WARC DC Series on Metrics & Measurement: Understanding CPC (Cost Per Click)

Jo Bowman and Gregory Grudzinski

CPC is a way of managing a digital campaign and ensuring that only the ads that get consumers to respond (by clicking) are paid for.

What’s CPC?

Cost per click (CPC) is a way of pricing and managing an online ad campaign in which the brand pays for each time a site user, usually a shopper, clicks on the brand’s ad.

It’s an engagement-based measure that only became possible in the digital era.  Previously, brands paid for their advertising based on the number of people likely to have seen it (number of impressions). The cost per thousand (CPM) model made popular in television advertising charged a brand according to how many thousands of people would see it.

A cost per click price is set by...

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