate is 8%." It is WordStream's US median, from a sample weighted heavily towards lead generation accounts with short forms. In our three Italian accounts the same metric is 1.54%. Using it as a target means importing someone else's definition of a conversion along with the number.
"The average CPC in the UK is £X." None of the public sources cited above measures the UK separately. Anyone who publishes an average UK CPC either has a sample of their own, which they should disclose, or is converting a US figure. It is worth asking, as you would when reading a quote and trying to understand where the prices come from.
How to build your account's benchmarks in an afternoon
External benchmarks are for the order of magnitude. The ones you will actually use come from your own account, and they take less time than you might think.
- Take twelve months, not thirty days. With less than a year, seasonality makes you mistake a spike for a trend.
- Segment by campaign type before calculating any average, as in the table above.
- Choose a single primary conversion and recalculate the history on that. If you count five, the account's conversion rate is not comparable with anything, not even with itself a year earlier.
- Compare with yourself first: same month, previous year. It is the only comparison in which market, sector and conversion definition stay fixed.
- Only at the end look at industry benchmarks, to see whether you are within the order of magnitude or off the scale.
From here on the work is structural: which queries you are buying, which of them also come in through organic search and should be left there, and where SEO and Google Ads overlap, paying twice for the same click. If you are deciding whether to open the channel, the real advantages of Google Ads and the conditions under which they apply deserve a separate read, as does what changes with AI Overviews on the results page. For a small business with a limited budget, the order of the channels matters more than any single CPC: we cover it in the guide to marketing for SMEs.
The useful question is not "is my cost per click high?". It is "how much can I pay for a click and stay profitable?". That number is not in any public table, because it depends on your margin and your sales close rate. A £4 click is cheap for someone selling a £12,000 installation and closing one quote in four; it is unsustainable for someone selling a £30 spare part at a 20% margin. Industry statistics tell you whether you are on the pitch. The maximum price of a click is set by your profit and loss account, and it should be calculated before opening the campaign, not at the end of the quarter when the budget has already gone. If you want to see how we work with these numbers, the projects we have run all start there, and our Google Ads management begins with the same question.
Frequently asked questions
None of the most-cited public surveys isolates the UK market. On the three Italian accounts we manage, between September 2025 and August 2026, the average cost per click on the Search Network was €1.81, ranging from €1.18 to €1.92 depending on the sector. For comparison, the US median measured by WordStream across 13,474 campaigns over the same period is $5.42. For your own market, the reliable figure is the one Keyword Planner and your account give for the queries you actually buy.
It depends on what you count as a conversion. 8.18% is the median of WordStream's US sample, which is weighted towards lead generation accounts with short forms. On the three Italian accounts in our sample the same metric is 1.54% on the Search Network. Before setting a target, choose a single primary conversion and recalculate the account's history on that basis.
They are useful for the order of magnitude, not as a target. The US median cost per click is about three times what we measured in Italy, because advertiser density on the same queries and the average customer value in the sectors surveyed are different. A benchmark can only be used if it states the market, the period and how the metrics are defined.
Google Ads documentation states that Quality Score isn't an input in the ad auction and isn't a key performance indicator. It is a diagnostic tool on a scale of 1 to 10 at keyword level. Its three components, expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience, do affect the auction; the aggregate score shown in the column does not.
You work it out from your own account's cost per conversion, not from a table. In our Italian sample the cost per conversion on the Search Network was €117.80, so ten conversions a month means about €1,180 of ad spend. In the same sample the figure ranges from €55 to €147 per conversion: the real range for ten conversions is €550 to €1,470 a month.
To see how these numbers play out in a specific sector, with measured CPCs and a calculated minimum budget, read Google Ads for hotels.
One sector where CPCs sit above average is accountancy: in the UK, £9.48 on "accountant london" and £7.77 on "accountants near me" (DataForSEO, Google UK, September 2026; CPC converted from USD at £1 = $1.3242). Data and minimum budgets by scenario are in Google Ads for professional services.
To see how these values change within a single sector, we have tabulated the CPCs of legal searches by practice area and city, with the cost per enquiry calculated: Google Ads for law firms.
