How to set a Google Ads budget for lead generation, with the maths shown
There is no universal good budget for Google Ads: the right figure is your cost per click, multiplied by the clicks a lead takes, multiplied by the leads you need. This guide shows that arithmetic in full, runs £20 a day against £100 a day on the same maths, and is candid about the budgets where the honest answer is not yet.
The budget maths: work backwards from a lead
The formula is plain: monthly budget equals leads needed, multiplied by clicks per lead, multiplied by cost per click. Both multipliers vary by industry by an order of magnitude, and there is no reliable single UK CPC benchmark to plug in — the figures circulating online are mostly US-derived, and our own keyword dataset's click prices are unpriced or likely denominated in USD. So this guide shows the method rather than inventing an average. For the CPC side, see how much Google Ads costs in the UK; for the CPL side, see cost-per-lead benchmarks by industry.
| metric | £20/day | £100/day |
|---|---|---|
| monthly spend | £600 | £3,000 |
| illustrative cost per click | £2.50 | £2.50 |
| clicks bought per month | 240 | 1,200 |
| illustrative click-to-lead rate | 1 in 12 | 1 in 12 |
| leads per month | 20 | 100 |
| cost per lead | £30 | £30 |
Illustrative arithmetic only — the inputs are examples, not UK benchmarks. No reliable UK CPC benchmark exists in our dataset (values unpriced or likely USD).
On identical inputs the cost per lead is identical at both budgets — budget does not buy efficiency, it buys volume and data rate. What moves cost per lead is the click price and the conversion rate; what the bigger budget buys is faster learning — a statistical read in weeks instead of months.
Is £20 a day enough for Google Ads?
£20 a day — about £600 a month — works only where clicks are cheap. This is conditional arithmetic, not a benchmark: if clicks in your market cost £1–£3, that budget buys enough traffic to learn from. If they cost £5–£10 or more, it buys one or two clicks a day, data arrives too slowly to optimise, and results will read as random noise rather than a trend. Run the worked example above with your own click price before you commit. For some sectors, £20 a day sits below the practical floor, and the honest move is to wait and save rather than trickle-spend into an account that can never gather enough data to improve.
Is £100 a day good for Google Ads?
At £100 a day — about £3,000 a month — most UK lead-generation accounts gather conversion data at a usable rate, and the constraint flips: the question stops being "is it enough?" and becomes "is it reaching the right searches?". At this level the common failure modes are allocation problems — search-term waste, over-broad match types, spend drifting to the wrong geography or the wrong hours — rather than starvation. That is a qualitative pattern we see across accounts, not a quoted waste percentage; we don't have a sourced figure for how much of a £100-a-day budget typically leaks, so we won't print one.
£500 or £1,000 a month: where the practical floor sits
Around £500 a month is where we tell most service businesses to think hard. It can work with tight geography, exact-match keywords and cheap clicks, but one bad week is a large share of the month, and learning is slow. Around £1,000 a month is a workable start for many trades and local services; in expensive sectors — legal, financial, some medical — the same money buys far fewer clicks.
Candour is the content here, so three situations where the right budget is £0 for now: the job value is too low to pay back a realistic cost per lead; there is no landing page worth sending paid clicks to; or the budget is so small the account can never leave guesswork. Per-sector economics live on our industry pages, each carrying its own economics table as data lands.
Budget is not the first thing to fix
A bigger budget amplifies whatever the account already does — including its faults. Two checks come before any budget decision: conversion tracking that verifiably fires (a broken tag makes every budget look wasted), and the page the click lands on — see landing page design.
A free PPC audit reports what your actual click price and conversion rate are, in writing — the two inputs this post's maths needs.
Media spend versus management fee
The budget discussed above is media spend, paid to Google; a management fee, paid to an agency or freelancer, sits on top and matters proportionally more at small budgets — on a £500 media budget, a fee can exceed the spend. GrowthLine's fees are published in full — see our published management fees — and the service behind them is itemised at what PPC management includes.
Google Ads budget FAQs
Is $100 a day good for Google Ads?
This question reaches UK search results in dollars because most published coverage is American. Treated as a planning figure of around £100 a day (about £3,000 a month), it is enough for most UK lead-generation accounts to gather conversion data at a usable rate. Whether it is good depends on the two numbers that decide everything — your cost per click and your click-to-lead rate — and at this level the real question is usually whether the spend is reaching the right searches, not whether there is enough of it.
Is $20 a day good for Google Ads?
Around £20 a day — roughly £600 a month — works only where clicks are cheap. If clicks in your market cost £1 to £3 it buys enough traffic to learn from; where they cost £5 or £10 or more it buys one or two clicks a day, data arrives too slowly to optimise, and results will look random. Run the worked example in this guide with your own click price before committing: in some sectors £20 a day is below the practical floor.
Is $500 a month enough for Google Ads?
Around £500 a month is the level at which we would tell most service businesses to think carefully. It can work in low click-cost local markets with tight geography and exact-match keywords, but the account learns slowly and one bad week is a large share of the month's budget. There is no reliable UK benchmark for a minimum spend by sector — the figures circulating online are mostly US-derived — so test the arithmetic in this guide against your own click price. If it does not stack up, waiting and saving is a legitimate strategy.
Is $1000 enough for Google Ads?
Around £1,000 a month is a workable starting budget for many UK trades and local-service businesses, where clicks are comparatively cheap and jobs are high value. In expensive sectors — legal, financial services, some medical — the same money buys far fewer clicks and may not produce enough leads to judge the account fairly. The deciding factors are your cost per click and your job value, not the round number.
Is £500 a month enough for Google Ads in the UK?
£500 a month is around £16 a day, and whether that is enough depends almost entirely on your cost per click: at £1.50 a click it buys roughly ten clicks a day, which an account can learn from; at £8 a click it buys two, which it cannot. As a rule we treat sub-£500 budgets as a reason to fix the plan before spending. The management fee also matters at this level — on a small budget a fee can exceed the media spend, which is why our fees are published in full on the pricing page.
What's the minimum Google Ads budget for a trades business?
There is no published UK minimum, and our own keyword dataset cannot yet supply one — the click-price data available to us is unpriced or likely denominated in US dollars, so quoting a figure would be invention. The method is more reliable than any number: take a realistic click price for your trade, decide how many clicks a lead typically takes, and set a daily budget that buys at least a lead's worth of clicks most days. Our industry pages carry the economics for each trade as data lands, and a free audit will tell you what your actual click price is.
Run this maths on your own account.
A free audit reports your actual cost per click and conversion rate — the two numbers this page's arithmetic needs — whether or not an engagement follows.