How much do Google Ads cost?

Google charges per click, not per view. Your ad can appear ten thousand times and cost nothing until somebody clicks it. This sounds generous and is the single most misunderstood thing about the platform, because it means your budget converts directly into visitors — and at a $20 cost per click, a $300 monthly budget buys fifteen of them.

That is the whole economics of the channel. Meta bills you for impressions and clicks come along for the ride, which is why a small budget still delivers there. Google bills you for the click itself, so a small budget buys a small number of visits and nothing else.

What you pay per click is set by an auction, and the auction is not won by the highest bidder. Google multiplies your bid by a quality assessment of your keyword, your ad and your landing page. An advertiser bidding less with a genuinely relevant ad routinely outranks one bidding more with a generic one — and pays less for the privilege.

Do not start from a budget. Start from the outcome, and let the budget fall out of it.

Take the number of customers you need each month. Divide by the share of enquiries you convert — if one in four leads becomes a customer, that is 25%. That gives the leads you need. Multiply by your cost per lead, which is your cost per click divided by the rate at which clicks turn into enquiries.

A worked example. A plumber wants ten new jobs a month and closes one enquiry in three. That is thirty leads. At a $34 cost per click and a 10% conversion rate on the landing page, each lead costs $340 — so thirty leads is $10,200 a month. That number is uncomfortable, and it is the honest one. The plumber's realistic options are to narrow the geography, target cheaper long-tail keywords, or improve the conversion rate — not to run the same campaign on $500.

Google imposes no minimum spend, which is why so many small businesses start and quietly fail. The real floor is set by data, not by Google's terms.

A campaign needs roughly three clicks a day before it accumulates enough signal to improve. Below that, every optimisation decision is being made on noise. At a $20 cost per click, three clicks a day is $60 a day — about $1,800 a month.

If that is out of reach, the answer is not to spend $5 a day on the same campaign. It is to narrow until the money is concentrated enough to matter: one city instead of a region, one service instead of five, exact-match keywords instead of broad. A campaign that dominates a small area beats one that whispers across a large one.