Can Your Business Afford Google Ads?

There's no fixed price — Google Ads runs as an auction, and what you pay per click depends on your industry, your location and who else is bidding on the same searches. Home-service and local-lead-generation keywords in Canada commonly land anywhere from a couple of dollars to $20 or more per click, and professional-service terms often run higher again. The calculator above uses your own expected click cost rather than a single national average, because the range between industries is too wide for an average to be useful to any one business.

Enough to buy a genuinely useful test, and not more than your break-even math supports. Two numbers matter more than any percentage-of-revenue rule: your break-even cost per click, and whether your monthly budget can buy enough clicks to see a real signal rather than one or two leads. The calculator estimates both from your own numbers.

It's the most you could pay per click and still come out even, once you account for how many clicks become leads, how many leads become customers, and what a customer is worth to you after costs. Enter your numbers above and the calculator works it out; the methodology section below shows the formula and a worked example.

Budget divided by expected cost per click gives you the clicks you can buy; multiply that by your website's visitor-to-lead rate to estimate leads. The calculator does this for you, and also checks whether your budget is large enough to buy a useful test in the first place — a budget that only buys a handful of clicks won't tell you much either way.

It depends on whether your numbers support it, not on the platform. A business with solid margins, a working funnel, and a break-even cost per click above what clicks in its category actually cost is a reasonable candidate for a test. A business with thin margins or a broken landing page will lose money on ads no matter how well the campaign is built — for that business, the fix is elsewhere first, and the calculator will say so.

Two things matter more than the campaign itself: whether you can measure what happens after the click, and whether the page a visitor lands on is built to convert for that specific service rather than a general homepage. Either gap can be fixed independently of your ad budget, and fixing it first usually saves more money than any amount of bid optimization.

There's no universally agreed number, and anyone who quotes one with false precision is rounding off more than they're letting on. As a practical floor, the calculator looks for a budget that buys at least 50 clicks and, ideally, enough to expect around 5 leads given your own conversion rate — below that, one unusually good or bad week can swing the result more than your campaign choices did. Treat this as a starting point for a first test, not a statistical guarantee.

Local Services Ads — Google's pay-per-lead product for certain service categories, including many home-services trades — charge per qualified lead rather than per click, and Google vets and insures the business. Google Ads gives more control over targeting, messaging and landing pages, but puts the conversion risk on you. Not every category qualifies for Local Services Ads, and the two can run alongside each other; this calculator is built around a standard Google Ads click-based campaign.