Glossary · Compter l’argent
Cost per click
Cost per click is a campaign's spend divided by the number of clicks it produced. It is abbreviated *CPC*, and it measures the price of a visit — not the price of a customer.
Les quatre divisions qui décident si une campagne mérite un euro de plus. The forty terms of the trade
What it is for
It is there to watch, not to decide. A cost per click that doubles overnight signals a saturated audience or rising competition, and that is useful information immediately, long before sales show it. It is an alert indicator, not a results indicator.
How it is calculated
Spend divided by clicks. The trap is comparing different clicks: the ad platform counts its own, your link counts human visits, and the two numbers will never be identical. Picking one denominator and sticking to it beats hunting for the true one.
The classic mistake
Deciding a budget on it. A low cost per click on an audience that does not buy costs more than a high one on an audience that does — cost per acquisition settles it, never this.
The order in which these figures decide
Cost per click alerts. Cost per acquisition decides. Confusing them costs a budget.
The first moves in a day, the second takes two weeks. That is why people watch the wrong one.
What Subtraq does with it
Subtraq does not calculate cost per click: it does not know your spend, which lives with the ad platform. It provides a clean denominator — human clicks, robots excluded — and the division is left to you, or to the calculator once you add the number of sales.
Read next
Un terme seul ne sert à rien. Voici ceux qui le rendent utilisable.
Cost per acquisition
Read the definition →Click-through rate
Read the definition →Human click
Read the definition →ROAS and ad spend
Open the page →« Cost per click », une fois posé sur de vraies ventes
These divisions are only worth something if the revenue on top has a known origin. The calculator does them without signing up; the rest of the work is knowing where the money came from.
Open the calculator