CPC (link click) is the average amount you pay for each click on a Meta ad that takes someone to a destination, such as your website, an app store, a lead form or a chat. Meta calculates it by dividing the amount spent by the number of link clicks.
How CPC (link click) works
Meta counts several kinds of click. CPC (all) includes every click on the ad: likes, comments, shares, taps to expand the text and clicks on the Page name. CPC (link click) counts only the clicks that send someone where you wanted them to go. That makes it much closer to the cost per click idea used in search advertising, and a better measure of what you pay for traffic.
Unless the campaign is set to pay per click, you are usually charged for impressions, not clicks. CPC (link click) is therefore a result of two other numbers: what you pay for a thousand impressions and the share of people who click. If your CPM is £8 and one in a hundred people clicks a link, each click costs about 80p. Halve the click rate and the cost per click doubles, even though nothing changed in the auction.
A link click is not the same as a visit. Someone can tap the ad and leave before the page loads. Meta’s landing page views metric counts people who did get to your page, provided the pixel is installed, and the gap between the two often reveals a slow website.
Why it matters
CPC (link click) helps diagnose why a campaign costs what it does. If the cost per lead is too high, it tells you whether the problem is upstream (people are not clicking, or impressions are expensive) or downstream (people click but the landing page does not convert). For a UK business paying, say, £1.50 a click and converting 5% of visitors, a lead costs about £30. Knowing which part of that chain to fix saves money.
It is a diagnostic, though, not the goal. A cheap click that never becomes a customer is worth nothing. Some of the lowest-cost clicks come from placements where people tap by accident. For typical UK figures by sector, see my UK ad benchmarks for Google and Meta, which are sourced and dated.
Common mistakes
- Reading CPC (all) instead of CPC (link click) and thinking traffic is cheaper than it is.
- Optimising the campaign for link clicks to make this number look good, which tends to find people who click but do not buy.
- Comparing CPC across placements or objectives as if like for like.
- Ignoring the gap between link clicks and landing page views.
- Judging a campaign on CPC alone when cost per lead or sale is what pays the bills.
How to act on it
Add CPC (link click), CTR (link click), CPM, landing page views and cost per result to a custom column set in Ads Manager, so you see the whole chain at once. If CPC is high because few people click, work on the creative and the offer. If it is high because CPMs are high, look at audience size, placements and season. If clicks are fine but results are poor, look at the landing page.
Keep the campaign optimised for the outcome you actually want, and use CPC only to explain it. Reading the chain this way is the starting point for any review in my Facebook and Instagram ads management.