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.