How much should a Birmingham business spend on Google Ads a month?

The floor

An account needs enough clicks a month to tell the difference between a bad week and a bad campaign, and Smart Bidding needs a few dozen conversions a month before its targets behave. At £3 a click and one enquiry in twenty clicks, £600 buys two hundred clicks and ten enquiries, which is enough to learn from slowly. At £10 a click, the same £600 buys sixty clicks and three enquiries, which is not. So the floor depends on your sector's click price: a Birmingham restaurant or garage can start lower than a solicitor, and a solicitor starting on £500 is paying for noise.

The sum

1. Find what a click costs for five searches a customer would type, in Keyword Planner with Birmingham set as the location.
2. Divide by the share of clicks that become an enquiry. One in twenty is realistic for a page built for the search; a homepage does worse.
3. That is the ad spend per enquiry. Add the management fee spread over the month's enquiries.
4. Compare with what an enquiry is worth to you: the margin on an average job or order, times the share of enquiries you win.
5. If the enquiry costs less than it is worth, multiply the ad spend per enquiry by the number of enquiries you want a month. That is the budget.

The ceiling

The account tells you when more money would buy more customers. The Search campaign reports the share of eligible searches your ad showed for and why it did not show for the rest: lost to budget, or lost to rank. Share lost to budget with a cost per enquiry below what an enquiry is worth is the signal to spend more, in steps of twenty or thirty per cent with a fortnight between them, because each step buys a slightly dearer click than the last. Share lost to rank means more budget buys nothing until the ad or the page improves.

Where Birmingham budgets go wrong

The budget is whatever was left over, so it is too small to learn from or too large for the searches in the patch. Google's suggested daily budget is accepted; it is calculated to spend, not to convert. The radius is drawn from the city centre and the budget is spread across Dudley and Solihull for a business that serves neither. The same amount is spent in every month of the year, so the Christmas market weeks are capped by lunchtime and February is overpaid. And the management fee is left out of the sum, so an account that looks profitable on ad spend alone is not.

What to do with the first month

Treat the starting budget as an estimate and replace every number in the sum with a real one at the end of the month: the actual click price, the actual conversion rate, the actual enquiries. Then recalculate rather than defend. The report at month three is written to do exactly that, and it recommends more, less or stop in plain words.

Read on

The page that does this for you is Google Ads costs in Birmingham, sourced; the long version is the guide What Birmingham businesses actually pay per click.