There is no fixed price for Google Ads. You set the budget, and Google spends up to it. What varies is how much each click costs, which depends entirely on how competitive your industry is. A cleaner might pay a few dollars a click. A lawyer might pay twenty times that. Whether it is worth doing comes down to your margins and whether you can handle the enquiries.
That is the honest answer to a question that usually gets a evasive one. Here is how the pricing actually works, what you would realistically spend in WA, and how to test it yourself before you pay anyone to manage it.
How Does Google Ads Pricing Actually Work?
Google Ads is an auction, but not one where the biggest budget simply wins.
Every time someone searches, Google runs an instant auction among advertisers bidding on that term. Your position is decided by Ad Rank, which combines your bid with a quality assessment of how relevant and useful your ad and landing page are. The practical consequence is genuinely useful for small businesses: a smaller advertiser with a tightly written ad and a relevant landing page can outrank a bigger one paying more, because Google would rather show the ad people will click.
You also do not pay your maximum bid. You pay roughly what was needed to beat the advertiser below you, which is why actual click costs usually come in under the ceiling you set.
On budgets, Google’s own documentation explains the mechanics clearly. You set an average daily budget for each campaign and can edit it at any time. Google may spend up to twice that on a given day when it thinks the traffic is worth it, but it caps the month at 30.4 times your daily budget. So a $30 daily budget can hit $60 on a busy Tuesday, but it will not exceed about $912 across the month.
No minimum spend is specified anywhere. That is a genuine advantage of the platform, though as I explain below, there is a practical floor that has nothing to do with Google’s rules.
The other thing worth understanding is that you are not really buying clicks, you are buying attempts. If a hundred people click and three enquire, you paid for a hundred clicks to get three conversations. That is normal, and it is why the click price on its own tells you almost nothing. What matters is the whole chain: what a click costs, how many clicks produce an enquiry, how many enquiries become customers, and what a customer is worth to you.
Work that backwards before you start. If a customer is worth $1,500, one in four enquiries becomes a customer, and one in twenty clicks becomes an enquiry, then each customer costs you eighty clicks. At $5 a click that is $400 to earn $1,500, which is a good business. At $25 a click it is $2,000 to earn $1,500, which is not. Same platform, same competence, completely different answer, and you can work out which one you are before spending anything.
Where the Money Actually Goes Wrong
Most failed Google Ads accounts I look at fail in the same handful of ways, and none of them are exotic.
Broad match keywords left on. Google will happily show your ad for searches only loosely related to what you typed. On a small budget this is the single fastest way to spend money on nothing.
The Display Network switched on by default. When you create a campaign, Google often opts you into showing image ads across millions of third-party sites. The clicks are cheap, plentiful, and mostly worthless for a local service business. Turn it off and run search only until you know what you are doing.
No conversion tracking. Without it you are looking at clicks and guessing. Roughly half the accounts I am shown have never had it set up properly, which means every optimisation decision made in that account has been guesswork.
Sending everyone to the homepage. Covered below, but it is worth repeating because it is so common and so expensive.
Never reading the search terms report. This shows the actual phrases people typed to trigger your ad, as opposed to the keywords you chose. It is where you find out you have been paying for “how to fix a leaking tap yourself”. Fifteen minutes a week here is the highest-value maintenance in the account.
How Much Should You Budget in WA?
Two numbers matter: what a click costs in your industry, and what you can afford monthly.
Click costs vary more than people expect, and I am not going to quote you someone else’s average, because averages across industries are close to useless and every agency publishes a different one. You can get the real number for your own industry, in your own suburb, in about ten minutes, for free.
Get Your Own Real Click Cost in 10 Minutes
Google’s Keyword Planner exists for exactly this. It is part of Google Ads and it will show you what a click actually costs for specific searches in specific locations, before you spend anything.
- 1
Create a Google Ads account but do not launch anything
Go to ads.google.com and sign up. You will need to enter billing details to unlock the planning tools, but you are not committing to any spend. Do not let it push you into an express campaign. Switch to Expert Mode if offered.
- 2
Open Keyword Planner
Tools, then Planning, then Keyword Planner. Choose "Discover new keywords".
- 3
Set the location to where you actually work
Not Australia. Set it to Perth, or to the specific suburbs you serve. This matters enormously, because costs in Perth are generally lower than Sydney or Melbourne and a national average will mislead you in both directions.
- 4
Enter the searches a customer would actually type
Not your industry name. The words a panicking customer types: "emergency electrician", "conveyancer near me", "bathroom renovation quote". Five or six of them.
- 5
Read the two columns that matter
Average monthly searches tells you whether anyone is looking. Top of page bid, low and high range, tells you what a click realistically costs. That range is your actual number, not an industry average from a blog.
Ten minutes of that beats any figure I could give you, because it reflects your industry, your city and this month rather than someone’s national average from last year. It also tells you something a cost article cannot: whether there is enough search volume in your area to bother.
Perth advertisers do tend to get a break here. There are simply fewer businesses bidding than in Sydney or Melbourne, so the same search often costs less. It is one of the few structural advantages of marketing from WA.
Three things people miss when budgeting.
GST. Google Ads invoices in Australia attract GST on top of your spend. Most guides quietly omit this, and it is 10% of your budget.
Management fees are separate. If someone manages your account, that fee is on top of ad spend and does not go to Google. A quote that presents one combined number is hiding which is which.
The practical floor. Below roughly $500 a month you will not accumulate enough clicks to tell what is working. You need volume before the data means anything, and without data you are just spending. If your budget is $200 a month, put it into your Google Business Profile and reviews instead.
Run a Simple Campaign Yourself First
I would rather you test this yourself than hire anyone, including me, before you know whether it works for your business.
- 1
Build one tight search campaign
Search ads only. Turn off the Display Network and Search Partners, which Google enables by default and which will spend your budget on low-quality placements while you are learning.
- 2
Pick 5 to 10 specific keywords
Not "plumber". Use "emergency plumber [suburb]" and similar. Specific terms cost less, convert better, and make the results readable. Broad terms will drain the budget before you learn anything.
- 3
Add negative keywords on day one
Block the obvious wasters immediately: jobs, salary, courses, free, DIY, how to. Then check the search terms report weekly and keep adding. This is the single highest-value ongoing task.
- 4
Write honest ads and send them somewhere relevant
Say what you do, where, and what happens next. Send the click to a page about that specific service, never your homepage. This is the most common and most expensive mistake in small business advertising.
- 5
Set a daily cap you can genuinely afford
Remember Google can spend up to twice your daily budget on a given day, capped at 30.4 times monthly. Set the daily figure so the monthly ceiling is a number you are comfortable with.
- 6
Track enquiries, not clicks
Set up conversion tracking for calls and form submissions before you spend anything. Without it you are measuring traffic, which tells you nothing about whether the ads made you money.
Run that for a month. You will know more about whether Google Ads suit your business than any agency could tell you in a pitch.
Resist the urge to change things daily while it runs. Google’s bidding needs a run of data before it settles, and an account fiddled with every morning never gets there. Set it up carefully, check the search terms report weekly, and otherwise leave it alone until the month is up.
Are Google Ads Worth It for Your Business?
Sometimes genuinely not, and I would rather say so.
They tend to work when your customers actively search for what you sell, a single customer is worth enough to absorb a few clicks that go nowhere, you can respond quickly to enquiries, and you have somewhere decent to send the traffic.
They tend not to work when your margins are thin relative to click costs, nobody searches for what you do because it is a new category, your landing page is unconvincing, or you cannot handle the enquiries you already get. That last one is more common than you would think. Advertising when you are already at capacity buys you a worse reputation.
Should You Do Google Ads or SEO First?
| Google Ads | SEO | |
|---|---|---|
| Time to first enquiry | Days | Months |
| Cost pattern | Every click is paid for | Effort now, compounds later |
| When you stop | Traffic stops that day | Rankings persist, then fade slowly |
| Budget control | Exact, adjustable daily | Indirect |
| Best for | Speed, testing, urgent services | Durable long-term visibility |
Ads buy speed. SEO builds something you keep. If you need work this month, ads are the only lever that responds fast enough. If you are steady and thinking about next year, SEO is the better investment.
Most small businesses I work with do the free SEO basics first, then run ads while SEO builds underneath. That sequence works because ads perform better once your profile, reviews and pages are decent anyway.
There is also a use for ads that has nothing to do with getting customers, and it is genuinely valuable: research. A month of search ads tells you exactly which phrases people use, how many are searching, and which of your services generate interest. That information would take SEO half a year to reveal. Some businesses run a small campaign purely to learn what to write their website around, then switch it off. Treated that way, a few hundred dollars is cheap market research rather than disappointing advertising, and it makes everything you do afterwards better aimed.
When It Is Worth Getting Help
If you have not run the test campaign above, do that first. A month of your own data is worth more than any pitch, and it means you can judge a proposal properly afterwards.
It becomes worth paying someone when you are spending consistently and cannot tell which enquiries came from where, when you are ready to scale past a simple single campaign, or when the account has grown complicated enough that maintaining it is eating hours you should spend on the business.
One thing to watch in any quote: management priced as a percentage of your ad spend rewards whoever manages it for pushing your budget higher rather than making it work harder. A flat fee keeps the incentives pointed the right way.
If the arithmetic above came out ambiguous, walk me through your numbers and I will give you a straight read on whether ads are worth trying. Fifteen minutes, free, and sometimes the answer is that your margins do not support it. You can also run your site through the free audit to check the page you would be sending clicks to, or read how I approach Google Ads.
Questions People Ask Me About Google Ads
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a minimum spend for Google Ads?
No. Google lets you set an average daily budget for each campaign and change it whenever you like, with no minimum specified. There is a practical floor though: below roughly $500 a month you will not gather enough click data to work out what is and is not working.
How much should a small business budget for Google Ads in Australia?
It depends entirely on click costs in your industry, which can range from a few dollars to well over twenty. Work out what a customer is worth to you, check typical click costs for your sector, and budget enough to get meaningful volume. Remember GST is added on top.
What is the difference between ad spend and management fees?
Ad spend goes to Google and buys clicks. Management fees go to whoever runs the account and buy their time. They are entirely separate, and any quote presenting a single combined figure should be broken down before you agree to it.
Are Google Ads worth it for a small business?
They work well when people actively search for what you sell, a customer is worth more than a handful of clicks, and you can respond quickly. They work badly when margins are thin against click costs, your landing page is weak, or you are already at capacity.
Should I do Google Ads or SEO first?
Ads if you need enquiries this month, since they start within days. SEO if you are ticking along and want visibility that keeps working. Most small businesses should do the free SEO basics regardless, because ads convert better once those are in place.
Why is my cost per click so high?
Usually because your keywords are too broad, or your ad and landing page are not relevant enough to the search. Google factors relevance into Ad Rank, so a tighter keyword list and a landing page that matches the search often lowers your costs and improves position at the same time.
