What Google Ads actually costs for your trade
Pick your trade and put in your own numbers. The cost per click is the real one Google charges for that trade right now, not an industry average somebody wrote down in 2019.
Google charges $10.01 to $80.29 a click to sit at the top of the page for “plumber near me”, searched about 823,000 times a month in the US. Measured 2026-08-17. Everything below the click price is your own estimate: the job value is a starting figure for this trade, not a measurement, so change it to yours.
| At a click price of | $10.01 (low) | $80.29 (high) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly spend | $1,000 | $1,000 |
| Clicks | 100 | 12 |
| Enquiries | 8 | 1 |
| Customers | 4 | 0 |
| Cost to win one customer | $250 | $2,007 |
| Revenue | $1,598 | $199 |
| Left after ad spend | $598 | -$801 |
This only works at the cheap end of the auction. At $80.29 a click a customer costs $2,007 to win, which is more than the $400 the job is worth. Whether you land near the low or the high end is mostly your city and your landing page.
How to use it
- Pick your trade. The cost per click is pulled from Google Keyword Planner for the search your customers actually type.
- Put in what a customer is worth and how often you close one.
- Work it either way: set a budget and see the revenue, or set a revenue target and see the budget.
What it looks at
- The live cost-per-click range Google reports for the query your customers search, by trade.
- What a month of ads buys at that price: clicks, enquiries, and customers, at your own conversion rate.
- The spend needed to reach a revenue target, and what that leaves once ad cost is taken out.
What it will not tell you
Worth reading before the results, because a check that quietly skipped something is worse than one that says it did.
- The click price is a United States national figure. Your city will differ, sometimes a lot, and a competitive metro runs well above the national number.
- Google reports a RANGE for what advertisers pay at the top of the page, and the range is wide. Both ends are shown for that reason, and neither is a quote.
- Everything downstream of the click is your estimate, not a measurement. We do not know your close rate; the calculator only does the arithmetic on the number you give it.
- A trade we have not priced is not offered rather than guessed at.
Questions
Where does the cost per click come from?
Google Keyword Planner, through our own Ads account, for the query your customers search rather than the one you would search. A plumber's customer types 'plumber near me'; the plumber types 'plumber website design'. Only the first has an ad price attached, and it is the auction you would actually be bidding in.
Why is the range so wide?
Because the auction is. Google reports a low and a high for what advertisers pay to sit at the top of the page, and for some trades the high is five times the low. Where you land depends on your city, your competitors, the hour, and how good your landing page is. A single number would be a more confident answer and a less true one.
Are ads worth it for a small business?
Sometimes, and the calculator is meant to let you find out before you spend rather than after. We ran our own campaign and it produced 673 visits and no signups for $197, which is the kind of result that is much cheaper to discover on this page.
How often do the prices update?
Weekly, and the date each figure was measured is printed next to it.