Google Ads on £1,000 a month, spent properly
A thousand pounds is not a small budget for a local service business. It is a small budget for the way most agencies run an account, which is why so many of them fail.
- At Surrey trade and clinic click prices of roughly £4 to £12, £1,000 a month buys somewhere between 80 and 250 clicks. That is the entire month.
- The most common way a small account is wasted is broad match plus automated bidding with too little data to learn from.
- Run one campaign, three or four tight ad groups, exact and phrase match, and a negative keyword list you actually maintain.
- A landing page that matches the search beats a homepage every time. Sending "bathroom fitter Esher" traffic to a generic homepage wastes about half the budget.
- We do not sell ads before month four. Paid traffic to a site that does not convert is buying evidence you already have.
A bathroom fitter in Esher rings on a Wednesday. He has spent £3,000 with an agency over three months, had four enquiries, and one of them was somebody in Manchester.
He wants to know whether Google Ads works. It does. What did not work was the way his thousand pounds a month was being spent, and the reasons are the same almost every time.
A thousand pounds a month is about a hundred and fifty clicks. Spend them like it.
What does £1,000 a month actually buy?
Start here, because everything else follows from it and almost nobody says it out loud.
High-intent local searches in Surrey — bathroom fitter near me, emergency plumber Cobham, private dentist Weybridge — cost somewhere between four and twelve pounds a click. In the hardest categories it is more.
So £1,000 of media buys you roughly 80 to 250 clicks. Not impressions, not reach — clicks, which is to say individual human beings arriving on your website. Somewhere between two and eight a day.
Hold that number in your head, because it reframes everything. Eight visitors a day is not a firehose you can afford to be careless with. Every wasted click is half a percent of your month.
Where does the money actually disappear?
Broad match. Google offers to match your keyword to searches it judges related. On a large account with thousands of conversions a month this works well — there is enough data for the system to learn from.
On 150 clicks a month there is not. The system explores, because exploring is how it learns, and it explores using your money. That is where bathroom fitter becomes bathroom fitting jobs and how to fit a bathroom and, eventually, somebody in Manchester.
The homepage. Somebody searches bathroom fitter Esher and arrives on a homepage that talks about kitchens, bathrooms, extensions and the family firm since 1998. They now have to find the bathroom part, decide it applies to Esher, and locate a way to make contact. Most do not.
A page that says Bathroom fitting in Esher, shows three bathrooms, states a starting price and has a form above the fold will convert roughly twice as well from the same click. That is not a marginal gain — it halves your cost per enquiry.
How should a small account be structured?
- One campaign. Not six. Six campaigns on £1,000 means six budgets too small to learn from.
- Three or four ad groups, each a tight cluster of near-identical intent. Bathroom fitting, wet rooms, bathroom design — not one group containing all of it.
- Exact and phrase match only, at least for the first two months, until you know what people actually search.
- A negative keyword list you maintain weekly. Fifteen minutes reading the search terms report, adding jobs, courses, DIY, salary. This one habit is worth more than any bidding strategy.
- Location targeting set to presence, not interest. The default includes people merely interested in your area. Change it.
- Call extensions and a tracked number, because a large share of trade enquiries never touch the form.
When should you not run ads at all?
We do not sell paid media before month four with a client, and it costs us money to hold that line.
The reason is that paid traffic to a website that does not convert is an expensive way to prove something you could establish for nothing. If your site takes six seconds to load, buries the phone number and reads like a brochure from 2014, buying visitors will produce a precise measurement of that.
Fix the site. Get the local listing right. Then buy traffic, and buy it into a page built for the search that produced it.
The same logic applies to a business already at capacity. If you are turning work away, more enquiries make your week worse. Put your prices up instead — it is free and it works immediately.
What should you judge the account on?
Not clicks. Not impressions, and emphatically not the position of your advert, which is a vanity number the industry stopped using for good reason.
Cost per enquiry, and then cost per job. If a bathroom is worth £6,000 to you and you win one in four enquiries, an enquiry is worth £1,500 of pipeline. Paying £120 for it is excellent. Paying £600 is still arguably fine. Not knowing which is happening is the actual problem, and it is the one most small accounts have.
Google Ads at £495 to set up and £399 a month, with a minimum of £1,000 in media. Every figure published, and the account is yours — in your own Google account, not held by us, and it stays with you if you leave.
Questions we get asked
How much should a small business spend on Google Ads?
For a local service business, a minimum of about £1,000 a month in media, separate from management. Below that the account gathers too little data for bidding to work and too few clicks to tell a good week from a bad one. If £1,000 a month is not available, spend the money on the website and local search first.
What is a typical cost per click for a trade business in Surrey?
Commonly between £4 and £12 for high-intent local searches, and higher in competitive categories such as emergency plumbing, private dentistry and legal services. That range means a £1,000 monthly budget buys roughly 80 to 250 clicks, which is a useful number to hold in mind when someone promises volume.
Why do Google Ads campaigns fail for small businesses?
Most often because of broad keyword matching combined with automated bidding on too little data, so the budget is spent on searches that were never going to convert. The second most common reason is sending all traffic to a homepage rather than a page that answers the specific search.
Should I use broad match keywords?
Not on a small budget. Broad match asks Google to interpret intent, which needs volume to do well. On 150 clicks a month it will spend a meaningful share of your budget exploring. Exact and phrase match with a maintained negative list gives you control over where the money goes.
How long before Google Ads works?
Expect six to eight weeks before the data is worth drawing conclusions from, and treat anything decided in the first fortnight as a guess. Accounts that are restructured every week never accumulate enough evidence to improve.