{
  "slug": "paid-average-cpc",
  "name": "Average cost per click",
  "aliases": [
    "CPC",
    "Avg CPC"
  ],
  "definition": "What one paid click cost on average, total ad cost divided by paid clicks.",
  "category": "Paid search",
  "type": "monetary",
  "unit": "account currency per click",
  "direction": "neutral",
  "verification": "review",
  "aggregation": "A ratio of two sums, it is recomputed at whatever grain is queried, never averaged across rows of a breakdown.",
  "grain": "One number per date range, or one row per group_by value.",
  "dimensions": [
    "keyword",
    "campaign_keyword",
    "page",
    "adgroup_name",
    "campaign_name",
    "campaign_type",
    "intent",
    "category",
    "country",
    "device"
  ],
  "requiredFilters": [
    "date_range"
  ],
  "sources": [
    "google-ads"
  ],
  "reports": [
    "paid-organic-overlap-report",
    "paid-search-performance-report"
  ],
  "skills": [
    "paid-efficiency-review",
    "paid-organic-balance"
  ],
  "verbs": [
    "paid_search_overview"
  ],
  "rungs": [
    "R5"
  ],
  "levers": [
    "L8"
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What are our CPC trends by keyword?",
    "Which campaigns have the most expensive clicks?"
  ],
  "caveats": [
    "Averaging CPC across a breakdown is not the account CPC: the ratio must be recomputed from the summed cost and summed clicks.",
    "Whole-domain only; a segment argument is ignored.",
    "The denominator is the paid click count, which the formatter mistypes as money, see the paid clicks entry."
  ],
  "freshness": "~1 day behind, Ads reporting settles overnight; same-day spend is provisional.",
  "failureModes": [
    "Taking a mean of per-campaign CPCs and calling it the account CPC.",
    "Comparing CPC between two periods without checking whether the campaign mix changed."
  ],
  "notSameAs": [
    {
      "slug": "paid-cost-per-conversion",
      "why": "CPC prices a click; cost per conversion prices an outcome. A campaign can have a cheap CPC and an expensive cost per conversion at the same time."
    },
    {
      "slug": "paid-clicks",
      "why": "One is a count of clicks, the other is the price of a click. Their underlying field names look alike, which is why the two are kept as separate entries.",
      "mirroredFrom": "paid-clicks"
    },
    {
      "slug": "paid-cpm",
      "why": "CPM prices exposure and CPC prices a click. They are not interchangeable, and neither may stand in for the missing one.",
      "mirroredFrom": "paid-cpm"
    }
  ],
  "related": [
    "paid-ad-cost",
    "paid-clicks",
    "paid-cost-per-conversion"
  ],
  "workflows": [],
  "lastVerified": "2026-08-04"
}