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Adriel Glossary
Cost-per-click (CPC)

Cost-per-click (CPC)

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Adriel Glossary
Cost-per-click (CPC)

Cost-per-click (CPC)

Cost-per-click (CPC) measured against channels and time periods – Adriel
How Adriel’s marketing dashboard visualizes cost-per-click (CPC) across channels and time periods

What is cost-per-click (CPC)?

Cost-per-click (CPC), also called pay-per-click, is a popular programmatic advertising term where you pay an ad seller a cost every time someone clicks on an ad. Different social media platforms, search engines, and programmatic publishers have different costs per click. 

On Google Ads, for instance, you would typically set a maximum CPC bid which is the highest amount that you’re willing to pay for a click on your ad. But Google will often charge you less for each click. The final amount of each click is called the actual CPC.

How to calculate CPC

CPC is a common type of billing method that measures advertising cost and refers to the cost incurred per click on an advertisement. It is a measure of advertising costs, referring to the amount billed per click gained through the campaign. CPC is known to be the most commonly used billing method.

To calculate CPC, you can use this formula:

Advertising cost
_______________ = Cost per click

Number of clicks

In today’s mobile advertising landscape, advertisers have access to a range of digital platforms to grow their brands and generate revenue. These include platforms such as Google Ads (Search and Display), Meta (Facebook and Instagram Ads), Twitter Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Pinterest Ads, and Amazon Ads.

The CPC rates for each of these advertising platforms are: 

  • Google Ads (Search) CPC rate – $0.67
  • Google Ads (Display) CPC rate – $2.32
  • Facebook Ads CPC rate – $1.35
  • Instagram Ads CPC rate – $3.56
  • Twitter Ads CPC rate – $0.38
  • LinkedIn Ads CPC rate – $5.26
  • Pinterest Ads CPC rate – $1.5
  • Amazon Ads CPC rate – $0.89

Measuring CPC on Adriel

You should aim to have a low CPC on your marketing campaigns. The ultimate goal of your CPC is to drive sales, so it’s also a good idea to budget CPC according to the profit you want to make. 

On attribution dashboards like Adriel, you can plot CPC against total ad spend, revenue, or any other metric of your choice, and group data by campaign or channel.

Cost-per-click (CPC) measured against ad spend by campaign – Adriel 
Adriel’s scatter plot chart showing cost-per-click according to ad spend and campaign

To see what it’s like to measure and analyze campaign performance with absolute ease, book a demo with Adriel and we'll help you build the perfect marketing dashboard.

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