CPV vs CPC
Views buy attention. Clicks buy intent. The metrics price accordingly: sourced YouTube views run $0.018 to $0.058 Store Growers, Google Ads Benchmarks, Q1 2026 while search clicks routinely cost dollars. That gap is not inefficiency; a click is a person leaving their feed for you.
Cost per outcome, worked
$1,000 on views at the $0.024 average Store Growers, Google Ads Benchmarks, Q1 2026buys 41,667 views. If 0.5% of viewers click through (your account's number, labeled as an assumption here), that is 208 site visits at an effective $4.81 per visit. A $1,000 click buy at a $2.00 CPC delivers 500 visits at $2.00 flat. On pure traffic arithmetic the click buy wins; on branded recall, message depth, and audience building, the view buy delivers 41,667 exposures the click buy never made. Decide which column the campaign is actually for before the auction does it for you.
Funnel mapping
- Awareness and consideration: CPV. Judge with the bands.
- Direct response from video: CPC or conversion bidding; a video campaign optimized to clicks stops optimizing to views, and your CPV will drift accordingly.
- Both at once: split the budget and read each half in its own currency; blending them makes both look wrong (the mix-shift trap).
The impression-side version of this decision: CPV vs CPM. Engagement-billed formats: CPV vs CPE. Definitions first: what CPV is.