How much should you spend on Google Ads? (AUD budget guide)

There is no universal Google Ads budget. Work it out from three numbers: the leads or sales you need each month, the conversion rate you can expect from your landing page, and the cost per click Keyword Planner shows for your keywords in your area. Budget equals leads needed divided by conversion rate multiplied by CPC, plus a margin for testing. For most Perth service businesses that lands well above the few hundred dollars a month people hope for.

How much should you spend on Google Ads? The short answer

Spend enough to buy the clicks that produce a readable number of conversions every month, and no more than the leads are worth. The formula is:

Monthly budget = (leads needed ÷ conversion rate) × cost per click, plus 15 to 20 per cent for testing.

One rule sits behind the formula. Smart Bidding needs conversions to learn from, and Google’s guidance recommends judging performance over periods with at least 30 conversions, such as a month or longer, or 50 conversions for Target ROAS. If your budget cannot buy that many conversions, plan for manual or Maximise clicks bidding at first and read our guide to choosing a bidding strategy before you launch.

What budget do you need to run Google Ads effectively?

You need enough to buy the clicks that produce a readable number of conversions each month, and that figure is set by your CPC and conversion rate, not by a fixed dollar amount. A budget that buys 40 clicks a month at a 5 per cent conversion rate produces two leads, which tells you nothing about whether the channel works.

Think of two budgets rather than one. A testing budget exists to learn what converts: which keywords, which ads, which landing page, which hours. It should be large enough to produce a conversion rate you can trust within six to eight weeks. A scaling budget buys more of what the testing budget proved. Most businesses that “tried Google Ads and it did not work” ran a scaling budget’s expectations on a testing budget’s money.

Very small budgets on competitive terms fail for the same reason. If clicks cost $15 and you spend $300 a month, you get 20 clicks, your ads stop showing by mid-morning, and you never see enough data to fix anything. Either narrow the keywords until the budget buys meaningful volume, or wait until you can fund the test properly.

How to calculate your Google Ads budget

Calculate your Google Ads budget in five steps: set a monthly lead or sales target, pick a conversion rate, pull CPCs from Keyword Planner, multiply, then add a testing margin.

Step 1: set a monthly lead or sales target

Start from what the business needs, not from what feels affordable. How many enquiries a month do you need to hit your sales target, given how many enquiries your team closes? If you close one in four, and you want five new customers, you need 20 leads.

Step 2: pick a conversion rate

Use your own data if you have it: the conversion rate of your landing page from organic or referral traffic in GA4 is a fair starting point, and paid traffic usually converts a little lower at first. If you have no data, choose a conservative assumption and label it as one in your plan. The rate you pick moves the budget more than any other input, so revisit it after the first month with real numbers.

Step 3: pull CPCs from Keyword Planner

Open Keyword Planner in your Google Ads account, set the location to Australia and then to your city or region, and enter your keyword list. Use the top-of-page bid range rather than the average CPC, because that is what it costs to show where people click. Our guide to Google Ads keyword research covers how to build that list.

This is also how you build your own industry benchmark. Published CPC tables are almost all US data in US dollars, and they say nothing about what “emergency electrician Joondalup” costs on a Tuesday. Run Keyword Planner on your own keywords, in your own location, and repeat it each quarter so the budget tracks the market.

Step 4: budget = target ÷ conversion rate × CPC

Divide the leads you need by the conversion rate to get the clicks you need, then multiply by CPC to get the spend. That is the core budget.

Step 5: add 15 to 20 per cent for testing and seasonality

Every account spends some money learning: new keywords, new ads, a landing page variant, a month where the market gets more expensive. Add 15 to 20 per cent so that learning does not come out of the lead target.

A worked example: Perth electrician

Every figure below is an assumption chosen to show the method, not a benchmark. Replace the CPC with a live Keyword Planner figure for your own keywords and date it in your plan.

• Target: 20 leads a month (assumption).
• Conversion rate: 6 per cent of clicks become enquiries (assumption, for a focused landing page with click-to-call).
• CPC: $12, an assumed top-of-page figure for “electrician Perth” terms (assumption, not a Keyword Planner reading).
• Clicks needed: 20 ÷ 0.06 = 333 clicks.
• Core budget: 333 × $12 = about $4,000 a month.
• With testing margin: $4,600 to $4,800 a month.

Now the sensitivity, because this is where budgets go wrong. Drop the conversion rate to 4 per cent and you need 500 clicks, so the core budget becomes $6,000. Keep 6 per cent but lift the CPC to $18 and 333 clicks cost $6,000. Change both and you are at $9,000 for the same 20 leads. The landing page and the keyword list are the two levers that decide whether Google Ads is affordable, and both are in your control.

How much should an electrician spend on Google Ads?

Under the assumptions above, a Perth electrician needing 20 enquiries a month would budget about $4,000 in ad spend plus a testing margin, and the real figure depends on the electrician’s own CPCs and landing page. Emergency and after-hours searches carry different CPCs and convert differently from installation, inspection and solar queries, so run the calculation per campaign rather than for the trade as a whole. An emergency campaign might justify a higher CPC on a smaller budget because the job is won on the first call, while a switchboard upgrade campaign needs a quote page and a longer decision.

Google Ads budget by goal

The table gives a method for each goal and an indicative range. The ranges are arithmetic on the worked example’s assumed $12 CPC and 6 per cent conversion rate, not Keyword Planner benchmarks, so substitute your own figures before you commit.

Goal	What the budget must buy	Indicative monthly range (AUD)	Notes
Test the channel	Enough clicks to read a conversion rate, roughly 150 to 250 clicks a month on a short exact and phrase match list	$1,800 to $3,000	One campaign, one landing page. Judge on cost per lead after eight weeks, not on week one
Steady local lead flow	Leads needed ÷ conversion rate × CPC, plus 15 to 20 per cent	$4,600 to $4,800 for 20 leads a month	The worked example. Add a small brand campaign
Dominant share of local search	The steady-flow figure divided by your search impression share	$10,000 at 40 per cent impression share for the example above	Check Search lost impression share (budget) before spending this
E-commerce growth	Target revenue ÷ target ROAS, checked against clicks × CPC from Shopping and Search data	$12,500 for $50,000 in target revenue at a 4:1 ROAS target	Both inputs are assumptions. Margin decides the ROAS target, not the platform

How many Google Ads campaigns does a $3,000 a month budget realistically support?

Usually one or two non-brand Search campaigns plus a small brand campaign. At the worked example’s assumed $12 CPC, $3,000 buys about 250 clicks a month, which at 6 per cent is 15 enquiries. Split that across five campaigns and each one gets 50 clicks a month, three conversions, and no chance of learning anything.

The structure that works at this level is one core service campaign covering your best-converting keywords, one brand campaign to protect your name, and nothing else until the core campaign has produced a stable cost per lead for two consecutive months. Then add a second service campaign, funded by a budget increase rather than by starving the first.

Performance Max is a poor fit at $3,000 unless you sell products with a feed and already have conversion history for it to learn from. At small budgets it spends on brand searches unless you exclude them, and it reports too little for you to see why. Standard Search gives you the keyword and search term data you need to make the budget decisions in this guide.

How does budget forecasting work?

Budget forecasting multiplies expected impressions by expected click-through rate and CPC for a keyword set, then applies an assumed conversion rate to estimate leads or sales for a given spend. Google offers two tools that do this for you, and both are useful if you know what they leave out.

Keyword Planner forecasts take your bid, budget, seasonality and historical ad quality into account. Google’s own documentation notes the limits: new advertisers get forecasts based on historical averages for all advertisers, forecasts are less accurate for small geographic areas and for overlapping keywords, and each forecast is based on one week of data averaged into daily figures.

Performance Planner models how changing spend or targets would affect conversions and conversion value, by simulating relevant auctions over the last seven to ten days including seasonality, competitor activity and landing page. Campaigns must meet minimum click, impression and conversion thresholds and have a stable bid strategy to be eligible, and since 09/03/2026 it no longer supports Display and Video campaigns or plans based on impression share.

Neither tool knows what your landing page will actually convert at, and both assume the auction behaves as it did recently. Sanity-check every forecast against your own account: if the plan says 400 clicks at $9 and your last 90 days show $14, trust the account. Where you have no history, run a forecast, halve the conversion rate it implies, and treat the result as the first month’s hypothesis.

How to set a monthly budget in Google Ads

Google Ads runs on average daily budgets, so divide your monthly figure by 30.4 to get the daily amount. Google’s documentation states that a campaign might spend up to twice its average daily budget on a given day to take advantage of traffic, but no more than 30.4 times the average daily budget in a month. A $4,000 monthly budget is a $131.58 daily budget, with days as high as $263 and a monthly ceiling of $4,000.

Three settings help you control the month:

• Shared budgets let two or more campaigns draw from one pool, which is useful when a brand and a core campaign should not compete for the last dollar of the day.
• Account-level spend limit caps total spend across every campaign for the month, whatever the daily budgets add up to.
• Pacing a launch means starting at 60 to 70 per cent of the planned daily budget for the first two weeks, while search terms are being cleaned up, then lifting to the full figure once the negatives are in.

Management fees: what to budget on top of ad spend

Agency management fees are separate from the money paid to Google, and they are charged as a flat monthly fee, as a percentage of spend, or as a hybrid of a base fee plus a percentage. Ad spend is billed by Google to your own account, and the fee is what you pay for the people who run it.

Compare models on what they cost at your actual spend, and on what they cost at the spend you plan to reach. A percentage fee grows with you, and a flat fee gets cheaper as a share of spend as you grow. At small budgets a fee that looks large relative to spend can still be right, because the work of building the account, the tracking and the landing page is the same whether the budget is $2,000 or $20,000.

PWD does not publish a price list, because the fee follows a scoping call that looks at your keywords, your market and what needs to be built. Our Google Ads management in Perth page explains what is included and how it is reported.

Budget discipline: the PWD scheduling rule

PWD’s standard is that non-brand campaigns run weekdays 6am to 6pm Perth time, and brand campaigns run 24/7. It is the single biggest budget lever we apply to a service business account, and it costs nothing.

For a service business, non-brand conversions cluster in the hours when someone can answer the phone or reply to a form. A search for “electrician Perth” at 11pm on a Saturday is real, but the enquiry rarely arrives and, when it does, the customer has usually called three other businesses by Monday. Brand demand is different: someone searching your name already wants you, and that click should be won at any hour.

The effect on a fixed budget is arithmetic. A $4,000 monthly budget spread over 30.4 days is about $132 a day. The same budget over roughly 22 weekdays is about $184 a day, concentrated in the 12 hours that convert. You buy the same number of clicks, in the hours where a higher share of them become customers. Read our guide to ad scheduling in Google Ads for how to set it up and how to check your own account’s hour-of-day data before you copy the rule.

When to increase your Google Ads budget

Increase the budget when four signals line up:

• Search lost impression share (budget) sits above about 10 per cent month after month. You are being priced out of auctions you would win.
• Cost per lead is stable across two or more months, so more spend should buy more leads at a similar price.
• Lead quality is confirmed in the CRM, not only in the conversion column. More of the wrong leads is not growth.
• The landing page conversion rate is holding as volume grows. If it falls as you scale, the page is the constraint, not the budget.

Scale in steps of 20 to 30 per cent, and give each step two to three weeks before judging it.

Common Google Ads budget mistakes

• Starting too big. Launching at full scale before the search terms are clean and the landing page is proven wastes the first month’s money on learning that a smaller budget would have taught you.
• Spreading too thin. Ten campaigns at $100 each perform worse than two at $500. Concentrate the budget until you have data.
• Ignoring seasonality. Air conditioning peaks in summer and accountants peak at tax time. Plan the increases before the season, not during it.
• Not funding testing. Without the 15 to 20 per cent margin, every test comes out of the lead target and gets cancelled the first time results dip.
• No negative keywords. Broad and phrase match without a negative list pays for searches you would never want. Review search terms weekly.
• Pausing to save money. Frequent pausing resets what Smart Bidding has learned. Reduce the daily budget in slow periods instead.

Frequently asked questions

How much budget do I need for Google AdWords?

Google AdWords was renamed Google Ads in 2018, so the answer is the same as for Google Ads: divide the leads you need by your conversion rate, multiply by the cost per click Keyword Planner shows for your keywords in your area, and add 15 to 20 per cent for testing. Any guide still quoting AdWords budgets is old enough that its CPC figures should be ignored.

How do I estimate a Google Ads budget without historical data?

Use Keyword Planner for CPCs and a conservative conversion rate assumption, then treat the first two months as the test that replaces the assumption with data. Set the location to your city, use the top-of-page bid range, and pick a conversion rate below what you hope for. Review the real conversion rate after eight weeks and recalculate the budget from it.

Get a Google Ads budget plan built from your numbers

A Google Ads budget is a calculation, not a guess, and every input in it belongs to your business: your lead target, your landing page and your keywords in your market. PWD builds the budget from those numbers, sets the scheduling and structure that make it go furthest, and reports cost per lead against the target every month.

Want a budget built from your numbers, not a US benchmark? Ask PWD for a Google Ads budget plan, or call 08 6146 0195.