Getting a lead from Google Ads costs $70.11 on average in the United States, according to WordStream and LocaliQ’s annual analysis of more than 16,000 campaigns. A year earlier it was $66.69, and the average cost per click rose by almost 13% over the same period, to $5.26.
These figures come from a different market, and in Spain the price varies widely by sector and city, but they make one thing clear: the useful question isn’t how much Google Ads costs, but how much each customer costs you and whether it pays off. With three or four numbers from your business, you can work out the budget you need before spending a single euro.
Working backwards: from the customers you want to the budget
The most common mistake is to start with a figure: “I’ll try €300 a month.” If €300 gets you two enquiries and you close one in five, you’ll never know whether the campaign works, because there isn’t enough data. It’s better to do the maths the other way round, starting with your goal:
- How many new customers you want each month from your ads.
- What percentage of enquiries you end up closing. If three out of every ten quotes you send are accepted, your close rate is 30%.
- How many enquiries you need: the customers you want divided by your close rate.
- How many clicks you need: enquiries divided by the percentage of visitors who email or call you. A well-built landing page usually converts between 5% and 10%.
- How much each click costs in your sector and area. Google’s Keyword Planner gives you a rough range.
An example makes it clear. A renovation company that wants to win four jobs a month:
| Step | Example |
|---|---|
| New customers wanted per month | 4 |
| Quote close rate | 20% |
| Enquiries needed (4 ÷ 0.20) | 20 |
| Percentage of visitors who ask for a quote | 7.5% |
| Clicks needed (20 ÷ 0.075) | 267 |
| Cost per click in their area (example) | €2.50 |
| Monthly ad spend | €667 |
| Cost per customer won | €167 |
If each job brings in €3,000 in profit, paying €167 per customer is an excellent deal and it makes sense to invest more. If the company sold a product with a €50 margin, the same campaign would lose it money. That’s why there’s no one-size-fits-all budget: it’s set by what a customer is worth to you.
What makes your clicks cost more or less
There are no fixed rates on Google Ads. Every time someone searches, advertisers compete in an auction, and the price depends on several factors that are worth understanding before you set your budget:
| Factor | How it affects the price |
|---|---|
| Sector | Where a customer is worth a lot of money, such as lawyers, insurance, clinics or renovations, there’s more competition and clicks cost more. In the WordStream study, the legal sector has the most expensive clicks: $8.58 on average |
| Area | Bidding in Madrid or Barcelona costs more than in a mid-sized city, because there are more advertisers |
| Ad and landing page quality | Google rewards relevant ads with useful pages: better quality means paying less for the same position |
| Type of search | “Full kitchen renovation in Alcobendas” costs more than “kitchen ideas”, but converts far better |
| Time of day and device | Focusing your spend on the hours when you can answer the phone gets better results for the same money |
On the flip side, there are sectors where clicks are cheap and conversion rates are high. In the same study, home services convert between 12% and 14% of visitors, almost double the average, because someone searching for a plumber or a locksmith usually needs one right away.
How much would it cost to manage your campaigns?Choose your platform and monthly budget, and see the price instantly.
The minimum budget for a campaign to learn
There’s a minimum below which a search campaign has very little room to work. Google’s automated bidding strategies learn from conversions: they need enquiries to come in regularly to figure out which searches and which people convert. With a budget that only covers a handful of clicks a day, the first few weeks are spent learning and the campaign never gets out of that phase.
As a practical guide, your budget should allow for at least 10 to 20 clicks a day on your main searches. At €1.50 a click, that’s between €450 and €900 a month. If you can’t reach that, it’s better to narrow your reach, with fewer services or a smaller area, than to spread a small budget across everything.
How Google spends your daily budgetOn Google Ads you set an average daily budget. According to Google’s official help pages, on any given day it can spend up to twice that amount if it spots more opportunities, but over the month it will never charge you more than 30.4 times that figure. If you set €20 a day, the monthly maximum is €608.
What comes on top of your ad spend
The money for clicks is paid directly to Google. On top of that there’s the work of building, tracking and fine-tuning the campaigns, and sometimes a page designed to convert. These are our prices, the same ones you’ll find in the calculator:
| Item | Price excl. VAT |
|---|---|
| Initial campaign set-up | €200 one-off |
| Management with ad spend up to €1,000/month | €200/month |
| Management with ad spend from €1,000 to €3,000/month | €350/month |
| Management with ad spend over €3,000/month | €500/month |
| Google Ads + Meta Ads | €350 / €550 / €800 per month |
| Landing page for your campaigns | €590 one-off |
In the renovation company example, the real cost would come to around €667 in ads plus €200 in management each month. At that total cost, each customer works out at around €217. That’s the figure to compare against your margin, not just what you pay Google.
Where we do recommend not cutting corners is the landing page. Sending your ads to your homepage, where people have to hunt for what they want, is the quickest way to pay for clicks that don’t convert. A dedicated page for each service, with the phone number in plain sight and a short form, gets considerably more enquiries for the same spend.
When to increase, hold or cut back
The first two or three months are for fine-tuning: cutting out searches that don’t sell, adjusting ads and finding out which services and times of day work best. From then on, the decision depends on the numbers, not on gut feeling:
- Increase your spend if your cost per customer is well below what each customer brings in and the campaign runs out of budget before the day is over.
- Hold steady if your cost per customer is profitable but you already appear for almost every relevant search: more money would only push up the price of each click.
- Cut back or rethink if, after three months of adjustments, your cost per customer is still higher than your margin.
And before you blame the budget, rule out these mistakes, which are the ones that waste the most money:
- Not tracking calls or form submissions. Without recorded conversions, Google is optimising blind and you don’t know what works.
- Broad match with no negative keywords. Your ad for “kitchen renovations” shows up for “cookery courses” or “second-hand kitchens”.
- Advertising across the whole of Spain when you only serve your own province.
- Leaving the campaign unchecked. Searches, competitors and prices change every week.
Google Ads is the fastest way to generate enquiries while your SEO gains momentum, and what your campaigns teach you about which searches convert can then be used to rank your website. If you’d like us to put together a Google Ads and Meta Ads campaign strategy using numbers like these, tell us what you sell and where.
