It is the first question every business owner asks, and most agencies answer it backwards. They start from what you can afford. The right answer starts from what a customer is worth to you, because a Google Ads budget is not a cost you set. It is an investment you size.
Start with the only maths that matters
Three numbers decide everything: what an average job is worth to you, how many enquiries it takes to win one, and what a click costs in your market. Work backwards from there. If your average job is worth $2,000, you close one in three enquiries, and a lead costs you $60, then every $180 of properly spent budget returns $2,000 of work. Once you can see that equation for your own business, the budget question stops being scary and starts being obvious.
This is also why Google Ads management done properly always begins with tracking. If you cannot connect spend to enquiries and enquiries to booked jobs, you are not budgeting, you are guessing.
What clicks actually cost in Australia
Costs vary wildly by industry and city. Emergency trades in Sydney and Melbourne regularly see clicks north of $15, sometimes several times that in legal and financial niches, while regional markets and less contested services can sit in the low single digits. The pattern that holds everywhere: the more urgent and valuable the job, the more the click costs, and the more it is worth paying for.
City matters too. Melbourne runs the most expensive auctions in the country, Sydney is close behind, while Brisbane and Perth still offer some of the best value clicks an Australian service business can buy. The same budget travels very different distances depending on where you are spending it.
The minimum that actually works
Here is the uncomfortable truth most agencies soften: there is a floor below which Google Ads cannot work, and it is set by data, not by ambition. Campaigns learn from clicks and conversions. Spread a tiny budget across expensive keywords and you get a handful of clicks a day, no pattern for the system to learn from, and a verdict on the channel that was never fair.
For most Australian service businesses, meaningful traction starts somewhere between $1,500 and $3,000 a month in ad spend, with competitive metro trades often needing the upper end just to gather enough data to optimise. Below that, you are usually better off narrowing the campaign, fewer suburbs, one hero service, than thinning the whole thing to death.
A budget too small to generate data is not a smaller bet. It is a different bet, and it almost always loses.
When to scale, and when not to
Scale when the maths says so, not the mood. If your cost per lead is stable, your close rate is holding and your team can handle more work, extra budget is close to a printing press. If leads are cheap but jobs are not closing, the budget is not the problem, the follow-up or the offer is, and more spend just buys the same leak at a larger size.
The other trap is scaling by loosening. Adding budget by adding broader keywords and vaguer targeting usually drops efficiency faster than it adds volume. Scale into what is already working: more of the winning suburbs, longer hours on the winning campaigns, deeper coverage of the winning services.
The straight answer
So how much should you spend? Enough that the campaign can learn, sized against what a customer is worth to you, in a structure tight enough that none of it leaks. For most service businesses that means starting in the $1,500 to $3,000 a month range and letting the tracked numbers argue for every increase after that. Our Google Ads packages keep the management fee flat so the budget conversation stays about your ad spend, and if you want the equation run on your actual market and job values, that is exactly what the free audit is for.