How much should a Quincy business spend on Google Ads?

Every week someone asks us some version of the same question: "What should we be spending on Google Ads?"

We understand why. You want a number. Something to put in the budget line, something you can defend to your business partner or your spouse. And there are plenty of agencies happy to give you one before they've asked a single question about your business.

We won't do that. Not because we're being difficult — because the honest answer depends on four things we can actually measure, and once you know them, the number stops being a guess.

Start with what a customer is worth

Not what a click is worth. Not what a lead is worth. What a customer is worth to you over the life of the relationship.

A roofing company might make $9,000 on one job and never hear from that customer again for fifteen years. A lawn care company might make $60 a visit — but that same customer stays with them for six years, refers two neighbors, and adds snow removal in the winter. Those two businesses should not be spending the same amount to acquire a customer, and they shouldn't be measuring success the same way either.

Write down your average sale. Then write down how many times an average customer buys from you. Multiply. That's your ceiling — the absolute most a customer can be worth to you.

Then figure out how many you can actually handle

This is the step everyone skips, and it's the one that wrecks budgets.

We've watched businesses turn on ads, get exactly what they asked for, and then quietly lose most of it because nobody answered the phone on a Thursday afternoon. If your crew is booked six weeks out, more leads aren't the goal — better leads are. Sometimes the right move is to spend less and target tighter.

So: how many new customers can you serve next month without anything breaking? That number caps your budget just as much as your bank account does.

Now look at what your market actually costs

Here's where local matters. Search costs in Quincy are not search costs in Chicago.

In Adams County, a lot of service categories run somewhere between $3 and $12 per click. Emergency and high-value trades run higher — water damage, HVAC in a heat wave, legal. Retail and general services run lower. We pull the real numbers for your specific keywords and your specific service radius before we recommend anything, because the range is wide enough that guessing is useless.

Multiply your cost per click by the number of clicks it takes to get one call, then by the share of calls that become customers. That's your real cost per customer. Compare it to what a customer is worth. Now you have a decision instead of a guess.

A realistic starting point for a local business

For most small businesses in our area, meaningful Google Ads campaigns start somewhere around $1,000 to $2,500 a month in ad spend. Below roughly $750, you usually don't get enough data in a month to know what's working — you're paying for a test that never finishes.

That's a starting point, not a rule. We've run smaller budgets successfully for narrow, high-intent categories where there just isn't much competition. We've also told businesses to wait, because their website wasn't ready to convert the traffic we'd send it and we'd be spending their money to prove a point.

What we do with the first 90 days

Month one is learning. We're gathering data on which searches actually turn into calls, which ones burn money, and where your customers are coming from.

Month two is cutting. Negative keywords, adjusted bids, ad copy rewritten around the language your real customers use instead of the language we assumed they'd use.

Month three is where most of the gains show up. By then the campaign is running on evidence, not on assumptions.

If someone promises you results in week two, they're either lucky or they're managing your expectations rather than your budget.

The part nobody puts in the proposal

Your ads are only as good as what happens after the click.

If your Google Business Profile has last year's hours, if your website takes eight seconds to load on a phone, if the contact form goes to an inbox nobody opens — the ad budget doesn't fix any of that. It just pays to send more people into it.

That's why we don't sell Google Ads as a standalone product very often. It works best when your online presence, your website, and your ads are pulling in the same direction.

The short version

Take what a customer is worth. Divide by how many clicks it takes to get one. Compare to what clicks cost in your market. Cap it at what your business can actually handle. Then commit to at least 90 days.

Or skip the math and tell us what you're working on — we'll pull the real numbers for your category and tell you honestly whether Google Ads is where your next dollar belongs. Even if the answer is no.