“How much should I spend on Google Ads?” is one of the questions we hear most. The honest answer is that it depends on your industry, your area and what a customer is worth to you. But you don’t have to guess. Here’s a simple way to work it out.
The short answer
For most local service businesses, $300 to $500 a month in ad spend is a sensible minimum to start, and more if clicks in your industry are expensive. Below that, you usually get too few clicks to learn what works. The right number for you comes from the math below.
Step 1: Know what a customer is worth
Start with your own numbers:
- Average job value: what a typical customer spends with you.
- Profit: how much of that you keep after costs.
- Repeat business: do customers come back or refer others?
A dentist with patients who stay for years can afford to pay more for each new patient than a business with one-off, low-value jobs.
Step 2: Find out what clicks cost
In Google Ads, open Keyword Planner and enter the services you want to advertise, like “emergency plumber” or “teeth whitening”, along with your location. It shows a range for what advertisers typically pay per click (the “top of page bid” range).
Click costs vary a lot. Searches with high-value jobs and lots of competing advertisers, such as emergency repairs or legal services, can cost many times more per click than searches for lower-value services.
Step 3: Do the math
Here’s an example with simple, made-up numbers. Replace them with your own.
| Example | |
|---|---|
| Average cost per click | $5 |
| Clicks that turn into a call or form | 1 in 10 |
| Cost per lead | $5 × 10 = $50 |
| Leads that become customers | 1 in 3 |
| Cost per new customer | $50 × 3 = $150 |
If a new customer is worth comfortably more than $150 to you, ads can be profitable. If 10 new customers a month is your goal, that’s roughly a $1,500 monthly budget at these numbers. Real numbers change as campaigns improve, but this gives you a realistic starting point.
Step 4: Start with enough to learn
New campaigns need data. If your budget only buys a couple of clicks a day, it takes months to learn which searches bring customers. It’s usually better to:
- Focus your budget on your most valuable services and the area you really serve,
- rather than spreading a small budget across every service and a huge area.
You can always expand once you know what works.
Where small budgets get wasted
- Broad keywords that match searches unrelated to your business
- No negative keywords, so you pay for clicks from people looking for jobs, DIY tips or free services
- Too large an area, showing ads to people you can’t serve
- No conversion tracking, so you can’t tell which ads bring calls
- Sending clicks to your home page instead of a page about the exact service
What to expect in the first 90 days
- Weeks 1–2: ads go live after Google’s review. You’ll see impressions, clicks and your first calls.
- Weeks 2–8: search terms are reviewed weekly. Wasted searches are blocked, and better ads and keywords get more budget.
- Months 2–3: your cost per lead usually settles, and you can decide whether to scale up, hold steady or adjust.
Should you pay someone to manage your ads?
Running ads yourself is possible, but it takes time to learn and to check every week. If you hire help, look for:
- You own the account. It should be in your name, with your own payment card.
- Ad spend paid directly to Google. Fees should be separate and clear, never a hidden markup.
- Call and form tracking from day one.
- Clear monthly reporting of spend, clicks, leads and cost per lead.
That’s how we run Google Ads management: your account, your card, a flat management fee and a plain-English report every month. See our Google Ads pricing for details.