“How much should I spend on Google Ads?” is one of the first questions we get from small business owners, and it’s a fair one – there’s no official price list. What follows is a practical way to think through the number, using typical UK benchmarks pulled together from a few PPC pricing sources. These are directional estimates, not precise or guaranteed figures. Your actual costs will depend heavily on your sector, your location, and how much competition you’re up against, so treat everything below as a starting point to sense-check against your own account data once you’re live.
What actually determines your budget
Your Google Ads budget is really the product of three things: how much each click costs in your sector, how many clicks you need to generate a meaningful number of leads or sales, and how much you’re paying someone (or setting aside time yourself) to manage the account. Most small businesses focus only on the first number and forget the other two, which is why budgets set from a single competitor quote or a rough guess so often turn out to be wrong in either direction.
Working through all three in order – cost-per-click, minimum viable volume, then management cost – gives you a far more defensible figure than picking a round number because it feels affordable.
Cost-per-click varies enormously by sector
Average UK cost-per-click (CPC) figures differ hugely depending on what you sell, mainly because they reflect how much competitors are willing to bid, not any fixed price set by Google. As a rough guide, based on cross-referenced UK PPC pricing data rather than Google’s own published figures:
- Legal services: around £8 per click, with a typical range of roughly £4.50-£15+
- Financial services: around £5.50 per click, roughly £3-£10
- B2B SaaS: around £3.65 per click, roughly £2-£6
- Home services (trades, boiler and HVAC work, and similar): around £3.20 per click, roughly £1.50-£5.50
- Healthcare and dental: around £2.80 per click, roughly £1.50-£5
- Retail and e-commerce: typically under £1 per click, roughly £0.40-£2
Outside of these more extreme categories, most SMBs we see generally land somewhere between roughly £1.50 and £2.50 per click as a broad benchmark. These numbers move with competition, seasonality, and location – a London-based solicitor will typically pay more per click than the same firm operating in a smaller regional market – so use them to sanity-check quotes and early account data, not as a fixed price you should expect to pay.
The minimum spend needed for meaningful data
Once you know roughly what a click costs in your sector, the next question is how many clicks you actually need. This matters because Google Ads campaigns – particularly anything using Smart Bidding – need a certain volume of conversions to optimise properly. As a rough rule of thumb used across a lot of our own account planning, you want somewhere in the region of 15-20 conversions per campaign per month before the algorithm has enough data to bid intelligently. Below that, bidding tends to be erratic and results are hard to read with any confidence.
To work backwards to a budget, take your typical conversion rate (search campaigns for service businesses often convert somewhere in the low single digits, but this varies a lot) and your sector’s CPC, then calculate the click volume needed to reach 15-20 conversions a month. A home services business with a 5% conversion rate needs roughly 300-400 clicks a month to hit that range, which at a £3.20 average CPC works out at somewhere around £960-£1,280 in ad spend alone. A legal services firm at the same conversion rate but an £8 CPC would need a noticeably larger budget to reach the same conversion volume. This is exactly why a fixed “small business budget” figure doesn’t travel well between sectors – the underlying maths is different in each case.
Ad spend and management fees are two separate budget lines
A common mistake is treating the total Google Ads budget as one number. It’s really two separate costs: what you pay Google directly for clicks, and what you pay whoever is managing the account. Keeping these distinct makes it much easier to compare quotes and to see where your money is actually going.
Typical UK management fee structures, again as a directional guide rather than a fixed price list, tend to fall into a few bands: freelancers often charge somewhere around £200-£800 a month, small agencies typically sit around £500-£1,500 a month, and mid-tier agencies are often in the £1,500-£5,000 a month range depending on scope and reporting. Some agencies instead charge a percentage of spend, typically 5-15%, though this model is usually only used once a budget passes around £5,000 a month, since below that the percentage doesn’t cover the actual time involved. It’s also worth budgeting for a one-off setup fee if you’re starting fresh, typically somewhere around £250-£500, covering account structure, conversion tracking, and initial campaign build.
When you’re comparing providers, always ask whether a quoted figure is the management fee alone or includes ad spend – conflating the two makes it very difficult to compare like with like, and makes it harder to spot when a low management fee is being subsidised by an unrealistically low ad spend recommendation.
Putting a rough number on it
As a starting point for most small UK businesses outside the highest-CPC sectors, a combined ad spend and management budget somewhere in the region of £1,000-£3,000 a month is a reasonable range to plan around, split between click costs and a freelancer or small agency fee. Businesses in higher-CPC sectors such as legal or financial services should expect to plan for meaningfully more on the ad spend side to reach the same conversion volume, even if the management fee stays broadly similar.
None of these figures should be taken as guaranteed costs. Check them against quotes from providers in your specific sector, and once your account has been running for a few weeks, use your own actual CPC and conversion data rather than these industry averages – your account is the only source that reflects your real market and competition.
If you want a clearer picture of what your own sector and market should realistically cost before you commit a budget, that’s exactly what our free audit is for. We look at what clicks cost in your sector and whether your budget can produce enough data to learn from, whether or not you work with us. No commitment, a reply the same working day.