How much do Google Ads cost in the UK? Real figures by trade

Google Ads has no price. It has an auction. You pay per click, and a click in the UK costs anywhere from about £3 to over £65 depending on what you sell. Most trades sit between £4 and £6.50. Below is what a click actually costs right now, trade by trade, then the two numbers that matter more than the click price: the monthly budget that makes a campaign viable, and what one enquiry ends up costing you.

Every figure in the first table is live UK auction data pulled on 17 August 2026, not a range copied from a blog post written in 2023.

If you are deciding whether paid search or organic search should come first, read Google Ads vs SEO: which should a small business do first? before setting a budget.

What a Google Ads click costs in the UK, by trade

Search term	Monthly UK searches	Average cost per click	Top of page bid range
Aesthetics clinic near me	3,600	£3.14	£1.17 – £4.60
Scaffolding hire	2,900	£4.00	£0.92 – £5.01
Roofer near me	33,100	£5.38	£4.22 – £16.37
Concrete supplier	590	£5.46	£1.81 – £12.80
Electrician near me	74,000	£6.46	£2.02 – £10.43
Web design Leeds	1,000	£16.65	£2.37 – £8.34
Emergency plumber	12,100	£22.57	£6.59 – £39.66
Personal injury solicitor	2,400	£65.48	£20.06 – £60.85

Two things in that table surprise people.

The first is how wide the spread is. A solicitor pays twenty times what a clinic pays for one visitor. That is not Google being unfair. It is other solicitors deciding a case is worth bidding £60 for, which sets the price for everybody in that lane. Your cost per click is mostly a statement about how valuable your competitors think a customer is.

The second is emergency plumbing at £22.57. Urgency is expensive, because a person searching “emergency plumber” at eleven at night is about to buy from whoever answers. Everybody in that auction knows it.

The three numbers that make up “cost”

People ask what Google Ads costs and mean one of three different things.

The click price is set by auction and you only partly control it. The lever you do control is Quality Score, which is Google’s read on how relevant your ad and landing page are to the search. Tightly themed ad groups pointing at a matching page pay less per click than one loose campaign pointing everything at a homepage. That is not a trick, it is most of the craft.

The monthly budget is what you actually decide. This is the number that determines whether the campaign works at all, and it is where most small accounts go wrong.

The management fee is what you pay somebody to run it, if you are not running it yourself. It is separate from the budget, and it should never be a slice of it.

Why £750 a month is the floor

Take a roofer at £5.38 a click. A £750 monthly budget buys roughly 139 clicks. At a five per cent conversion rate, which is a fair assumption for a decent service-business landing page, that is seven enquiries in a month, at about £107 an enquiry. Against a £4,000 roof that is an obvious yes.

Now run the same £750 at other click prices:

Trade	Cost per click	Clicks for £750	Enquiries at 5%	Cost per enquiry
Aesthetics clinic	£3.14	239	12	£63
Roofing	£5.38	139	7	£107
Electrical	£6.46	116	6	£129
Emergency plumbing	£22.57	33	1 to 2	£450
Personal injury law	£65.48	11	0 to 1	£750+

The bottom two rows are the point. At £65 a click, £750 a month buys eleven visitors. You cannot learn anything from eleven visitors, Google’s bidding cannot learn anything either, and one month you will get a case and the next you will get nothing. That is not a campaign, it is a raffle.

This is why we set a hard £750 monthly minimum on ad spend and will not launch below it, and why in expensive verticals the real floor is higher still. Below the floor the auction starves the campaign and you buy noise. £10 a day, the number people usually arrive with, is £300 a month and roughly 55 clicks in a trade where a click costs £5.50. Two enquiries, maybe three.

If £750 a month is not there yet, that is genuinely useful information rather than bad news. It means the next pound is better spent on the site and the Google Business Profile, both of which keep working after you stop paying. Ads stop the day the card stops.

What UK agencies charge to manage it

There are two models and they are not equivalent.

A percentage of ad spend, usually 10 to 20 per cent, is the industry default. It also means your agency earns more every single time it persuades you to increase your budget. That conflict sits in the middle of every conversation you will have about scaling, and you will never be quite sure which side of it the advice came from.

A flat monthly fee does not move when your budget does. UK mid-market flat fees run about £800 to £1,500 a month to manage £2,000 to £5,000 of spend. Below roughly £300 a month, be realistic about what you are buying: at that price it is automation and a junior glancing at the account.

Lucent’s fee is flat and agreed in writing before work starts. It does not change simply because your spend does. The ad budget is paid by you straight to Google on your own card, in an account in your own name, and it never passes through us or gets marked up. If we part company you keep the account, the campaign history and every bit of conversion data, which is not true everywhere. The Google Ads management page explains what the service includes.

So a realistic all-in figure for a single-area UK service business starting properly is £750 to £1,500 of ad spend plus £400 to £800 of management, which is £1,150 to £2,300 a month. Quoting the click price alone, as most pages on this subject do, makes it sound like a tenth of that.

The only number that actually matters

Cost per click is a means. Cost per enquiry is the scoreboard, and cost per won job is the real one.

The account we point everybody at is Procon 24/7: £1.22M of revenue on £133,417 of ad spend, a return of 9.1 times, held across four and a half years rather than in one flattering quarter. Nobody involved could tell you the average cost per click off the top of their head, and it does not matter. What matters is that every enquiry was tracked to a real form fill or phone call, so the return is a measured figure rather than an estimate.

Which brings up the fault we find most often in accounts we inherit: broken conversion tracking. A campaign that is not tracked properly cannot be judged at all, however healthy the click numbers look, and a surprising number of accounts have been running for years reporting impressions and clicks to an owner who has no idea what an enquiry cost. Verify the conversion fires against your real enquiry form before you spend anything. Then insist on being reported on enquiries and cost per enquiry, not impressions and click-through rate.

When Google Ads is the wrong spend

Three situations, all common.

The site leaks. If your pages do not convert the organic traffic they already get, paid traffic will not convert either. You will simply pay to discover the same problem faster. Start with why your website isn’t getting enquiries and fix the conversion faults before you buy visitors.

The budget is below the floor. Covered above. Under £750 a month in most trades you are buying noise, and in a £20-plus click vertical the floor is well above that.

You need the money back this quarter and the margin is thin. Ads are the fastest channel to switch on, but they are rented. The first month is largely Google’s bidding phase learning your account, which we tell clients in advance rather than presenting month one as a result. If the business cannot absorb a learning month, ads are the wrong first move.

None of that is an argument against paid search. It is the argument for doing it in the right order, which is: a site that converts, then the free traffic, then the paid traffic on top. That is why our flat-fee Google Ads management starts with an audit of whether your pages actually convert before we spend a penny, and plenty of those audit calls end with us telling somebody not to spend on ads yet, or fixing the leak first.

Getting your own number

The arithmetic is simple enough to do on a napkin. Find your main search term, take its cost per click, divide your monthly budget by it to get clicks, take five per cent of that for enquiries, and divide the budget by the enquiries. If the answer is comfortably less than what a job is worth to you, paid search will probably make you money. If it is not, either the budget is too small or the vertical is too expensive for the margin, and no amount of clever campaign structure fixes that.

If you would rather have somebody do the sums against your real numbers, the free 30-minute audit covers it, including whether your site is ready for paid traffic at all. Both answers happen, and the honest no is cheaper for you than finding out with a budget.

Price is only half the decision. Once you know what a click costs, the question is whether the return justifies it: is Google Ads worth it for a small business answers that with two real accounts, one that returned 9.1 times over four and a half years and one of our own that we killed after 348 clicks and no enquiries at all.

Worth reading next: how much a website costs in the UK if the site needs building first, what SEO costs in the UK for the slower and cheaper half of the same question, how long SEO takes if you are weighing the two against each other, and why your website isn’t converting if you suspect the leak is the real problem.