Google Ads cost per click: what does a click cost?

The short answer: there is no price list. Google Ads, which many still call AdWords, sells clicks at auction, and the price is decided the moment someone searches. A click can cost a few cents, and it can cost hundreds of kroner or dollars. Here is what drives the price, and how you find out what a click costs in your particular market.

Why there is no fixed cost per click

Every single time someone searches on Google, a lightning auction runs between the advertisers bidding on that search. Your cost per click, CPC, depends on what the competitors bid and how good Google judges your ad to be. You do not pay your maximum bid, but typically just enough to beat the advertiser below you.

The AdWords name was retired in 2018, when the platform became Google Ads, but the pricing is the same auction model today. If you are searching for AdWords prices, it is Google Ads prices you are really looking for.

What drives your cost per click

• Competition on the keyword. The more advertisers bidding, and the more a click is worth to them, the more expensive the auction gets. Keywords where the customer has a high lifetime value are the most expensive.
• Quality Score. Google rewards ads that match the search and send people to a relevant landing page. A high Quality Score can give you a better position at a lower price than a competitor with a higher bid.
• Search intent. Clicks on purchase-ready searches, for instance product names with “price” or “buy”, cost more than broad informational searches.
• Ad Rank thresholds. Google has minimum requirements for what gets shown at all. On some searches there is a real floor price, even without hard competition.
• Time, device and geography. The price swings across the day, between mobile and desktop, and from country to country. High-purchasing-power markets such as Denmark are generally among the more expensive ones.

Rough levels to expect

Treat every number here as a wide, approximate interval, never as a price list. Prices change continuously, and two neighbouring industries can sit far apart:

• Broad retail and e-commerce: often somewhere from well under one euro to a couple of euros per click.
• B2B and services with high order values: typically several euros per click.
• Insurance, loans, legal and the like: clicks can run into double-digit euro amounts, because a single customer is worth thousands.

More important than any benchmark: your own number. Two shops in the same industry can pay very different prices, purely down to Quality Score and account structure.

How to find your own price

1. Google Keyword Planner. Free with a Google Ads account. It shows the bid range for every keyword in your market, which is the best available answer to “what does a click cost here”.
2. A small test campaign. A couple of weeks of data on your most important keywords beats any benchmark report. That is the method I use myself when I need to judge a new market.
3. Auction insights. Once the campaign runs, Google shows you who you collide with in the auctions, and how often they beat you.

Cost per click is the wrong number to stare at

An expensive click can be good business, and a cheap click can be waste. What matters is what the click leads to: does the order pay for the clicks once margin is part of the math? That is why I measure campaigns on POAS, profit on ad spend, rather than clicks or ROAS alone.

The math is simple to set up: cost per click times clicks per order has to be comfortably below the contribution margin per order. If that does not work on a keyword, it is not your keyword, no matter how cheap the click looks.

If you are unsure whether your ad budget belongs in Google Ads at all, I have written an honest comparison of SEO vs Google Ads, and you can read how I work with the channel in practice on my Google Ads page.