Personal Injury Lawyers Pay $195.73 per Google Ads Click vs $1.68 for Auto Dealers

A car dealership and a personal injury law firm both open Google Ads with a $1,000 monthly budget. The dealership's money buys about 600 clicks from people searching for cars. The law firm's money buys about 5. Both are paying the going rate for their industry, and both are told the "average" Google Ads click costs about $11.

Cost per click, or CPC, is what an advertiser pays each time someone clicks its ad in Google's search results, whether or not that person buys. It decides how many visits a budget buys and so how many customers it can bring in. A single average across all industries hides the thing every advertiser actually needs to know: what a click costs in their own market.

By industry, prices run from $1.68 for auto dealers to $195.73 for personal injury law, a 116-fold spread, around an all-keyword average of $10.82 and a median of $4.23. Insurance, software, IT services and moving companies sit in the expensive tier; car, home and wedding businesses in the cheap one. Wedding venues show how even the cheap end works: every one of their keywords costs under $5, and the same clicks cost about half as much on Microsoft Ads.

In September 2026 we collected Google Ads Keyword Planner data for 20,000 US keywords, each searched at least 2,900 times a month, and kept the 18,477 that have a cost per click. For each keyword Keyword Planner gives an average cost per click, a monthly search volume and a range of bids for the top of the page. We calculated the average, median and spread of cost per click across all keywords and for 23 industries. For weddings we looked closer at 81 wedding venue keywords, adding state-level prices for the 25 largest US states and Microsoft Ads prices for the 29 keywords priced on both platforms.

Industry averages use only keywords that match each industry's core terms, such as "lawyer" or "attorney" with "injury" or "accident" for personal injury law, and every industry has at least 40 of them. Cost per click is Google's estimate of the average price an advertiser pays for one click on an ad shown for that search. The median is the middle keyword: half cost less, half cost more. The volume-weighted average counts each keyword by how often it is searched, so busy searches count for more than rare ones. Each state is compared with the national price of the keywords priced in that state.

Google Ads prices are lopsided. The median keyword costs $4.23, less than half the $10.82 average, because a small group of legal, insurance and software keywords cost hundreds of dollars a click. 27.6% of keywords cost $10 or more, 3.6% cost $50 or more, and the most expensive 1% start at $103.42.

That gap matters for budgeting. The average describes no typical advertiser: it mixes the $1 clicks of a car dealer with the $200 clicks of an injury lawyer. In most industries the median is also well below the mean, as with HVAC, where the average click costs $7.64 but the median keyword $3.08. The median is the better guide to what most of your keywords will cost.

No industry comes close to personal injury law. Its keywords average $195.73 a click, 18 times the all-keyword average, and even its median keyword costs $150.84, 36 times the all-keyword median. A single injury case can bring a large fee, so firms can afford to pay hundreds of dollars for one visit from someone looking to hire a lawyer. Against the $1.68 auto dealers pay, that is 116 times as much per click.

The next tier is far lower but still expensive. Insurance averages $31.22 and SaaS $30.36, each close to three times the overall average, followed by IT services at $26.39. These are industries where one customer is worth thousands of dollars over a contract or policy. Moving companies ($18.86), higher education ($18.40) and plumbing ($16.67) follow, driven by urgent, high-value jobs and enrolments.

At the other end, auto dealers pay $1.68 a click on average, real estate $1.78 and weddings $2.85. Auto dealer keywords are tightly priced: the median is $1.43 and even the most expensive auto keyword costs $8.76. Six of the 23 industries average under $6, well below the $10.82 overall average.

Real estate shows how averages mislead in the other direction. Its volume-weighted cost per click is $0.74, lower than its $1.78 average, because its most-searched keywords are cheap searches for property portals such as Zillow. For a small budget, industries like these leave room to test ads and learn what converts before spending much.

Wedding venues rank 21st of 23 industries by average cost per click, ahead of only real estate and auto dealers, and their prices are unusually even. The median wedding venue keyword costs $2.84, almost exactly the $2.85 average, and weighted by search volume the average is $2.89: there are no expensive outliers. 91% of wedding venue keywords cost between $2 and $5 a click and the other 8.6% between $1 and $2. The middle half fall between $2.33 and $3.41.

City searches sit at the top: "san diego wedding venues" at $4.39, "dallas wedding venues" at $4.35, "wedding venues in arizona" at $4.22 and "wedding venues los angeles" at $4.20. Couples who name a city are close to booking tours, so venues in those markets bid a little more. The most searched keyword, "wedding reception venue", runs 22,200 times a month at $3.02 a click. Demand follows engagement season: January 2026 had 1.44 times as many wedding venue searches as December 2025.

Microsoft Ads, which shows ads on Bing search, prices 29 of the wedding venue keywords at $1.46 a click on average, about half the Google Ads average, so the same budget can buy roughly twice as many visits. State prices barely differ at the top: among the 25 largest states, Massachusetts is 2% above the national price of the same keywords, Colorado matches it and Arizona is 3% below. The differences open up at the bottom, where Wisconsin pays 34% less than the national price, Minnesota 27% less and Washington 25% less.

Start from your own industry's numbers, not the overall average. A $1,000 budget buys about 600 clicks for an auto dealer and about 5 for a personal injury firm, so a benchmark borrowed from the wrong market will be wrong by a factor of ten or more. Use the median for your industry when you estimate how many clicks a budget buys, because in most industries a few very expensive keywords pull the average up.

If you are in an expensive category, tight targeting pays for itself quickly. Exact and phrase match, strong negative keywords and location limits keep your budget off the $100-plus keywords you do not need. If you are in a cheap category, such as wedding venues, the gains come from converting more of the traffic you already buy: send clicks to a page with real photos, a starting price, capacity and a simple way to book, raise budgets when demand peaks, and copy campaigns to Microsoft Ads, where the same clicks can cost about half as much.

A google ads agency that plans budgets from your industry's real click prices, and tracks cost per lead or booking rather than cost per click, will tell you which of those two problems you have.

Embed this research

Cite this study