The difference between advertising on Google and advertising on social media is intent. On social media, the advert appears to someone who was looking at something else. On Google, it appears to someone who typed exactly what your company sells, at the moment they decided to solve the problem.
That's why it's usually the channel with the fastest response. It's also why so much money gets spent there with no return: the intent is there, everything else is what fails.
It isn't an auction won by whoever pays most
When someone searches, Google runs an instant auction among the advertisers who bid on that phrase. You pay per click, not to appear.
What decides the position isn't just the bid. There's also a quality score, which assesses whether the advert matches what was searched and whether the page someone lands on actually answers the question. An advertiser with well-made adverts and a good landing page can outrank one bidding more per click.
The practical consequence is the one that matters: improving the landing page is often cheaper than raising the budget. Sending every click to the homepage, instead of the page for the advertised service, is the most expensive and most common mistake.
How much does it cost? It depends, and anyone who gives you a number is guessing
There's no universal minimum budget. What there is, is a sum you can do before spending anything at all.
Check how much, on average, a click costs on the phrases that matter to your business — there are tools that estimate this. Location matters, a great deal: "locksmith in Aveiro" costs a fraction of the same phrase with no location attached, because it competes with half a dozen companies instead of the whole country. Then multiply by how many clicks it usually takes to get an enquiry, and by how many enquiries it takes to close a deal. If a click costs two euros, if it takes twenty clicks for one enquiry and five enquiries for one customer, that customer costs you two hundred euros in advertising. The question becomes simple: what's a customer worth to you?
This sum has another use. If the result is higher than a business's margin, no budget fixes that — the channel isn't right for that service, and it's better to know that before spending.
Too small a budget isn't caution, it's waste
There's a trap here. With a budget well below what that auction costs, the advert shows up half a dozen times a day, there's never enough data to see what's working, and after two months the conclusion is "Google Ads doesn't work."
What didn't work was entering an auction without enough to stay in it. Better to put everything into one service and one area for three months than spread the same money across five campaigns that never get off the ground.
What to expect, and when
First few weeks: the system is learning and the numbers are poor. Tinkering with it every day at this stage is the best way to never get past it.
Second month: there's now enough data to cut what isn't converting — phrases bringing in the wrong clicks, times of day that don't pay off, areas that don't matter. This is where cost per enquiry starts to drop.
Third month: this is when the decision gets made. With the sum done earlier, you know whether the cost per customer fits what you can afford.
A note on automation: today a good share of auction decisions are made by automated systems, and that's genuinely a good thing — they perform better than the manual management people used to do. But they only learn from what they're told. If conversion tracking is set up wrong, the system will optimise, with total efficiency, for the wrong goal.
When it isn't worth it
Three situations where the money is better spent elsewhere: when nobody's searching for what you sell because it's a brand-new category; when the margin doesn't cover the cost per customer; and when the site still doesn't convert the visitors it already gets — in which case you're paying to fill a leaking bucket, and the work to do first is in the article on visits that never become enquiries.
If you're torn between this and social media, we've written about that in when paid ads aren't working. Campaign management is what we do in SEO and SEM.
Want to know if it pays off in your case?
Tell us what you sell and what a customer is worth to you. We'll do the sum before proposing any investment.