What is a good cost per click in Birmingham?

Why the question has no general answer

A £9 click for a family law firm is cheap if one visit in ten becomes an enquiry and one enquiry in four becomes a case worth thousands. A £2 click for a café is dear if one visit in two hundred books a table. The cost per click is one number in a sum, and the other two numbers, the conversion rate of the page and the worth of an enquiry, vary far more between businesses than the click price does. Anyone who tells you a good CPC for Birmingham without asking what you sell is quoting an average of everyone else.

The comparison that does tell you something

Compare your cost per click with itself, segmented. By hour: if the working-day click costs twice the evening click and converts no better, the schedule is wrong. By device: if desktop clicks cost more and never convert, the device bids are wrong. By search term: if the generic term costs twice the specific one and converts half as well, the budget is in the wrong place. By district: if clicks from the edge of the radius cost the same as those near the base and convert at a third of the rate, the radius is wrong. Each of these comparisons is inside your own account and each leads to a change.

What lowers the price for the same position

Quality Score. Google rates the ad's relevance to the search, the expected click-through rate and the landing page experience, and a higher score pays less for the same position against the same competitors. The levers are the ad, which should repeat the search, and the page, which should load in under three seconds on a phone and answer the search in the first screen. The bid is the lever most people reach for and the one that changes the least.

The Birmingham part

A big city with many agencies bidding pushes the generic searches up: "solicitor Birmingham", "plumber Birmingham" have a lot of bidders. It also means the specific searches have enough volume to be worth a campaign of their own, and those are often no dearer than anywhere else. The Birmingham premium is on vagueness. The other Birmingham cost is the radius: a conurbation of overlapping towns where a generous circle buys clicks from places you do not serve at a perfectly normal price, which is the worse problem because it does not look like one.

The number to write down instead

Cost per enquiry, all-in: ad spend plus the management fee, divided by the enquiries that were real. Compare that with what an enquiry is worth to you. If it is lower, the cost per click was good, whatever it was. If it is higher, the cost per click was bad, however cheap it looked. Every report here leads with that figure and treats the cost per click as a diagnostic rather than a result.

Read on

The page that does this for you is Google Ads costs in Birmingham, sourced; the long version is the guide What Birmingham businesses actually pay per click.