PPC vs backlinks: what a visit costs after a year
Cost per click is a monthly number. Links only make sense on a yearly one. This page builds the yearly comparison with figures that are invented and labelled as such.
Reading guide
Everything below is a hypothetical
The CPC, link prices and referral figures in this page are examples chosen to make the arithmetic easy. Swap in your own from Google Ads and Google Analytics before you decide anything.
- Break-even is a formula you can reuse.
- Referral visits are only one part of what a link may do.
- No outcome here is promised.
The setup
Imagine a store that pays an average $2.40 per click on a handful of non-branded terms. It buys 1,000 clicks a month. That is $2,400 monthly and $28,800 over twelve months. Plain enough.
Now imagine the owner diverts $1,200, once, into 20 placements averaging $60 each on topical sites. The ads keep running. Only one new question appears: how many visits must those 20 pages produce to match the ad channel?
The answer is $1,200 divided by $2.40, which is 500 visits. Spread over a year, that is roughly 42 visits a month across all 20 links, or about two per link.
Same money, three invented outcomes
| Scenario | Visits from links in 12 months | Cost per visit, year 1 | Cost per visit, if they stay live in year 2 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Weak: dead pages, few readers | 200 | $6.00 | Still near $6.00 unless traffic grows |
| Break-even | 500 | $2.40 | Falls toward $1.20 if volume holds |
| Strong: pages that rank and get clicks | 2,000 | $0.60 | Falls toward $0.30 if volume holds |
Referral clicks are the smallest part of the story. The larger and less certain effect is search visibility on your own pages, which Search Console shows slowly. Counting only referrals understates a link, and assuming a ranking lift overstates it.
Myth and reality, three rounds
Myth: links are free traffic once bought. Reality: they are prepaid traffic with an unknown delivery rate. Some placements send nobody. A few send steady readers for years. You find out by tagging and watching.
Myth: ads and links compete for the same budget line. Reality: they answer different questions. Ads fill the pipeline this month. Links lower how much of it you have to rent next year, if they work.
Myth: more links per month is always better. Reality: ten well-chosen placements beat a hundred random ones, and a sudden jump in volume on a young site is the kind of pattern reviewers question. Pace it.
Turning it into your own formula
Break-even visits equal link spend divided by your cost per click. Divide by twelve for a monthly figure. Compare it with a realistic guess for the pages you can buy. Easy to rerun.
Then add a second line for the part that is hard to count: queries where a page might earn organic clicks you stop buying. Track those in Search Console and treat any saving as a bonus you only book once it appears. See the budget split for sizing.
Questions from ad managers after the sums
Should I pause ads to see what links do?
No. Pausing breaks your baseline and loses sales you were already winning. Keep ad spend steady, tag the pages that received links, and compare organic clicks to those pages in Search Console over at least a quarter.
How do I attribute a sale to a link?
Partly you cannot. Use UTM-free referral reports for direct clicks and assisted conversions for the rest, and accept that branded searches after a mention will land as organic. Report ranges and trends instead of a single clean number.
What should one placement cost me?
Prices range from $1 to about $500 and rise with Domain Rating, traffic and niche. A cheap link on a relevant, living site is often a better test than one expensive link on a site that does not match your topic.