The question every business owner asks about Google Ads is "how much should I spend?" and the honest answer is that it depends on something most people haven't worked out yet: what a customer is worth to you, and how many clicks it currently takes to get one.
Until you know those two numbers, any budget is a guess. Once you know them, the budget mostly calculates itself.
The floor: enough to learn something
There's a minimum below which advertising can't teach you anything, because you don't accumulate enough data to tell signal from noise. If a click in your category costs €3 and it takes 40 clicks to produce one enquiry, then €200 a month buys you about 66 clicks — perhaps one enquiry, perhaps none. You cannot draw a conclusion from that, in either direction.
Published 2026 benchmarks put the average cost per click across business services at roughly $5.87, with an average cost per lead near $94, though both vary enormously by sector and by how competitive your particular searches are. Trades, legal and insurance sit far above those averages; niche B2C sits below.
The practical rule: your test budget should be large enough to generate somewhere around 30 to 50 clicks a week on your best terms. Work backwards from your own cost per click to get the number. For many small businesses that lands somewhere between €400 and €1,500 a month, or the equivalent in your currency — but it is the arithmetic that matters, not the range.
The ceiling: what a customer is worth
Work out what you earn from an average customer over the time they stay with you, not from their first purchase. A vet, an accountant or a garage earns from a customer repeatedly for years, which means they can afford an acquisition cost that would bankrupt a one-off seller.
If a customer is worth €900 over three years and it costs you €120 to acquire one, the correct budget is "as much as you can spend at that cost".
That's the whole logic of paid advertising, and it's why "how much should I spend" is the wrong question. The right one is "what does a customer cost me, and is that less than a customer is worth?"
Why most budgets get wasted anyway
Three patterns come up repeatedly, and none of them are fixed by spending more.
- Broad matching on terms with no buying intent. The search terms report — not the keyword list — tells you what people actually typed. It is frequently a surprise.
- Geography nobody checked. Businesses routinely pay for clicks from well outside the area they can actually serve — a whole country when they work in one city, or neighbouring markets they cannot deliver to.
- A conversion action that isn't a real outcome. If the thing being counted is a newsletter signup or a page view, the campaign is being optimised towards something the business doesn't value, and Google will get very good at delivering it.
Before you increase the budget
Ask yourself three questions. Can you state what a valuable conversion is, in plain language? Do you know which specific searches produce them? And if the next €1,000 had to come out of something else, what would you stop funding first?
If any of those is unclear, more budget will buy you more of whatever you are currently buying. That may be fine. It's worth knowing which.
Common questions
What is a realistic starting Google Ads budget for a small business?
Rather than a fixed figure, work backwards: find your likely cost per click for your best search terms, and set a budget that buys roughly 30 to 50 clicks a week on them. For many small businesses that lands between €400 and €1,500 a month or the local equivalent, but the arithmetic matters more than the range.
Should I hire an agency to manage Google Ads?
It depends on spend. Management fees are usually a percentage of budget or a flat monthly amount, and below a certain spend the fee consumes the advantage. If your monthly budget is small, learning the search terms report yourself is often better value than paying someone else to run it.
How do I know whether my Google Ads are working?
Compare enquiries to spend over the same period, not clicks to spend. If enquiries have not moved while spend has, the money is buying activity rather than customers.
Source: WordStream — 2026 Google Ads Benchmarks
Before you spend more, find out what deserves priority.
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