Google Ads CPC Is Soaring — What Falling CTR Means for Your Budget

Google Ads Benchmarks Part 1: Middle Market Google Ads Performance Data‍

Q1Media has a diversity of Google Ads data available for analysis and benchmarking. In this post, we’ll explore a few simple anonymized  data points, such as Cost Per Click (CPC) and Click Through Rate (CTR), pulled from our Google Ads accounts. We would note that no attempts have been made to normalize this data  for changes to our client portfolio, changes to macroeconomic conditions, and so forth. This is simply raw aggregated anonymized data pulled from our Google Ads accounts.

For the first part of our benchmarking exercise, our paid search team reviewed year over year performance, for the first quarter of the year, from 2022 – 2025. We reviewed benchmarks for CPC, CTR, and spend by network. We think these trends are informative towards the overall state of Google Ads as a platform and the Google SERPs.

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The trend is clear: CPCs keep rising every year…while CTR has dropped sharply, changing how advertisers must approach performance.

Google Ads Average CPC Rates for the Last 4 Years

Conclusion: We see a steady rise in Search CPC through the years, with a very notable spike in CPC between 2024 and 2025. We did not attempt to normalize this data to account for changes to our client mix and other factors, so it is a given that this data does not necessarily reflect the broader market, just our view of the market.

Nevertheless the trend is clear: CPCs go up every year and Search has become more expensive in 2025, perhaps by a larger margin than usual.

Question: What is the average Cost-per-Click (CPC) since 2022 for Google Ads?
Answer: $1.81

Google Ads Average CTR Rates for the Last 4 Years

Conclusion: An interesting trend – we see a steady increase in Google Ads CTR through 2022, 2023, and 2024, and then a sudden drop in 2025. Narratively this aligns with the idea that from  2022 – 2024, Google incrementally made changes to GAds and SERPs to improve CTR, but that AIOs in 2025 impacted total SERP CTR (both organic and paid) in a dramatically negative fashion. Of course this narrative could be simply coincidentally aligned with unnormalized changes in OM client strategy.

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Question: What is the average Click-Through Rate (CTR) Google Ads since 2022?
Answer: 8.30%

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Google Ads Spend by Network Trends

Conclusion: Here we see a range of interesting points which align with intuitive perceptions of the state of Google ads and the middle market.

1. We obviously see that Google has been successful at driving PMAX adoption over time. About 30% of clients spend on PMAX maps to  intuition.
2. We can see that PMAX has largely cannibalized the already small share of “Everything Else” that OM clients ran. Generally mid-market performance seeking Google Ads clients don’t spend significantly on YouTube, Demand Gen, or Display. 
3. Share of non-search spend has not really grown. Though PMAX appears to eat some of the “Search” obviously we must account for the fact that a significant amount of PMAX actually runs through search. Overall we’d guess the share of non-search spend has stayed rather flat at around ~25% for clients despite PMAX growth.  

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