Solved: What is a “normal” CPC on Meta Ads?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

Happy to give you some of my initial thoughts on your question about 'normal' CPCs on Meta. Tbh, it’s a question I hear a lot, but it’s also probably the wrong question to be asking if you want to build a profitable campaign. Chasing a low Cost Per Click (CPC) is one of the fastest ways to burn through your budget with nothing to show for it.

Instead, I’m going to walk you through how to think about your entire advertising strategy, from your offer to your audience to your campaign structure. If you get these fundamentals right, the 'right' CPC will just be a number that leads to profit, wether it's high or low won't matter as much. This is a bit of a long one, but I wanted to give you a proper, detailed answer.

First off, let's talk about why chasing a low CPC is a trap...

I get it. When you're just starting out, CPC feels like a tangible, easy-to-understand metric. Lower must be better, right? It feels like you're getting more for your money. Unfortunately, it's a complete illusion.

Here is the uncomfortable truth: when you tell an ad platform's algorithm to find you the cheapest clicks, it does exactly that. It goes out and finds the people within your target audience who are browsing, scrolling, and clicking on things without any intention of ever buying anything. Their attention is cheap because no other advertiser wants it. They are the digital equivalent of window shoppers who never enter the store. You're effectively paying Meta to find you an audience of non-customers.

We see this all the time. A new client comes to us worried about their high CPCs, but when we look at their account, their few expensive clicks are the only ones turning into sales. The cheap clicks are just noise. The goal isn't to get the most clicks; it's to get the *right* clicks. The clicks from people who have a problem you can solve and are willing to pay for the solution. These clicks will almost always be more expensive because other advertisers are competing for their attention too. They are valuable.

This is why you have to shift your focus from CPC to two other metrics: Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) or Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), and Return on Ad Spend (ROAS).

• CPA/CAC: How much does it cost you in ad spend to get one new customer?
• ROAS: For every £1 you put into ads, how many pounds in revenue do you get back?

If you know a new customer is worth £500 to you, does it matter if you paid a £0.20 CPC or a £2.00 CPC to get them, as long as your total CPA was, say, £100? Of course not. You're still massively profitable. The person who only focused on the cheap CPC probably got a thousand clicks and zero customers. Who's really winning?

Before you spend a single pound, you need to fix your offer...

This is probably the single biggest peice of advice I can give you. The number one reason advertising campaigns fail has nothing to do with the ads themselves. It's the offer. I see so many founders and marketers with a product they think is brilliant, but they struggle to get traction because they haven't created an offer that resonates with a real, urgent need.

A great offer isn't just your product. It's the entire package: who it's for, what painful problem it solves, and how it delivers a clear transformation. A weak offer tries to be for everyone. A strong offer is for a very specific somebody. For example:

• Weak Offer: "We sell custom brand videos for businesses."
• Strong Offer: "For ambitious law firms struggling to look as credible as their larger competitors, we create a 'Credibility Case Study' video in a single day that you can use to attract high-value clients."

See the difference? The second one is incredibly specific. It identifies the audience (ambitious law firms), their urgent pain (struggling for credibility), and provides a clear, tangible solution with a defined process (a 'Credibility Case Study' video in one day). An offer like this is a thousand times easier to advertise because you know exactly who to target and what to say to them.

Your ad copy should then flow directly from this offer, using a framework like Problem-Agitate-Solve. You don't sell the service; you sell the solution to the pain.

Example (for the law firm offer):

• Problem: "Are you losing out on major cases to bigger, more established firms, even though you know your team is better?"
• Agitate: "It's frustrating watching them land the clients you deserve, all because their online presence looks more polished. Every potential client you lose is tens of thousands in lost revenue."
• Solve: "Our 1-Day Filming Process creates a powerful client testimonial video that builds instant trust and positions you as the obvious expert. Stop looking like a small firm and start attracting the cases you're truly worth."

If you don't have an offer this sharp, you need to stop thinking about ads and go back to the drawing board. Talk to your potential customers. Find out what keeps them up at night. What is the expensive, urgent, career-threatening problem they are dealing with right now? Build your offer around that, and your ads will practically write themselves.

You'll need to define your customer by their nightmare, not their postcode...

Once you have your offer, you need to find the people who need it. And this is where most advertisers get it wrong again. They build an "ideal customer profile" that looks something like this: "Males, 35-55, living in London, interested in business, income over £100k."

This is utterly useless. It tells you nothing of value and leads to generic ads that speak to no one. You need to stop defining your customer by their demographics and start defining them by their pain.

Your ideal customer isn't a person; it's a person in a specific 'problem state'. Your job is to become the world's leading expert on that problem. Let's take another example. Imagine you sell a B2B SaaS product that helps engineering teams manage their cloud costs.

• Useless demographic profile: "Companies in the tech sector with 50-200 employees, targeting CTOs and VPs of Engineering."
• Pain-based 'Nightmare' Profile: "The target is a VP of Engineering who just got an AWS bill that was 40% higher than last month. The CFO is demanding answers, her engineers are too busy shipping features to investigate, and she's terrified this runaway spend will kill her budget for hiring a new senior developer. She feels out of control and is secretly worried it makes her look incompetent."

Now *that* is a person you can advertise to. You know her fears, her frustrations, her secret desires. Your ad can speak directly to that nightmare: "That feeling when the AWS bill drops and your stomach sinks? We get it. Find and eliminate thousands in wasted cloud spend in 10 minutes. Without bugging your engineers."

So, how do you find these people? You have to do the work. Where do they hang out online?

• What niche podcasts do they listen to on their commute?
• What industry newsletters do they actually open and read?
• What software tools (like HubSpot, Salesforce, etc.) do they already use and pay for? These can often be used as targeting interests.
• What influencers or thought leaders do they follow on LinkedIn or Twitter?
• What specific Facebook groups or subreddits are they active in?

This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire targeting strategy. Don't guess. Do the research. This is the difference between precision targeting and just throwing money into the wind.

I'd say you need to know your numbers before you advertise...

Right, so we've established that focusing on CPC is a mistake and you should focus on your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA). But that leads to the next logical question: what is a 'good' CPA? How much *should* you be willing to spend to acquire a new customer?

The answer lies in a metric called Customer Lifetime Value (LTV). This is the total profit you can expect to make from a single customer over the entire duration of their relationship with your business. If you don't know this number, you are flying blind.

Calculating a basic LTV isn't as complicated as it sounds. You just need three numbers:

1. Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): How much revenue does a typical customer bring in per month (or per year)?
2. Gross Margin %: What is your profit margin on that revenue? (Revenue - Cost of Goods Sold) / Revenue.
3. Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of your customers do you lose each month?

The formula is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let’s run an example. Imagine you have a subscription software product.

• ARPA = £100/month
• Gross Margin = 80% (0.80)
• Monthly Churn = 5% (0.05)

LTV = (£100 * 0.80) / 0.05 = £80 / 0.05 = £1,600

This means that, on average, each new customer you acquire is worth £1,600 in gross margin to your business. Now you have power. A common rule of thumb is to maintain a 3:1 ratio of LTV to CAC. So, with an LTV of £1,600, you can afford to spend up to £533 to acquire a single new customer and still have a very healthy, profitable business.

Suddenly, that £50 CPA you were worried about looks like an incredible bargain, doesn't it? Knowing your LTV frees you from the tyranny of cheap leads and allows you to invest confidently in acquiring high-value customers.

Use the calculator below to get a rough idea of your own LTV and what your target CPA should be. It's a simple tool but it can completely reframe how you think about your ad spend.

We'll need to look at how you structure your campaigns...

Now that you know who you're targeting and what you can afford to pay for them, it's time to actually set up your campaigns. This is another area where beginners make a critical mistake. They see the 'Brand Awareness' or 'Reach' campaign objectives in Meta and think, "Great, I need to build awareness!"

This is a trap. As I mentioned earlier, when you choose these objectives, you are telling Meta's powerful algorithm to find you the cheapest possible impressions. The algorithm does its job perfectly and serves your ads to people who are proven to not click, not engage, and certainly not buy. You're paying to reach the worst segment of your audience.

For any business that needs to make sales or generate leads (which is pretty much every business), you should always use a conversion-focused objective. This means 'Sales' or 'Leads' in the Meta Ads Manager. By doing this, you're telling the algorithm: "Don't just find me people who will see my ad. Find me people who are similar to those who have previously bought my product or filled out my lead form."

The algorithm is incredibly good at this, but it needs data to work. This is why it's so important to have your Meta Pixel installed correctly on your website, tracking events like PageView, AddToCart, InitiateCheckout, and Purchase (or Lead). The more data you feed the pixel, the smarter it gets, and the better it becomes at finding your ideal customers at a profitable cost.

A solid campaign structure usually follows a simple funnel: Top of Funnel (ToFu), Middle of Funnel (MoFu), and Bottom of Funnel (BoFu).

• ToFu (Prospecting): This is where you reach cold audiences—people who have never heard of you before. You'll use your pain-based targeting here (interests, behaviours, and Lookalike Audiences once you have enough data). The goal is to introduce them to the problem you solve.
• MoFu (Consideration): This is for retargeting people who have shown some interest but haven't taken a high-intent action yet. This could be people who have visited your website, watched a percentage of your videos, or engaged with your social media posts. You'll show them ads that build more trust and explain your solution in more detail.
• BoFu (Conversion): This is for retargeting people who are on the verge of converting. They've added a product to their cart, initiated checkout, or visited your pricing page. These ads are very direct, often with a clear call to action, a special offer, or social proof (like testimonials) to get them over the line.

I've run countless campaigns for software and eCommerce clients, and this funnel structure is almost always the foundation for scalable success. I remember one eCommerce subscription box client where we used this exact structure to dial in their retargeting and achieved a 1000% Return On Ad Spend. It works because it mirrors the natural customer journey from awareness to purchase.

You probably should get your targeting right from the start...

Inside your ToFu campaign, audience testing is everything. But you need to be methodical about it. Don't just throw a bunch of random interests into an ad set. Think back to the 'nightmare profile' you built. What are the specific, niche interests that your ideal customer has, that the general population does not?

Let's go back to the example of targeting eCommerce store owners. A novice advertiser might target a broad interest like "Amazon". This is a terrible idea. It includes millions of consumers who just shop on Amazon. Your ad spend gets diluted across a massive, irrelevant audience. A much better approach is to layer interests that are highly specific to your target audience:

• Software they use: "Shopify", "WooCommerce", "BigCommerce"
• Industry tools/publications: "Shopify Plus", "Retail Page Admins"
• Events they attend: Interests related to major eCommerce conferences

By targeting these niche interests, you ensure that a much higher percentage of the people who see your ad are actually potential customers. Your CPC might be higher, but your conversion rate will be exponentially better, leading to a much lower overall CPA.

Once you start getting some conversions (you typically need at least 100 of a specific event, like a purchase or a lead), you can start building powerful Lookalike Audiences. A Lookalike Audience is when you tell Meta, "Here is a list of my best customers. Go and find me millions of other people who share similar characteristics."

You should prioritize your Lookalikes based on the value of the source audience. The further down the funnel, the better:

1. Lookalike of high-value customers
2. Lookalike of all purchasers
3. Lookalike of people who initiated checkout
4. Lookalike of people who added to cart
5. Lookalike of all website visitors

Always start with a 1% Lookalike in your target country, as this is the most similar to your source audience. You can test broader percentages (2%, 3%, 5%) later as you scale. For one B2B software client, we generated over 4,622 registrations at just $2.38 each by systematically testing Lookalikes of their existing user base. It's one of the most powerful tools available if you use it correctly.

Let's finally talk about the numbers you asked about...

So, after all that context, what kind of CPC and CPA numbers can you actually expect? As I said at the start, it varies wildly. But based on the dozens of campaigns we run, I can give you some very broad, general ballpark figures. Please take these with a massive grain of salt, as your own results will depend on your industry, offer, creative, and targeting.

These numbers are based on campaigns optimised for conversions (leads, signups, etc.), not just clicks.

For developed countries (UK, US, CA, AU, Western Europe):

• Cost Per Click (CPC): Usually falls in the £0.50 - £1.50 range. Can be higher for very competitive B2B niches.
• Cost Per Lead/Signup (CPL): If you have a decent landing page converting at 10-30%, your math looks like this: £0.50 / 30% = £1.67 CPL on the low end, and £1.50 / 10% = £15 CPL on the high end. Most decent campaigns we see fall somewhere in the middle.
• Cost Per Purchase (eCommerce): Landing page conversion rates are lower here, often 2-5%. So your cost per purchase could be anywhere from £0.50 / 5% = £10 to £1.50 / 2% = £75. This depends hugely on your product price. The key metric here is ROAS, not cost per purchase.

For developing countries:

• Cost Per Click (CPC): Much lower, maybe £0.10 - £0.50.
• Cost Per Lead/Signup (CPL): £0.10 / 30% = £0.33 on the low end, and £0.50 / 10% = £5 on the high end. Be warned, the quality of leads from these regions can often be much lower.
• Cost Per Purchase (eCommerce): £0.10 / 5% = £2 to £0.50 / 2% = £25.

You'll need a proper testing process to bring costs down...

So let's say your campaign is running and your CPA is £20, which is higher than your target of £15. How do you improve it? This is where methodical optimisation comes in. It's not about randomly changing things; it's about a structured process of testing.

1. Audience First: The biggest impact on performance usually comes from targeting. Are you testing enough different audiences? Have you built Lookalikes from all your key conversion events? Are your interest targets specific enough? We'd start here, launching new ad sets with new audiences and turning off the ones that are consistently underperforming after they've spent enough to be judged fairly (usually 1-2x your target CPA).
2. Creative Second: After audience, creative is the next biggest lever. You should constantly be testing new ad copy and new visuals (images vs. videos). Test different 'hooks' in your copy that speak to different pain points. Test different calls to action. We've had clients where a simple UGC-style video outperformed a polished, expensive production by 5x. You never know what will resonate until you test. For one of our software clients, we reduced their CPA from £100 all the way down to £7 just by systematically testing new creatives against their best-performing audiences.
3. Landing Page Third: If you're getting a good Click-Through Rate (CTR) on your ads but a low conversion rate on your website, then the problem isn't the ad, it's the landing page. Does the page load quickly? Is the headline clear and does it match the ad? Is there a single, obvious call to action? Is the copy persuasive? Removing distractions and improving your copy can often double your conversion rate, which in turn halves your CPA. A professional copywriter can be worth their weight in gold here.

This process of testing, learning, and iterating never stops. The best accounts are the ones that are always experimenting to find new winning combinations of audience and creative.

So, this is the main advice I have for you:

I know this has been a lot of information, and it's a far more complex answer than just giving you a 'normal' CPC. But advertising effectively isn't simple. If you follow these principles, you'll be miles ahead of most beginners who are just burning cash chasing cheap clicks. I've summarised the key action steps for you in the table below.

Getting this right takes time, expertise, and a lot of testing. It's a process, not an event. For new advertisers, it can be a very expensive learning curve. You can spend thousands just figuring out what doesn't work.

This is often where working with an expert can make a huge difference. We've been through this process hundreds of times and can help you avoid the common pitfalls, speed up the testing process, and get to profitability much faster.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a free, no-obligation initial consultation where we can take a look at your business and give you some more tailored advice on what a successful strategy might look like for you. It's a great way to get a sense of the expertise we bring to the table.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh