Most local businesses in Australia spend between $1,000 and $5,000 a month on Google Ads, plus a management fee if someone runs it for them. What you pay per click depends far more on your industry and location than on Google, and the only number that really matters is your cost per booked job.
There is no fixed price for Google Ads. You set the budget, and Google charges you each time someone clicks your ad. So the real question is not what Google Ads costs, it is what a customer is worth to you and how many clicks it takes to win one.
What drives the cost per click
The price of a click is set by how many other businesses want the same search. A plumber in a busy city pays more per click than a niche service in a quiet town, because more competitors are bidding on the same words.
In Australia, a click in a competitive local trade often runs anywhere from a few dollars to more than twenty. That sounds like a wide range because it is. A few things move it:
- Your industry. High-value categories like legal, trades and medical cost more per click.
- Your location. A click in a capital city costs more than the same click in a regional town.
- The search itself. Someone typing emergency plumber near me is worth more than someone typing how to fix a tap.
- Your competition. The more businesses bidding, the higher the price.
The number that actually matters
Cost per click is a distraction. The number that decides whether Google Ads is worth it is your cost per booked job, sometimes called cost per acquisition.
Say a click costs you $8, and one in ten clicks turns into an enquiry, and half your enquiries become customers. That is twenty clicks, or $160, to win one customer. If that customer is worth $2,000 to you, Google Ads is one of the best investments you can make. If they are worth $80, it is not.
This is why the landing page matters as much as the ads. Lift your conversion rate from one in twenty to one in ten and you have just halved your cost per customer without touching the ad budget.
What about management fees?
If you hire someone to run your ads, you pay them on top of your ad spend. The common model is a percentage of what you spend, often ten to twenty percent, which quietly costs you more as you grow.
A flat monthly fee is simpler and fairer. You know exactly what you are paying, and growing your budget does not grow the bill. That is how we run it, with no percentage taken from your spend.
So what should you budget?
Start with what a customer is worth and how many you want. If a job is worth $2,000 and you want four more a month, you only need the ads to produce eight or so good enquiries. That is a modest budget, not a huge one.
The mistake is starting too small to gather useful data, or starting big with no landing page and no tracking. Begin with enough to learn, point the clicks at a page built to convert, and let the cost per job tell you when to scale.
