The question we get most often: “what does Google Ads cost?” The short answer: there's no fixed price. The long answer is far more useful — because it shows where it's decided whether your money works or burns. (If you'd rather leave it to us: this is how we run advertising.)
Why isn't there a fixed price?
Google Ads is an auction. You don't pay a fixed “list price”; you compete with other advertisers for every single click. The price of a click depends on three main things:
- Competition: the more advertisers bidding on the same keyword, the more expensive it gets. A legal or insurance keyword can be many times the price of a niche product's.
- Quality Score: Google rewards a relevant ad and a good landing page — you get a better position for less. A low-quality advertiser pays a premium.
- Targeting: where, when, on what device and to whom you appear. The same keyword costs differently in a capital city at peak time than in a rural area at dawn.
Daily or monthly budget?
In Google you set a daily budget per campaign. The system tries to hold to it day by day (it can go over in the short term, but evens out by the end of the month). The practical formula is simple: daily budget × 30.4 ≈ monthly spend. If your monthly budget is 150 000 HUF, that's about 5 000 HUF a day.
Where does the money leak away?
In most accounts the budget isn't too small — it drains in the wrong places. The most common money pits:
- No conversion tracking. If you don't measure what produces a purchase or an enquiry, you're bidding blind. This is the most expensive mistake.
- No negative keywords. You're paying for searches that never buy (“free”, “jobs”, “DIY”, and so on).
- Match types too broad. A broad-match keyword shows against a huge number of irrelevant searches if there's no tracking and no exclusions alongside it.
- A weak landing page. A good ad counts for nothing if the landing page is slow or unclear — the click costs money but produces no client.
- “Set it and forget it”. The auction and the competition change; without optimisation a campaign slowly decays.
How much should you start with?
Don't start with the budget, start with the target — the budget follows backwards from it:
ad budget = how many enquiries you need in a month × what one enquiry costs
In our experience an enquiry in Hungarian service markets runs between 3 000 and 8 000 HUF — with swings both below and above that, depending on the industry and the competition. If 20 enquiries a month is enough for your capacity, that's a 60 000–160 000 HUF ad budget. If you need 80, that's already 240 000–640 000 HUF. Same cost per lead, a completely different order of magnitude — which is why quoting an “average” budget makes no sense without knowing how much work you can take on.
Two things are worth keeping apart: the ad budget goes to the platform, from your own account, and the management fee is on top of that. The sum of the two is your real monthly cost — our pricing and the lead target are here.
Starting with less is fine too: the account just learns more slowly, and it takes longer to find out what's worth scaling.
The bottom line
Google Ads isn't expensive because “it costs a lot” — it's expensive when you run it without tracking and optimisation. Sort out the measurement first (what counts as a conversion for you), then the exclusions and the landing page — and only then increase the budget on what has proven to deliver.
Related articles
- The lead has landed — now what? The maths of callbacks and follow-up
- What to do on social media in the first 90 days
- Why your website is slow — and what a slow landing page costs you
Want us to handle it?
If you'd rather not deal with this, SOULSILVER takes it over. We build campaigns that produce actual enquiries — and we put the lead target in the contract. This is how we win clients, or write to info@soulsilvermarketing.com.