Glossary · ad-metrics
What is CPC?
CPC means cost per click: total money spent divided by the number of clicks it bought. Read the label carefully, because Meta reports two versions. CPC (all) counts every click including someone tapping your page name or expanding the caption, while CPC (link click) counts only clicks that tried to leave for your website or WhatsApp. The second one is the number that matters. A low CPC is not automatically good — cheap clicks from people who bounce in two seconds cost you more than expensive clicks from people who message you. Judge CPC alongside what happens after the click, never on its own.
What does CPC mean for a business in Pakistan?
Clicks are cheap here, which makes it easy to feel successful while getting nothing. The gap usually opens after the tap: a page built on a slow theme takes eight or nine seconds on a mid-range Android on mobile data, and most people are gone before it paints. Clicks that open a WhatsApp chat almost always beat clicks that open a website, because nothing has to load.
A worked example
A Chinioti furniture showroom on Airport Road spends PKR 9,000 and records 1,200 link clicks — PKR 7.50 per click, which looks excellent. Analytics shows only 300 of those sessions actually loaded the page. The real cost per person who saw a sofa is PKR 30, four times the headline number.
Terms that go with this one
These come up in the same conversations and are worth reading together.
- CPMCPMCPM means cost per thousand impressions — what you pay to have your ad appear a thousand times. Impressions are not people: one person scrolling past…
- CPACPACPA means cost per action — the money spent divided by the number of completed results you decided to count. The action is whatever you defined it…
- Landing pagelanding pageA landing page is the single page someone arrives on after clicking your ad, built to get one specific action and nothing else. It is not your…
- Ad spendad spend / ishtihaar ka kharchaAd spend is the money that goes to the platform itself — Meta, TikTok or Google — in exchange for showing your ads. It is not the same thing as an…
- Conversion rateconversion rateConversion rate is the share of people who completed the action, out of the people who had a real chance to complete it, written as a percentage. The…
CPC — quick answers
What does CPC mean?
CPC means cost per click: total money spent divided by the number of clicks it bought. Read the label carefully, because Meta reports two versions.
CPC ko Urdu mein kya kehte hain?
فی کلک لاگت — though in practice almost everyone in Pakistan says "CPC". Clicks are cheap here, which makes it easy to feel successful while getting nothing.
Why does CPC matter for a business in Pakistan?
Clicks are cheap here, which makes it easy to feel successful while getting nothing. The gap usually opens after the tap: a page built on a slow theme takes eight or nine seconds on a mid-range Android on mobile data, and most people are gone before it paints. Clicks that open a WhatsApp chat almost always beat clicks that open a website, because nothing has to load.
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