How much budget do you need for Google Ads

The honest version of the answer is: it depends on your market. The useful version is that you can calculate it instead of guessing, and that there is a floor below which advertising mostly costs money without teaching you anything.

Work backwards

Start with what a customer is worth to you, not with what you are willing to lose.

1. What does a customer earn you? Take the average job, or better: the value over the whole relationship. An installer who also does the annual service afterwards counts more than that one boiler.
2. How much of that is margin? Steering on revenue is a classic way to stay very busy and keep nothing.
3. How many enquiries become customers? If one in three quotes goes through, an enquiry may cost at most a third of your margin.
4. So what may an enquiry cost? That is your maximum cost per enquiry, your CPA.
5. How many enquiries do you want per month? Multiply that by your maximum CPA and you have a budget that means something.

An example with round numbers: a job earns 1,500 euros, your margin is 400 euros, one in three quotes becomes a customer. Then an enquiry may cost around 130 euros before it starts costing you money. Want ten jobs a month, then you need thirty enquiries and you land at roughly 3,900 euros of budget. That is a worked example, not a promise: click prices vary enormously by sector.

The floor

Below roughly 500 euros a month, most Dutch markets give you too few clicks to establish anything. You will get results, but no reliable answer to the question of what works. Any conclusion built on ten clicks is coincidence.

That is also why AdWarp would rather say there is too little data than give advice at small accounts. Advice with an invented basis is worse than no advice.

If you have less to spend, two routes do work: narrow your reach instead of spreading your budget thinner, for instance one service and one region. Or advertise in waves and analyse per wave, instead of a little every month.

Daily budget and what Google does with it

You set a daily budget, but Google may spend more on busy days and compensates on quiet ones. Across a month it stays within your monthly amount. So do not be alarmed by a day that shoots well above it.

If your budget runs out before midday every day, you are giving away visibility during the hours you did not choose. Narrowing your reach is then better than raising your budget.

What AdWarp does here

The audit shows how much of your current budget went to searches that produced nothing. That is usually the cheapest room there is: money you already spend and can move without raising your budget.

What we do not know is your margin and your average customer value. You can enter those in the account under your goals, and Warp will use them. If you do not, we show cost per enquiry without claiming whether it is good or bad, because we could not know. See also CPA and ROAS.