What Is Cost Per Visit (CPV)?

The term cost per visit is pretty self-explanatory. It means the amount of money you’re paying for an ad and how much a single visit to your web page (through that ad) will cost you.

It can be relevant to both website clicks and physical visits or appointments at your location. However, it’s mainly used to analyze digital PPC (pay-per-click) marketing campaigns and help you understand your ads’ reach and influence.

When looking at your paid search results, you can determine how effective your PPC ads are at attracting the right audience. Looking at that cost per visit, you can then analyze variables such as:

• Bounce rate
• Pages viewed
• Average spend per customer
• The lifetime value of a customer

And learning about these factors can significantly help you in improving your ads and your website. But before that, let’s take a look at how we can calculate the cost per visit.

How to Calculate Cost Per Visit

Let’s say you want to calculate your cost per visit for one week.

The first thing to do is add up your ad spend on all platforms you’ve used in the last week and the site visits or clicks that came from each of them.

So, for example, let’s suppose that a business has spent $450 on marketing in a week. And as a result of investing that money, there have been 125 site visits.

$450 / 125 visits = 3.6

That makes a total of around $3.60 per site visit. 

Meanwhile, another way to perceive cost per visit is to divide all your marketing efforts by the number of total site visits you might’ve received in a certain period. 

It would include the costs of any freelancers or agencies you might’ve used to conduct keyword research or manage your ads, the time you spent to build organic content, and even the software you pay for to help you do the job.

In the end, it might look something like this:

• Money spent on ads $450
• In-house marketing team $300
• Freelance contributions $260
• Software used in the process $35

And let’s suppose your site had 800 unique views per week from all sources, including organic, paid search, and your paid social campaigns. 

The final result would be: $1045 / 800 = $1.30 per visit

Why Is Cost Per Visit Important?

Each click on a web page or advertisement has value, even if it’s from an organic source. Remember that you’ve invested time and money to create spaces that will link to your site and increase your page visits. So, the money you’ve spent should be converting into sales for your business. Otherwise, there’s no point in running paid ads.

Key Takeaway

Overall, cost per visit can be an effective method to help you determine what works and what doesn’t for your digital marketing strategy. If you can calculate and then analyze the figures, you can then determine which ads might be costing you the most and whether your money is being well spent.