How much do Google Ads cost a UK business?

Google Ads costs whatever you decide to spend, plus a 2% UK fee, plus whoever runs the account. So the useful question isn't "how much do Google Ads cost?" It's "how much do I need to spend to find out whether they work for me?" Your own click costs and enquiry rate answer that, and in the round-number example below, a fair test comes to about £612.

The three costs

Google Ads is only one line in what marketing costs in the UK, but that line breaks down into three costs of its own.

Quotes and articles often lump the first two together. They're different things, and keeping them apart is what makes two quotes comparable.

Ad spend: what you pay Google

On a Search campaign that bids by the click, you pay when someone clicks your ad. You set the most you're willing to pay for a click, and Google often charges you less.

What a click costs varies enormously by trade, by place and by how many others are bidding, so an average from other businesses won't tell you much. Look up the estimate for the searches you care about instead. Google's Keyword Planner, free inside a Google Ads account, shows the estimated bid for appearing at the top of the page for the searches you type in, and how often people search for them.

How Google bills your budget

You set an average daily budget, but Google doesn't treat it as a hard daily cap. Its help page on average daily budgets says that for most campaigns:

• on any single day, you can be charged up to twice your average daily budget;
• over a month, you won't be charged more than 30.4 times your average daily budget, which is the average number of days in a month.

So under Google's spending limits, a £20 average daily budget could spend £40 on a busy day, but no more than about £608 across a month. Plan the budget by the month, then divide by 30.4 to get the daily figure.

Google's UK surcharge

For ads served in the United Kingdom, Google adds a 2% fee to your invoice because of the UK's Digital Services Tax, and says it has charged it since 1 November 2020. On £1,000 of ad spend, that's £20.

How VAT applies to your Google Ads invoices depends on your own VAT position, so ask your accountant rather than assume.

Management: what it costs to run the account

Someone has to set the account up, choose the searches, write the ads, build the page the clicks land on, set up something to count enquiries, and then keep improving all of it. There are four ways to get that done:

Ours is the last kind. Our Google Ads launch is a fixed £2,500 and takes about two weeks, followed by 30 days of changes as the first data comes in. After that, monthly management is optional and quoted separately, or you can take the properly built account and run it yourself.

Whichever you choose, check two things. First, whether the fee is a share of your ad spend, because that gives whoever runs the account a reason to recommend spending more. Second, whether the account will be in your name. Google Ads has access levels up to Admin, and someone in your own business should hold Admin on your own account.

The costs around it

These are the costs that tend to get left out of a budget:

• A landing page, the page someone arrives on after clicking your ad. Sending ad clicks to your homepage wastes a lot of them. A page built for that search, following a clear structure, is often the best money spent in the whole account.
• Something to count enquiries. Until an enquiry is recorded as a result, neither you nor Google can tell which clicks were worth paying for, and recording it is part of setting up the five GA4 reports you need.
• Images and video, if you use campaign types that show visual ads.
• Your own time, answering the enquiries the ads bring in. That's the whole point of the exercise, but it's still time.

How to set a test budget from your own numbers

This is the part that matters most. Three numbers give you a test budget, and you can find all three yourself:

1. Cost per click for your main searches, estimated by Keyword Planner.
2. Visitors per enquiry: how many people land on your website for every one who gets in touch. Your analytics will tell you, or you can make an honest estimate.
3. Enquiries per customer: how many enquiries it takes to win one.

A fourth number, profit per customer, doesn't change the test budget, but it tells you whether the result is worth having. The boxes below do that sum for you.

Here's how it works with round numbers, which are there to show the method, not to suggest real prices:

• Keyword Planner suggests clicks at around £3.
• It takes 25 visitors to get one enquiry on your site.
• So each enquiry costs roughly 25 × £3 = £75 in clicks.
• To find out whether the ads produce enquiries at all, you need enough clicks that getting none would be a surprise. At one in 25, 200 clicks should normally produce around eight.
• 200 clicks at £3 is £600, plus the 2% fee, which comes to about £612 for the test.

If one enquiry in three becomes a customer worth £1,000 in profit, an enquiry is worth about £333 to you, and paying £75 for one is a good deal. If a customer is worth £150, it isn't, and no amount of management will fix that arithmetic. It's much better to discover that on paper than after a month of spending, so I'd work out whether Google Ads are worth it for your business first.

If your numbers don't add up, look at why Google Ads aren't working before giving up on them. And if you're setting a budget for more than ads, start with how much a business should spend on marketing.

Put your own four figures in below and the sums are done for you. Nothing is filled in until you type it, and nothing you type leaves your browser.

• Your cost per click, what Google charges on average when someone clicks your ad.

  £a click
  Where to find it

  Open Keyword Planner, which is free inside a Google Ads account, enter the searches you would bid on, and use the cost per click it estimates for them. If you already run Google Ads, the average cost per click in your own account is better than an estimate.

  Covered in full above.

• Visitors per enquiry, how many people visit your website for each one who gets in touch.

  1 enquiry for everyvisitors
  Where to find it

  From your analytics: visitors in the last full month divided by enquiries in the same month. If one visitor in 25 gets in touch, enter 25. If enquiries are not tracked yet, count last month's by hand, or make an honest estimate and treat the answer as rough.

  Covered in The only five GA4 reports you need.

• Enquiries per customer, how many enquiries it takes to win one customer.

  1 customer for everyenquiries
  Where to find it

  From your own records: count the enquiries that led to your last ten customers and divide by ten. If one enquiry in three becomes a customer, enter 3.

  Covered in full above.

• Profit per customer, what a typical new customer is worth to you in profit, not takings, over the time they stay.

  £profit from a customer
  Where to find it

  From last year's figures, or a question to your accountant: what a typical customer brings in over the time they stay, minus what it costs you to do the work.

  Covered in How to split a small marketing budget.

What makes clicks cheaper or dearer

You can't control what your competitors bid, but you can control a surprising amount of the rest:

• Relevance. Google's Quality Score is its rating of how well your ad and your page match what people searched for. It looks at how likely your ad is to be clicked, how relevant it is, and what the page behind it is like. Tight groups of searches, each with ads and pages that match them, are the foundation.
• Wasted searches. The search terms report lists what people actually typed before clicking your ad. Add the irrelevant ones as negative keywords, the searches you tell Google never to show your ad for, and you stop paying for them.
• Location. The location setting Google recommends on Search also reaches people who have merely shown an interest in your area, wherever they happen to be. If you only serve people nearby, targeting people who are physically in the area usually wastes less.
• Timing. If enquiries outside working hours go unanswered, an ad schedule can stop you paying for the clicks that bring them.
• Match types. Broad matching finds more searches, including more irrelevant ones. Start tighter and widen deliberately.

Search, or the other campaign types?

Everything above assumes a Search campaign, where your ads appear against what people type. Google's other campaign types spend money differently.

Performance Max is Google's all-in-one campaign: a single campaign that can show your ads across Search, YouTube, Gmail, Maps and more, with Google's automation deciding where. It leans heavily on that automation and on the results data you feed it, and it needs images and ideally video. If your business has little results data yet, it can be hard to see where the money went. So I'd prove a Search campaign first, then test Performance Max once your tracking is solid and there are results for it to learn from.

Display and video campaigns show image and video ads on websites, apps and YouTube. They reach people who aren't searching, so the job they do is closer to that of Meta ads, and they're usually a later step for a business starting out with ads.

Whichever you use, the same rules apply: track conversions, judge on cost per enquiry or sale, and keep the account in your own name.

What the first three months usually look like

A new Google Ads account rarely performs at its best in its first week. It has no history, and you don't yet know which searches bring enquiries. A realistic pattern looks like this:

• The first two weeks: the account goes live, the first clicks arrive, and the search terms report starts to show what people actually searched for. The main jobs are removing irrelevant searches and checking that tracking works.
• Weeks three to six: there's enough data to see which keywords and ads bring enquiries and which bring clicks that go nowhere, and money moves towards what works.
• Months two and three: a clearer picture of cost per enquiry, and a decision to scale up, change the offer or landing page, or stop.

Set the date for that decision before you start, along with the cost per enquiry that would count as success. It's much easier to be honest about results when you're measuring them against a number you chose in advance.

Before you set a budget

Once the sums are done, check these before you spend anything.

• I have allowed for the 2% UK DST Fee, and checked VAT with my accountant.
• My daily budget is my monthly figure divided by 30.4.
• Enquiries are tracked as conversions, and I have tested it.
• Clicks will go to a page built for the search, not the homepage.
• If someone else manages it, the account is in my name and I hold Admin access.
• I know whether the management fee is fixed, monthly or a share of spend.

If you'd like the account built properly from the start, our paid ads service builds and launches accounts from £2,500 to £6,000, and the Google Ads launch is a fixed £2,500.