Search advertising on Google - pay per click on search results
Rough top-line math using platform averages. Real campaigns will vary with targeting, creative, and industry — see the by-industry table below for refined figures.
Side-by-side cost and use-case breakdowns against the most common alternatives.
Per-industry estimates derived by scaling Google Ads PPC's baseline costs by each industry's multiplier relative to the cross-industry average. Click any industry to see the full side-by-side comparison.
Estimates derived from baseline platform cost × (industry metric ÷ cross-industry average). For exact figures from your account, run a search query report or campaign benchmark export.
The auction, the creative, the budget floor — the three things you actually need to know before picking a platform.
Google Ads runs a real-time second-price auction on every search query. You pay per click, and your effective CPC is a function of your bid, Quality Score, and competitor bids — high-intent commercial keywords (finance, legal, insurance) can 5-10x the platform average because auction density is brutal.
Responsive Search Ads: up to 15 headlines (30 chars each), 4 descriptions (90 chars each). Google mixes them dynamically. Sitelinks, callouts, and structured snippets are effectively required to stay competitive.
Budget floor to reach statistical signal: roughly $50–100/day per campaign, or $1.5K–3K/month per keyword theme. Below that, learning phase never stabilizes.
Free, no-signup tools to model your Google Ads PPC campaigns.