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Reason 1: The "New Neighbor" (Competition)

Someone else wants your spot.

Google Ads is an auction. If you are paying $2.00 for a click, and tomorrow a new competitor enters the market and bids $3.00, your price goes up. You have to pay more just to keep your same position on the page.

How to check:

Go to your Campaign.

Click Auction Insights in the top menu.

Look for new names in the list or competitors whose "Impression Share" has suddenly jumped up.

Reason 2: The Quality Score Drop

Your ads got "rusty."

Google charges you based on quality.

High Quality Score (10/10): You get a discount.

Low Quality Score (3/10): You pay a penalty tax.

If your CPC jumped overnight, check your Quality Score. Did you change your Landing Page? Did you rewrite your ads? If your Click-Through Rate (CTR) dropped, Google will immediately raise your CPC to compensate. 

The Fix: Improve your ad relevance or revert changes to your landing page.

Reason 3: Bidding Strategy Changes

Did you unleash the AI?

If you recently switched from Manual CPC to Maximize Conversions, your CPC will almost always increase.

Manual CPC: You set a hard limit ($2.00).

Maximize Conversions: Google sets the bid. If it sees a "perfect" customer, it might bid $10.00 to win them.

The Fix: If the CPC is too high, switch to a "Target CPA" strategy or add a "Maximum CPC Bid Limit" to your automated setting.

Reason 4: The Fraud Spike

Competitors draining your cheap clicks.

Sometimes, a high CPC is a symptom of Click Fraud. If a competitor uses a bot to click your ad 50 times in the morning:

Your daily budget drains quickly.

Google's algorithm panics. It sees you are running out of budget but still tries to get you traffic.

It might start bidding aggressively on weird, expensive auctions to spend the remaining budget fast.

The Fix: Check your ClickSambo dashboard. If you see a spike in blocked attacks on the same day your CPC went up, your "price hike" was likely caused by a fraud attack distorting your data.