Every channel of traffic has a price, and the interesting question is never “how much is a click” but “what does the machine that produces clicks cost per month, all in”. This page gathers the orders of magnitude we use internally when sizing up a channel. Treat every figure as a starting hypothesis for your own numbers, not as scripture, markets differ, and auctions move. For sterling figures, see the UK edition of this benchmark.
Paid search: the visible price
Pay-per-click is the only channel with a ticker tape. Typical costs per click in mature Western auctions run from well under a dollar for unglamorous long-tail queries to several dollars in finance, legal and B2B software, with insurance-adjacent terms historically the most expensive real estate on the web. The click is only the entry fee: you also carry creative production, landing-page work and management time, which practitioners budget at fifteen to twenty percent of media spend.
| Channel | Unit | Common range | Hidden line items |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paid search (long tail | CPC | 0.3 – 1.5 | Creative, landing pages, management |
| Paid search) competitive B2B/finance | CPC | 3 – 12+ | Same, plus fierce quality-score work |
| Paid social; feed | CPM | 6 – 20 | Creative refresh treadmill |
| Display / programmatic | CPM | 2 – 10 | Viewability and fraud checks |
| Sponsored placement in niche newsletters | flat | 150 – 2,500 / send | Creative, one-shot attribution |
| Sponsored articles on trade media | flat | 800 – 5,000 | Often nofollow; brand value > SEO value |
The meter you cannot see: organic
Organic traffic has no invoice, which is why it is systematically mispriced by both fans and sceptics. The real bill has three lines. First, production: a guide worth ranking takes one to three working days of a skilled person, and a library that compounds is measured in dozens of pages: see the weekly rhythm that produces one. Second, tooling: a realistic small-team stack of one rank tracker, one crawling tool and one analytics package runs a few hundred dollars a month. Third, patience: meaningful compounding typically shows its curve in the second and third quarters, not the first.
Our working rule: organic is cheap per session and expensive per calendar month of doubt. Budget the doubt.
Comparing the two honestly
Paid buys certainty and stops the moment you stop paying, it is rent. Organic is slow and keeps paying after the work ends: it is construction. The failure modes mirror each other: teams that only rent are hostage to auction inflation, and teams that only build are hostage to algorithm weather. The mature posture is a blend: paid for learning which language converts, organic for the phrases that prove durable, the decision framework lives in keyword research.
CPC is the price of a visitor. Organic cost per session is the price of a habit.
The channels without price tags
Three carriers of traffic cost money only indirectly. Referral and social cost the labour of being usefully present; email costs sending infrastructure and the discipline of cadence; AI surfaces cost only the quality bar that makes a page citable. On a strict cash basis these are the cheapest sessions you will ever earn, which is why everyone says you cannot buy them.
How to use this page
When you plan a channel, write your own row for the table above with your numbers, your margin and your tolerance for delay. If your unit economics survive your own row, the channel is worth a pilot; if they only survive our ranges, they will not survive contact with the auction. For the mechanics behind each line item, continue to the vehicles of web traffic, part II.