If you’ve been looking at running Google Ads for your business, then you’ll probably be aware of the fact that Google Ads are “pay per click”.
Compare a conventional form of advertising, such as radio advertising. With radio ads, you will receive approximate listenership numbers & demographics from your advertising rep, but you pay a flat rate regardless of how many people actually wind up listening to your ad.
If radio advertising was like Google Ads “pay per click”, then you’d only pay for the individual listens to your ad.
As you can image, the concept of “pay per click” is fairly appealing!
But how much does Google charge per click?
Google doesn’t have a fixed charged per click. Ultimately, what you pay per click on Google is fairly dynamic (and it’s actually become a bit more complicated in recent times with changes to Google’s ad platform, which I’ll explain shortly)
Basically, the cost per click that you pay on Google as an advertiser is ultimately the reflection of the competitiveness and relative value of a click.
The more valuable a keyword, the more likely it is to be competitive, and therefore the more you are likely to pay per click.
For example, in some niches/industries you may see click costs of $10, $20, and even more per click (insurance and legal services being good examples of both). This is because both of these industries are highly competitive. The value of a qualified lead can easily stretch into the thousands of dollars (even more when you consider lifetime value of the customer, which is what many organisations are concerned with).
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Other niches might see click costs of under a dollar, because they are less competitive or lower potential value.
If you’re wondering how much does Google charge per click, there’s another factor at play as well - the overall “quality” of your advertising efforts on the Google Ads platform.
In the early days of “Google AdWords”, the system was based basically entirely off how much you were willing to pay per click.
The advertiser that was willing to pay more per click got the premium position.
However, this old system let to issues with potentially irrelevant or low quality ads/offers taking precedence over better quality options, just because they were willing to pay more.
Google’s advertising system now factors in how much an advertiser is willing to pay per click, along with other metrics such as the relevance of your ad copy to the user’s search, as well as the relevance of your website/landing page to the user’s search.
If you can improve these factors (i.e. make your ads more compelling to click, make your ad copy and landing page(s) more relevant to the search in question etc) then you may well find that you get more impressions and clicks from Google but at a reduced cost.
Conclusion - How Much Does Google Charge Per Click On Your Ads?
To recap, the price you pay Google per click is a reflection of a few key factors:
- The competitiveness of the keyword in question. The more competitive the keyword (I.e. the more advertisers all vying for the top spot, and willing to pay more for it) the more you are going to have to pay to play in the space.
- Your willingness to pay. Without getting into the specifics of how bidding works on Google Ads, you ultimately have a fair amount of control over the maximum that Google can charge you per click on your ads - depending on the campaign bidding type you use and a few other factors. If you’re only willing to pay say $3 per click on a keyword, then you can tell Google that.
- The quality of your advertising experience. This is a factor that is massively overlooked by many Google Ads advertisers, especially “DIYers”. Does your ad copy align with your keyword(s)? Have you got a great landing page experience? The Quality Score of your advertising activity is critical for success, and also for determining how much Google is going to charge you per click. Put in effort here and you can see significant improvement to your advertising performance as well as reduced click costs!