There is no general answer, and there is a method that produces your answer in about twenty minutes. It works backwards from what a customer is worth to you rather than forwards from what you feel like spending.
Most businesses that describe Google Ads as not working never did this calculation, and were spending an amount that could never have produced a decision either way.
Start with what a customer is worth
Take your average job value and multiply by how many times a typical customer buys. A boiler service worth a hundred and twenty pounds once is a very different proposition from one that becomes an annual contract for six years. That lifetime figure is what you can afford to spend against, not the first transaction.
Then decide what share of it you are willing to pay to acquire a customer. Ten to twenty percent is a common range and yours depends on your margin.
Work through the conversion steps
- What proportion of enquiries do you win? Most local service businesses land somewhere between a quarter and a half.
- What proportion of clicks become enquiries? Between two and ten percent is typical for a decent landing page.
- What does a click cost in your trade and area? This varies more than anything else on the list.
Multiply through and you have a cost per customer. If it comes out above what you decided you could afford, the campaign is not viable at current conversion rates, and the fix is the landing page or the follow-up rather than the budget.
Owners ask what they should spend. The more useful question is what a customer is worth to them, because the budget falls out of that answer rather than the other way round.
Ryan Cole, Founder, Presseo
The minimum that produces a decision
Separately from affordability, there is a floor below which you learn nothing. You need enough conversions each month to tell a good campaign from a bad one, which in practice means roughly fifteen to thirty. Work back through the same numbers to find the spend that produces that, and if it is above what you can commit, narrow the scope rather than thinning the budget.
Narrowing means one service and one area rather than five services across a region. The same money concentrated produces signal; spread, it produces noise.
Why click costs vary so much
A click for an emergency plumber and a click for a personal injury solicitor differ by an order of magnitude, because the value behind them differs by an order of magnitude. Check your own trade rather than relying on a general figure, and expect it to be higher in a large metro than in a smaller town.
Budget for the learning period
The first six to eight weeks cost more per enquiry than the steady state, because the account is gathering data and you are still removing waste. Plan for that rather than judging month one, and hold the budget steady while it settles. Frequent budget changes reset the learning and extend the expensive phase.
When to spend more
Increase the budget when the cost per booked job is comfortably below what a customer is worth and you are limited by impression share rather than by conversion rate. Raising spend on a campaign that is not yet profitable simply buys more of the same result, faster. Our local SEO index covers the organic side that lowers what you need to buy over time.
Daily budget and what it actually controls
A daily budget does not cap spending precisely on any given day. Platforms may spend above it when traffic is available and balance it back across the month, so what matters is the monthly total rather than any single day looking higher than expected. Businesses that panic at an overspending Tuesday and cut the budget interrupt the learning period and end up paying more per enquiry overall.
The related mistake is setting a budget so low that the campaign exhausts it within the first hours of each day. That means your ads stop showing exactly when people search in the afternoon and evening, which for most home services is when the enquiries actually come in. If the budget cannot cover a full day, narrow the targeting rather than accepting partial coverage.
Seasonality is worth planning for
Most local services have predictable peaks, and the businesses that do best raise budget slightly ahead of theirs rather than reacting once demand has arrived. Waiting until the phone is already busy means competing at the point costs are highest and the learning period is least useful.
It works in the other direction too. Reducing spend during a genuinely quiet period is sensible; switching campaigns off entirely is not, because restarting from nothing costs another learning phase every time.
Want the number for your trade and area?
Tell us your service and your town and we will give you a straight read on click costs there and the budget needed before the data means anything.
