Ask what Google Ads costs a month and you'll get a range so wide it's useless: a few hundred dollars, a few thousand, "it depends." It does depend, but on one thing more than any other: what a click costs in your line of work. Everything else in a budget is built on that number.
This chapter builds a budget from the click up, the way we do it for small accounts, and then works out what a customer has to be worth to make the spend pay.
Your Monthly Budget Is Your Click Price Times the Clicks You Need, Times 30.4.
Google Ads budgets are set per day. To turn a daily figure into a monthly one, Google's help center uses 30.4, its average month length. So the math is short:
cost per click x clicks you want each day x 30.4 = monthly budget
The hard part is the first number. Before you've run a single ad, the best free estimate is Keyword Planner's "top of page bid" range for your searches. In Google's definition, that upper figure sits near the 80th percentile of past bids for a top spot. It is a planning number, not a quote: your real cost per click will land above or below it.
Here is what $500 a month buys at the high end of Google's range, across the kinds of businesses in this guide (US figures from Keyword Planner):
- "bookkeeping services," top bid $50.00: about 10 clicks
- "tutor near me," $22.34: about 22 clicks
- "handyman near me," $12.51: about 39 clicks
- "mobile detailing near me," $6.72: about 74 clicks
- "yoga studio near me," $5.44: about 91 clicks
- "hair salon near me," $2.80: about 178 clicks
The same $500 buys a salon nearly 18 times as many clicks as a bookkeeper. Neither number says how many customers that becomes, and we won't pretend it does: Keyword Planner can tell you roughly what a click costs, not how many of those clicks will call. Treat these as the floor of your thinking. Run the formula with your own searches, and the number of clicks you'd want each day, before you pick a budget.
A handyman who wants three clicks a day on "handyman near me" at the top bid would need about $12.51 x 3 x 30.4, or roughly $1,141 a month. That's a real number to plan around, instead of a guess.
A Click Isn't a Customer. Your Close Rate Decides What a Click Is Worth.
A click is the cost. A customer is the point. Between them sits a chain of numbers, and each one moves what you can afford:
- Cost per click: what Google charges.
- Conversion rate: what share of those clicks turn into a call, a form or a booking.
- Cost per lead: the click price divided by that conversion rate.
- Close rate: what share of those leads end up paying you.
- Cost per customer: the lead cost divided by that close rate.
- Lifetime value: what that customer pays you over the whole relationship.
You'll learn the first three from your own account once Chapter 1's tracking is running. Until then, published averages give a rough starting point. LocaliQ, which runs ad campaigns for small businesses, publishes medians from its own customers' accounts. For house cleaning, its 2025 figures were an $8.50 median click, a 17.65% median conversion rate and a $46.99 median cost per lead (each median is measured on its own, so they don't multiply out exactly). Those are one vendor's customers, not the market, and not your account.
The close rate is yours alone. No source we found publishes it for cleaners, bookkeepers, tutors or salons, and it depends on how you handle each lead. How fast you answer a lead changes your close rate.
Here's how the chain works with round example numbers. If a cleaning lead costs about $47 and one in three leads books, a new customer costs about $141. Swap in your own close rate and the answer changes fast: one in five makes it about $235.
A Cleaning Client Who Books Every Two Weeks Pays $160 to $220 a Visit. One Client Covers a Lot of Clicks.
That $141 looks expensive next to a single cleaning. It looks different next to a client who stays.
Thumbtack, the home services marketplace, puts a cleaning every two weeks at $160 to $220 a visit, based on its pros' quotes. A client on that schedule books about 26 visits a year. If they stay a full year, that's roughly $4,160 to $5,720 from one ad-driven customer. We couldn't find a reliable published figure for how long cleaning clients stay, so that "if" is doing real work. Your own records will tell you.
Other businesses in this guide have the same shape. NerdWallet puts most bookkeeping packages at about $200 to $700 or more a month, so a bookkeeper's $50 click can still pay if a few clicks become a client who stays. One-time work is tighter: Thumbtack puts a simple handyman task at $178 to $220, which leaves far less room for the cost of winning the job.
The ad account also never sees part of what a good customer is worth: the review they leave, the neighbor they send. Count those when you decide what a customer is worth, even if you can't put an exact number on them.
We Start Most Small Accounts Near $1,500 a Month. A Tighter Budget Should Advertise Fewer Services, Not Bid Lower.
So what should a small business spend? For most small accounts we start around $1,500 a month. David Smania, BrandRocket's founder, has told owners to give it "at least three months to give yourself a fair shot at success." Three months is long enough to collect real conversions and short enough to know whether the math works.
If $1,500 is more than you can spend, don't lower your bids to stretch it. A bid too low to reach the top of the page shows less often, and a budget spread thin across every service and town buys a few clicks of each and enough of none. Narrow what you advertise instead:
- one or two services, the ones with the best margin or the most demand
- a smaller area around you
- one core Search campaign, plus a small campaign for your business name
The same goes for channels. In David's words, "$1,900 is enough budget to run one channel well or two channels subscale, but not enough to run both channels at the level of investment they each need." Google's own small-business articles suggest running a couple of campaigns; on a small budget we'd rather fund one well.
Google Can Spend Twice Your Daily Budget on a Busy Day. It Can't Bill More Than 30.4 Days a Month.
Two Google rules surprise new advertisers. First, a single busy day can cost up to double the daily budget you set. Second, over a month Google won't charge you more than 30.4 times that daily budget. Busy days and quiet days average out, and your monthly cost stays under the line you set.
Google's own tip is "Start small. Check your account daily after applying a new budget." That's good advice for the first weeks.
Expect Google to suggest a bigger budget. Its "recommended budget" is defined as the lowest amount at which you wouldn't lose any impressions to budget limits. That's a statement about how many ads Google could show, not about whether they'd make you money. A campaign marked "Limited by budget" isn't failing either; Google's own help page says it "can still be successful." Raise the budget when the cost per customer says so, not when the warning appears.
A Small Town Can Run Out of Searches Before a Small Budget Runs Out of Money.
The other limit is the market itself. In the small businesses we studied, the biggest search with the town's name in it was smaller than most owners expect: about 1,600 searches a month for "hair salon asheville," 480 for "handyman boise" and 170 for "piano lessons albuquerque," each in its own metro area.
In a market that small, an account can hit the ceiling of available searches with budget left over. When that happens, more money won't help. Widen the area a little, add a service you can deliver, and only then, once about 30 quality conversions a month are coming in, loosen your match types (Chapters 6 and 7). If you serve a defined area, the Local Businesses guide covers location settings in depth.
Google Ads Is an Investment Only When You Can Count What It Returns.
David puts it plainly to owners: "Google Ads should always be an investment, not an expense." That's only true when you can see the return.
An investment you can't measure is just a monthly bill with a nicer name.
That's why Chapter 1 came before this one. With calls, forms and bookings counted, and paying customers sent back from a simple sheet, the chain above stops being example numbers and becomes yours. And Chapter 2 already pointed the budget at the right searches: the ones from people ready to buy.
Next: Six of 12 Small Advertisers Show Only Their Home Page Address in Every Ad.
You know what a click costs and what a customer is worth. Chapter 4 looks at where the click lands, and why a page that matches the search makes every click cheaper and more likely to call.
Every chapter, from tracking to bidding by hand, ad credits and when to hire help, is on the guide's home page.
When we take on an account through Google Ads management, the budget comes last, after the tracking and the search list, so it rests on real click prices instead of a round number. Doing it yourself? Run the formula above on your three most important searches tonight. It takes ten minutes and replaces a guess with a plan.
