What Google Ads costs is three numbers, and you are usually shown one

# What Google Ads costs is three numbers, and you are usually shown one

You typed the question into Google and the first page came back with five different answers. $1.66 a click. $2.69. $5.42. One to two dollars. A hundred to ten thousand dollars a month.

Every one of those was published by somebody who sells Google Ads management or sells the ads themselves, and every one is answering a question standing next to yours rather than yours. The number you need is not a price. It is a sum, and it has three costs in it that go to three different places.

I read the Canadian results for that query on 12 September 2026. Five of the pages returned are vendor or platform pages that opened for me. Four of them do not mention what an agency charges to run the account at all. The fifth names it as a separate cost and prices nothing.

That is what makes two quotes impossible to compare. One agency says $1,500 a month and means $1,500 of media with its fee on top. Another says $1,500 and means $750 of media and $750 of fee. You sign the second, and in month three you are asking why the click volume is half what the first one projected.

Three costs, three payees

Media. Paid to Google, per click, at a price set by auction. Google's own help page on the ad auction says it is "not like an art auction where the highest bidder always wins" — Ad Rank combines your bid with the quality of your ads and landing page, so "even if your competition bids higher than you, you can still win a higher position — at a lower price — with high-quality ads" (support.google.com, the ad auction (opens in a new window), read 12 September 2026). This is the only one of the three that Google sets.

Management. Paid to whoever runs the account. A percentage of media, a flat monthly fee, a minimum, or some combination. Google's pages never mention it, because Google is not the one selling it, and that absence is why so many of the pages answering this question inherit the same blind spot.

Setup. A one-off at the start: campaign build, conversion tracking, analytics configured, the Google tools connected to each other. Paid once, and it is the cost most often left out of a monthly figure entirely, which is how a quote that looked cheap acquires a second invoice in week two.

Ask any quote you receive which of the three it covers. If the answer is a single monthly number, you have been handed a total, not a price.

The average cost per click is not your cost per click

The five figures at the top of this piece are averages across everything Google sells. Your account does not buy everything.

Here are click-price estimates from Canadian keyword data pulled in August 2026, for the market location Canada, on queries a trades business would actually bid on: emergency plumbing at $29.60. window replacement at $25.27. hvac repair at $12.11. metal roofing at $2.71. In the same data, the term for the accessibility work I sell, aoda compliance, estimates $5.98 — which is what a professional-services click looks like standing next to a trades one.

Those are estimates from Google's own keyword data, not invoices. A real account with tight negatives and a good quality score pays something else, and so does a badly built one.

[GATE A — BLOCKED · placeholder 1 of 3] Mike's own bounded observation on how far the keyword estimate has sat from what his accounts actually paid, and in which direction. A direction in honest units, never a percentage. Do not publish this section until the interview fills it.

The spread that matters is not really between industries. It is between two queries that look like the same business. In the same August 2026 pull, portable air conditioner estimates 51 cents a click and hvac technician estimates $15.66. Same trade, thirty times the price, because one of those searchers is buying a box and the other has a problem. An average taken across both describes neither.

Do the sum yourself: budget, click price, conversion rate, cost per enquiry

Three inputs, and the answer falls out of them. You set the budget. You can look up the click price in an afternoon. The third one is your conversion rate, and nobody can give you that.

Google's own budget documentation gives you the conversion between the monthly figure you think in and the daily figure the platform takes: a campaign "might spend up to twice your average daily budget" on a given day, and "at the end of the month, you will have spent no more than 30.4 times your average daily budget" (support.google.com, overdelivery (opens in a new window), read 12 September 2026). So a $2,000 month is a daily budget of about $65.

What $2,000 of media buys, at four of the click prices above, and at two conversion rates — because you do not know yours yet:

Media only. Click prices are the August 2026 Canadian keyword estimates; the conversion rates are illustrative, and picking yours out of a blog post is the single fastest way to get this sum wrong.

The last step is the one the whole sum exists for. Put your cost per enquiry beside what one closed job is worth and beside the share of enquiries you actually close. Say a job is worth $8,000 to you and you close one enquiry in four: at $842 per enquiry you are spending about $3,368 to earn $8,000, which is a real decision with a real answer. At $90 per enquiry it is not a decision. At $987 per enquiry against a $1,200 job there is nothing to discuss, and no campaign structure recovers it.

The conversion rate is the input you are missing, and you will not have an honest one until the tracking underneath the account is telling the truth — which is the number that arrives last, long after you have committed the budget.

[GATE A — BLOCKED · placeholder 2 of 3] The occasion: the last time Mike ran this sum in front of somebody before they spent anything, what the answer came out as, and what they said when they saw it. Needs a when, a who (anonymised if necessary) and a first action. This is also the scene the article's opening should probably be rebuilt around once it exists.

The management fee is a fixed cost wearing a percentage

Percentage-of-spend pricing is the industry standard and it is sold as alignment: your budget rises, the fee rises, everyone pulls the same way. What the percentage hides is the floor underneath it, and the floor is where nearly every small account actually sits.

Mine is 15% of spend with a $750 monthly minimum, and the build is a separate one-off from $625. Those figures are maintained on the Google Ads page, and if this article ever disagrees with it, that page is right. You always pay Google directly for the media. It is never marked up and it never passes through me.

15% of spend does not reach $750 until you are spending $5,000 a month. Below that the fee is flat and the percentage is decoration:

That is not a quirk of my rate card. Any fee with a floor behaves this way, including the ones you are quoted as a percentage with the floor in a footnote, and it is worth asking for the floor before you compare two percentages.

Below roughly $1,000 a month in media the answer is no

The table above is the reason. I decline budgets under roughly $1,000 a month in media, and it is a decline rather than a discount, because the work does not shrink when the budget does. The same search terms have to be read, the same negatives built, the same tracking verified. At $600 of media you would be paying more for the reading than for the ads.

You have two honest options under that line and neither of them is me. Run it yourself on a small number of exact-match terms, accept that it will be worse than a managed account, and keep the fee. Or spend the money somewhere the arithmetic works, which for a lot of small businesses is the phone system, the quote turnaround, or the page the ads would have been pointing at.

Some businesses should not run search ads at all

• Nobody is searching for what you sell. Search captures demand that already exists; it does not create any. Before you check what a click costs, check whether anyone is typing the thing itself.
• The arithmetic does not close. If cost per enquiry divided by your close rate is more than a job is worth, no account structure fixes it. The click price is set by competitors who can pay more than you, and they will keep paying it.
• Nobody answers within the hour. A click you paid $25 for, returned on Thursday, was bought for a competitor.
• You cannot say what a good outcome looks like. If nobody in the business can name the thing that should happen more often, no amount of tracking will invent it.

[GATE A — BLOCKED · placeholder 3 of 3] A specific occasion where Mike told somebody not to run ads, what the disqualifying detail was, and what he told them to do instead. Anonymised is fine; a named client needs a recorded permission. No spend figures, no results.

The pages publishing an average are not lying, and Google's own budget documentation is accurate and worth ten minutes. Neither is about price. Google's pages describe a mechanism it controls, and it has no reason to tell you what somebody else charges to operate it; the agency pages quote an average because a range wide enough to be true is not a useful headline. The sum is still yours to do, and it takes about twenty minutes.

Do it with your own figures before you commit to a monthly number, and do it before you talk to anybody about running the account — including me. If it comes out in favour and you would rather not run it yourself, send me what you spend and what you think you get back, and you will hear which of the three costs your current arrangement is hiding.