How much should you spend on Google Ads?

Most budget calculators divide the money by the price of a click and multiply by a conversion rate, so twice the budget buys twice the leads. In one area it doesn't work that way. People there search for what you sell only so often, an ad shows on only part of those searches, and the clicks past the cheap ones are won by bidding higher. Google charges what it takes to beat the ad below yours, so a higher bid raises the price of the clicks you were already getting, not only the new ones.

So the calculator draws leads against budget as a curve that climbs, bends and levels off at the most the area can give. The next click gets dearer along it:

Next click = cheapest click ÷ (1 − share of the area's clicks already bought)

Halfway to the ceiling the next click costs twice the cheapest; three quarters of the way, four times. Given what a lead is worth to you, the budget stops where the next lead would cost more than that, or at the budget that brings 30 leads a month if that comes first: enough to judge a campaign by, without betting the whole market on its first month. Skip the lead value and it's the budget for 30 leads a month, or what a typical advertiser in the area spends, whichever is less.

If even the cheapest leads cost more than one is worth to you, no budget pays, and the answer says so instead of giving you one, with any service whose leads start below what yours is worth. If the area brings under one lead a month at any budget, it says that too, and finds the nearest wider area that brings more.

The three questions ask what no study can: what you sell, where your customers are, and the most a lead is worth paying for. That last one is the answer the lead value calculator works out from what a job brings in and how many leads become one, so it's asked once here and never rebuilt. Worked out there, it comes back with your close rate, and the answer counts customers as well as leads. Every other figure is on the answer screen under How this was worked out, with its source, and each one can be replaced with your own.

Searches. For 146 kinds of business, how often people search for each service, from Google's own search counts for the year to August 2026 (Keyword Planner, through DataForSEO): for the country, every state and, for the first 30, every county of 100,000 people or more. For the other 116, each state's count is shared out over its counties by how much more or less each county searched than its state across those 30. A ZIP code counts by how many people live there, from the US Census Bureau's 2020 to 2024 American Community Survey, at its county's rate, or its state's where the county is smaller.

Searches for the business itself. People who want a roof repair and people who want a new roof both type “roofer near me”. Where a business's own name is searched for several of its services, those searches are shared among them in proportion to each one's own searches, so picking one service keeps its part. Where most of those people want one service, as most typing “plumber near me” want a repair, the searches stay with it.

Searches no person typed. Google counts a search where it comes from, and machines on servers search too. In our data Loudoun County, Virginia, home to the world's largest cluster of data centers, sent three quarters of the country's searches for fire damage restoration, and its typical search ran at about four times the rest of Virginia's rate per resident, where its neighbors ran close to it. So Loudoun is given the rest of Virginia's rate. Anywhere else, a county's searches for a service are kept to 4 times the rest of its state's per resident, or 5 times the country's where that is more, plus 200 a month because Google rounds small counts up. What is cut comes off the state's and the country's counts too.

Click prices. Google's own prices for each search, in your area and across the country: what advertisers bid to show at the top, and what they paid for a click on average. Across the 13 home-service trades LocaliQ measured one by one, a typical campaign paid about 0.591 times Google's price, so Google's prices are scaled by that. Where LocaliQ measures the business itself, its median sets the price, and Google's only price the services and your area against each other. Where it doesn't, the price is the median for the business's industry, moved a third of the way toward Google's. Against the 31 businesses LocaliQ does measure, the industry's median came closer than Google's price, but Google's bids rightly mark the few that cost several times their industry, such as insurance and injury law. No service is priced above the high end of what advertisers bid to show at the top for its searches.

Click and lead rates. How often an ad is clicked, and how often a click becomes a lead or a sale, are LocaliQ's medians: from the business's own row where it has one, in LocaliQ's studies of home services, healthcare, automotive and real estate campaigns from 2024 to 2026, else its industry's (April 2025 to March 2026). Half of those campaigns did better and half did worse.

Where the curve starts. The median price is what a typical campaign averages, not what its cheapest clicks cost. In one study of 89 accounts the median campaign showed on 38.76% of the searches it could have (Doctor Ads, 2026), a little over halfway to the 70% we judge an ad can win, so the curve starts at about 69% of the median price.

Businesses without their own search counts. For one business on the list, Google counted too few searches, and an industry picked instead has none of its own. For them the calculator can't see where an area runs out, so there's no curve. It prices a click at the median for the closest industry, moved by how dear clicks run in your area across every search measured, and advises the budget for 30 leads a month at that price. The answer says when it has done this.

Google asks for an average daily budget, so divide the monthly figure by 30.4. A campaign can spend up to twice that on a busy day, but over a month Google never charges more than 30.4 times it (About average daily budgets).

Google suggests judging a Smart Bidding strategy over “longer time periods that have at least 30 conversions, such as a month or longer” (About Smart Bidding). So the answer shows how long the first 30 leads take at a few budgets, and what they cost: a smaller budget gets there later and pays a little less for each, a bigger one sooner. The full reasoning is in how much to spend on Google Ads.

Published medians are halfway points. The calculator can't see your ads, your website or your reviews, which move both what a click costs and how many clicks become leads. Once a campaign has run for a month, put what it spent and the leads it brought under How this was worked out, and the curve is drawn through your own month.

Searches that name a town, like “plumber in Mesa”, aren't counted, and Google gave no count for 258 of the 3,562 searches measured, so an area's ceiling runs a little low.

What a lead is worth is yours to say. If repeat work and referrals make a customer worth more to you than the first sale, the most you'd pay for a lead goes up, and so does the budget.