How Much Should I Spend On Google Ads? Work Out Your Real Number
Forget the industry average. Here’s how to size a budget from what a customer is actually worth to you, and what happens when you go in too light.
How much should I spend on Google Ads? Every answer you find online is a range someone invented, and none of them know your prices, your margins or how many enquiries you can handle. The number you need isn’t a benchmark. It’s the output of four figures you already have, and you can work it out in ten minutes.
The Quick Version
If you want the short version: your budget is set by what a customer is worth to you and how many clicks it takes to get one. Not by what a competitor spends, and definitely not by what you can spare this month.
You need a handful of numbers to size it properly:
- What one new customer is worth to you, over the whole relationship rather than the first job
- How many enquiries you need in order to close one of them
- Roughly what a click costs in your market. The Keyword Planner will give you a range
- How many of the people who click actually go on to enquire
- What you can afford to pay for one customer and still be pleased about it
Multiply the clicks you need by the cost of a click and you have a monthly figure with a reason behind it. If that number is uncomfortable, the honest conclusion is usually that paid search is the wrong channel for that service right now, not that you should try it with a tenth of the budget.
Not Sure Where To Start?
Getting this wrong in either direction is expensive. Too little and you pay for the learning without ever reaching the volume where it starts working; too much and you fund a campaign nobody is watching closely enough.
We’ll work the numbers with you, tell you what a realistic budget looks like for your service and area, and say plainly if the answer is that you shouldn’t bother yet.
The Full Guide: Sizing A Google Ads Budget From Your Own Numbers
When someone asks how much should I spend on Google Ads, they’re hoping for a figure. What they actually need is the calculation, because the figure changes completely between a plumber in a small town and a solicitor in a city.
1. Start With What A Customer Is Worth, Not With A Budget
Almost everyone starts from the wrong end: “I’ve got three hundred a month, what can I get for that?” Start instead with what a new customer is worth to you, and be honest about the whole relationship rather than the first invoice.
A boiler service that leads to an annual contract for six years is worth vastly more than the one-off callout price, and that difference is the whole ball game. It decides what you can afford to pay for a click, and whether you can compete in the auction at all.
Then decide what you’d happily pay to win one. If a customer is worth two thousand pounds over time, paying two hundred to acquire one is excellent. If they’re worth eighty, the sums get tight very quickly, and no amount of clever setup fixes that.
2. The Arithmetic That Sizes Your Budget
Here’s the chain. Clicks become enquiries at some rate, enquiries become customers at some rate, and every click has a price. Work backwards from the customers you want and the budget falls out of it.
Say you want four new customers a month, you close one enquiry in three, and one in twenty clicks turns into an enquiry. That’s twelve enquiries, which needs around two hundred and forty clicks, and at two pounds a click you’re looking at roughly four hundred and eighty pounds a month.
Those rates are illustrative rather than a promise, but the structure holds whatever your numbers are. If you don’t know your click cost yet, the Keyword Planner inside Google Ads gives you a workable range for your keywords and your area before you spend anything at all.
3. What Actually Happens If You Go In Too Light
This is the part most advice skips. A budget that’s too small doesn’t give you a smaller version of the same result. It gives you a different and worse one, because you never collect enough data to improve anything.
If your budget buys one or two clicks a day, a fortnight’s data is a couple of dozen clicks and quite possibly zero enquiries. You can’t tell a bad keyword from bad luck at that volume, so you end up making changes based on noise and resetting your own learning.
That’s how people conclude Google Ads “doesn’t work for their industry” after a few hundred pounds. It was never a fair test. One tight campaign on one service with a proper budget for two months will teach you more than a thin budget spread across everything you do.
4. Budget For The Learning, Not Just The Leads
Your first month or two is tuition, and it’s better to plan for that than to be surprised by it. Some of that spend buys search terms you’ll immediately add as negatives, and clicks from people who were never going to buy.
That isn’t waste, provided you act on it. The account should get cheaper per enquiry as you cut what doesn’t convert, but only if someone is reading the search terms report regularly and doing the cutting.
So set the figure for two or three months rather than one. Judging a campaign on its first three weeks means judging it at the most expensive point it will ever be.
5. When To Turn It Up, And When To Stop
Once the numbers stack up, increasing spend is the easy decision. If your cost per customer sits comfortably below what one is worth, and you can handle more work, raise the budget in steps and watch the cost per enquiry as you go.
Raise it gradually rather than doubling it overnight. Big jumps push you into looser and more expensive searches and unsettle the bidding, so the extra money often buys worse leads than the money before it.
And know your stopping point in advance. If the cost per customer stays above what one is worth after you’ve properly tidied the account, that’s genuinely useful information. Put the budget somewhere it works instead.
Common Mistakes
If you’re still asking how much should I spend on Google Ads after a couple of months of trying, one of these is usually why the answer keeps moving.
The big one is setting the budget from what’s spare rather than from what a customer is worth. It feels prudent, and it quietly guarantees a test too thin to tell you anything, so you spend the money and still don’t know whether the channel works.
Next is spreading a small budget across every service you offer. Five campaigns on a small budget gives you five sets of data too small to read. One service, one tight campaign, properly funded, will teach you more in a month than that will in six.
The rest are familiar. Not knowing the lifetime value, so every cost looks alarming. Judging results before conversion tracking even works, so the numbers were never real. Cutting the budget the moment it feels expensive, right at the point the learning was starting to pay off. And comparing your spend to a competitor’s, as though their margins and their close rate were anything like yours.
Do It Yourself, Or Let Us Handle It
The DIY Lane
You can work this out yourself, and you should at least try. Pin down what a customer is worth, get a click-cost range from the Keyword Planner, do the arithmetic, then run one tight campaign on your best service and leave it alone long enough for the result to mean something. The catch is that the first version of these numbers is almost always optimistic, and the gap between your assumed conversion rate and the real one is exactly the gap that empties the budget before you notice.
Rather Hand It Over?
If you’d rather not learn this with your own money, we’ll do the sums with you first. We’ll tell you what a realistic budget looks like for your service and your area, what it should return, and honestly whether it’s worth starting at all.
Related Guides on the wall
If you’re working out how much should I spend on Google Ads, these guides cover the setup that decides whether the budget goes anywhere useful.
How Much Should I Spend On Google Ads FAQs
There’s no universal figure, but there is a floor: enough to buy a meaningful number of clicks every day on the one service you most want to sell. Below that you can’t collect enough data to improve anything, so you pay for the experiment without getting the answer.
Start narrow rather than small. One service, a tight keyword list and a proper budget beats a thin budget spread across everything you do. You’ll get readable data instead of a fortnight of noise.
Use the Keyword Planner inside Google Ads. It gives a cost range for your keywords in your area, which is enough to size a budget and to spot when a service is simply too competitive to be worth it.
Plan for two to three months of stable spend. The first few weeks are the most expensive, because you’re paying for search terms you’ll later exclude, and cutting the budget at that point wastes what you just learned.
No. You can’t see their margins, their close rate or what a customer is worth to them, so their number tells you nothing useful about yours. Size it from your own figures.
That’s a useful answer, not a failure. It usually means the value per customer is too low for paid search at your click costs, and the same budget will work harder on SEO, local visibility or getting more from the customers you already have.
The right budget isn’t the one you can spare. It’s the one your own numbers point at, and if those numbers say no, that’s worth knowing before you spend a penny.
