About WhatIsCPC.com

I am Oliver Wakefield-Smith, founder of Digital Signet, a UK studio that builds and operates a portfolio of reference and calculator sites. I buy search ads for my own sites, which means I watch CPC numbers with my own money on the line. That is the qualification this site runs on: practitioner arithmetic, not agency marketing.

Most people typing "what is cpc" get one of two bad outcomes: a marketing blog that assumes the vocabulary it should be teaching, or the wrong CPC entirely, because the abbreviation also belongs to lorry drivers, medical coders, patent examiners and UN statisticians. This site answers the advertising question with a working calculator and current benchmarks, and routes the other four meanings to their proper homes instead of pretending they do not exist.

Every figure on the site carries an inline vintage chip naming its source and data year. The full list of claims, primary URLs and last-checked dates lives on the lot provenance page; nothing numeric ships without a row there. Ad platforms do not publish per-click rate cards, so this site never states an official rate; benchmark ranges are always attributed to the named study that measured them. When a widely repeated claim cannot be traced to a primary source, we say so and leave it out.

Corrections and source suggestions are welcome: oliver at digitalsignet dot com. If a figure on this site disagrees with its linked source, that is a bug; tell me and I will fix it.

Start points: the definition, 2026 benchmarks, or the calculator.