The three costs not to confuse
- The advertising budget: the money you pay Google or Meta directly to show your ads. It is not included in our packages and stays on your account.
- The setup cost: the work of creating the account, tracking, campaigns and ads. In our packages it starts from €750.
- The management cost: if you want someone to follow the campaigns over time. It is not included beyond what the package states.
How the budget works
In search campaigns ads compete for space in an auction, and you generally pay for each click. You set a maximum daily budget; the cost of each click varies with the sector, the competition and the quality of the ads. That is why there is no figure valid for everyone: whoever gives you one without knowing your sector is making it up.
How to estimate a starting budget
A purely illustrative example: if a customer leaves you €400 of margin and you want to spend at most €100 to win one, for 10 customers a month you need about €1,000 of budget. With real numbers from your sector the figures will differ.
- Start from the value of a customer: how much you earn, on average, from a new sale or enquiry.
- Decide how much you are willing to spend to win one: it is your maximum cost per customer.
- Estimate how many customers you want per month: the monthly budget is roughly desired customers times maximum cost per customer.
- Check the estimated cost per click in Google's Keyword Planner and make sure the numbers add up.
Why tracking comes before budget
Without measured conversions you do not know which ads bring enquiries and which burn money. That is why every one of our packages starts from conversion tracking, connected to Google Analytics, and only then sets up campaigns and budget.
The mistakes that burn budget
To see what each tier includes, check the fixed-price Google and Meta ads campaigns page.
- No tracking: money is spent without knowing what works.
- Keywords that are too generic: lots of clicks from people who do not buy.
- A weak landing page: ads bring people who then do not act.
- No exclusion of irrelevant searches (negative keywords).
- Nobody looks at the data for weeks.