Quick Answer · Google Ads Budget
How much should I spend on Google Ads?
Enough to win a meaningful share of your high-intent searches — a number you derive from your customer value, close rate, and market competition, not from a benchmark. A token budget in a competitive market gets drowned out. Start from what a booked job is worth, work back to what you can pay per lead, and size from there.
Budget is derived, not copied.
There's no universal "right" number, because a booked law-firm case and a booked dental cleaning are worth wildly different amounts — and your market's click prices depend on how many competitors are bidding. The method that works: start with average customer value, apply a realistic close rate to find what you can pay per lead and still profit, factor competition, then size a budget big enough to actually compete for the searches that book jobs.
Industry "average spend" figures are useful as sanity checks, dangerous as targets. Budgets by industry →
Why too small is worse than nothing.
In a contested market, a budget too small to compete for the high-intent terms gets spent on scraps — you pay for clicks that don't convert and conclude "Google Ads doesn't work." It's not that it doesn't work; it's that you brought a budget that couldn't win the auctions that matter. Either commit enough to compete for the real searches, or redirect the spend to less-contested, longer-tail terms where a small budget can actually produce. Google Ads for local →
Scale to the booked-job math.
The upper bound isn't a fixed dollar figure — it's the point where adding spend stops producing booked jobs below your cost ceiling. As long as a campaign produces customers at a cost under what they're worth, it's profitable to keep funding. That's why the only honest budget conversation runs on cost-per-booked-job, and why proper call tracking has to be in place before you scale. Tracking & attribution →
Ignore the benchmark; run your math.
Don't ask "what does a business like mine spend." Ask what a customer is worth to you, what your close rate is, and how competitive your market is — then fund enough to compete, and let real booked-job data refine it month over month. The diagnosis runs this math before any spend goes live, so the first dollar is informed. Local Intelligence →
Spend what it takes to win.
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Size the budget to your market.
30-minute strategy call. We run your customer-value math against your market's competition and recommend a budget that can actually win.