CPC (Link)
What one visit from Meta costs you. Lower means your budget buys more of them.
What it means
CPC (Link) is what one click through to your site costs you on Meta: Spend divided by link clicks. Only taps that opened your shop count — likes, comments, shares and profile taps sit in Meta's separate all-clicks figure, which always reads cheaper. Spend €2,000 for 2,400 link clicks and a visit cost €0.83.
Show the math
Formula and a worked example
Spend is what Meta charged for delivery in the period. It divides across every link click, whether that visitor bought or left in two seconds.
Link clicks are taps that opened your site. Meta counts them at its end, so they'll always run ahead of the sessions your site records.
Worked example. An ad spends €2,000 and earns 2,400 link clicks. CPC (Link) = 2,000 ÷ 2,400 = €0.83. If 2% of those visitors buy at €60, the ad brings in 48 orders worth €2,880.
At €1.60 a click, the same €2,000 buys 1,250 visits, 25 orders and €1,500. Nothing about the shop changed — the traffic doubled in price and the campaign went underwater.
It answers the question
What does one visitor from Meta cost right now? A rising number means the same budget delivers fewer people to your shop.
Why it matters
Two things set the price: how crowded the auction is, and how much people want to click your creative. You control one of them. An ad people ignore gets shown to worse inventory at a higher price, so a weak hook charges you twice.
It also decides whether the maths can work at all. Your Conv. Rate (GA4) multiplied by your average order is what a visit is worth, and once the click price climbs past a fraction of that, no landing page change rescues the campaign. The answer is cheaper traffic, not a better funnel.
What good looks like
There's no benchmark. Click prices swing with country, placement, season and category, so €0.40 in one market is the same result as €1.20 in another. Judge it two ways — against your own last 90 days on the same placements, and against what a visit is worth. At a 2% Conv. Rate (GA4) and a €60 order, a visit is worth about €1.20, so a €1 click is comfortable where a €3 click never will be.
How to improve it
| Lever | What you do | Expect | How long | Watch out for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fast Lift the click rate on your top spender | Rewrite the first frame and headline on the ad taking most of the budget, change nothing else | CPC (Link) down 15–30% | 3–5 days | It restarts learning on that ad, so cost per purchase swings for a few days. A hook that grabs the wrong people buys cheap clicks that never buy. |
| Fast Cut the placements you're overpaying for | Break the report out by placement and stop the ones charging well above your average | CPC (Link) down immediately | 1 week | The average falls because you removed rows, not because anything improved. Reach narrows and Frequency climbs on what's left. |
| Slow Broaden the targeting | Drop narrow interest stacks — small audiences mean you bid against everyone else chasing the same people | CPC (Link) down, Reach up | 2–4 weeks | Cheaper clicks from colder people. Cost per purchase can rise even as the click price falls, so watch both for a fortnight. |
| Slow Refresh creative on a schedule | Ship 3 new hooks every 2 weeks so budget keeps moving to something the audience hasn't seen | CPC (Link) structurally lower | 1 quarter | Production time and money, and most new ads lose to the one they replace while still spending budget. |
Every lever costs something somewhere. The last column is the one to read twice.
Read it with
The click price alone tells you what traffic costs. Next to what that traffic bought, it tells you whether the price was fair.
Cheaper traffic that buys
More visits for the money and more of them converting. Scale in steps so you can see where it stops working.
Expensive but worth it
You're paying more per visit and the visits still buy. That's a decision, not a fire — until the click price passes what a visit is worth.
Cheap and wrong
You found cheap clicks from people who were never going to buy. Giveaway hooks and curiosity openers land here.
Losing on both sides
Traffic costs more and returns less. The creative has usually stopped working — check Frequency to confirm before you rebuild.
Together they separate the auction from your creative. A rising click price with the click rate holding means the auction got more expensive — competitors, seasonality, a wider audience. A rising click price with the click rate falling means people stopped wanting the ad, and that one is yours to fix.
This weighs the price of a visit against its quality. A €0.40 click next to a 75% Bounce Rate is worse value than a €1.50 click next to 35%. Read the price on its own and the cheap ad always looks like the winner.
Common misreads
Cheap clicks and good clicks are different things. Broad, vague creative pulls curious scrollers at a low price and sells nothing. Rank ads on what the traffic did, then use the click price to explain why.
That figure is the all-clicks version, which counts reactions, comments, shares and profile taps in the denominator. More clicks, lower price, no extra visitors — only link clicks reach your shop.
Check the calendar before the creative. Black Friday, Christmas and any big retail moment put every advertiser in your category into the same auction, and click prices rise with nothing wrong in your account.
Also called
Cost per link click · link CPC · cost per click (link)
See yoursYour CPC (Link) for the last 30 days, by campaign and by ad.
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