Question
What is a good cost per click in the UK?
A good cost per click is one that leaves your cost per enquiry below what an enquiry is worth to you, so there is no universal figure; across all industries WordStream's 2025 benchmark report put the average Search CPC at a little over five dollars, with legal, home services and finance well above that and retail, travel and hobbies below. UK CPCs in the same sectors tend to land in a similar range in pounds, and the only number that matters is the one for your searches in your area, against your margin.
Answered by Daniel Stoychev, Webso Digital · 4 September 2026
Why the sector decides most of it
Cost per click is set in an auction, and the auction is made of the other businesses bidding on the same search. A search for a solicitor is bid on by firms for whom one case is worth thousands, so the click costs pounds; a search for a phone case is bid on by shops with a few pounds of margin, so the click costs pence. Your CPC mostly describes what your competitors think a customer is worth.
What moves your own CPC up or down
- Quality Score: expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. A higher score buys the same position for less, and a slow or vague landing page pays a surcharge on every click.
- Match type: broad match enters auctions for searches you did not choose, and some of them are dearer than the ones you did.
- The bid strategy: Maximise Clicks buys cheap clicks, Maximise Conversions buys the clicks it believes convert, and target CPA will pay more per click for a search that has converted before.
- Location and time: the same search costs different amounts in different towns and at different hours, because the bidders differ.
- Device: mobile and desktop clicks are priced separately in the auction, and for many local services the mobile click is the one that phones.
The comparison that matters
Divide your CPC by your conversion rate to get the ad spend per enquiry, add a share of the management fee, and compare that with what an enquiry is worth in margin times the share you win. A three-pound click at a six per cent conversion rate is fifty pounds an enquiry, which is a bargain for a boiler installer and a disaster for a florist. The same CPC is good or bad depending entirely on the second half of the sum.
How to find yours before spending
Keyword Planner, inside any Google Ads account, shows a top-of-page bid range for each search in a chosen location. It is an estimate, but it is your searches and your area rather than a benchmark, and it takes five minutes. After the first fortnight of a live campaign, the account shows the real figure.
When a lower CPC is worse
A campaign that halves its cost per click by moving to Maximise Clicks and broad match has usually bought a lot of clicks from people who could never buy. Cost per click is an input; cost per customer is the result, and an account judged on cost per customer drifts towards the right clicks, whatever they cost.
Where this leads
The service this question belongs to is PPC audit, and the longer read is our guide Google Ads match types in 2026: what broad, phrase and exact actually do now.
Follow-up questions
- Where can I see UK cost per click benchmarks?
- The widely quoted benchmarks, such as WordStream's annual report, pool mostly American accounts and publish in dollars. They rank the sectors usefully; Keyword Planner and your own account give the UK figure for your searches.
- Does a higher Quality Score really lower CPC?
- Yes. The auction ranks ads by bid times quality, so an ad with a higher Quality Score wins the same position with a lower bid. Landing page experience is a third of the score.