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 get it. You want a number. Something to put in the budget line, something you can defend to your business partner or your spouse over dinner. There are plenty of agencies happy to hand you one before they've asked a single question about your business.

We don't operate this way, not to be difficult, but because the honest answer depends on four things we can actually measure. Once you know them, the number stops being a guess and starts being a decision.

Step 1: 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 homeowner again for fifteen years. A lawn care company might make $60 a visit, but the same customer stays for six years, refers two neighbors, and adds snow removal in the winter. Those two businesses shouldn't spend the same amount to win a customer, and they shouldn't measure success the same way either.

Do this on the back of an envelope right now:

1. Your average sale.
2. How many times an average customer buys from you.
3. Multiply the two.

That's your ceiling, the absolute most one customer can be worth. Every budget conversation lives underneath it.

Step 2: Figure out how many customers you can actually handle

This is the step almost 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 ask yourself honestly: how many new customers could you serve next month without anything breaking? This number caps your budget as much as your bank account does.

Step 3: Look at what your market actually costs

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

Across Adams County and west-central Illinois, a lot of service categories land somewhere in the range of a few dollars to low double digits per click. Emergency and high-value trades run higher: water damage, HVAC in the middle of a heat wave, legal. Retail and general services usually run lower. Before we recommend a number, we pull the real figures for your specific keywords and your actual service radius, because the range is wide enough that guessing is useless.

Then the math is simple:

• Cost per click × clicks it takes to get one call = cost per lead
• Cost per lead ÷ the share of calls that become customers = cost per customer

Hold that against what a customer is worth from Step 1. Now you have a decision instead of a hunch.

Step 4: Pick a number you can commit to for 90 days

For most local 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 gather enough data in a month to know what's working, you're paying for a test that never finishes.

That's a starting point, it's not a rule. We've run smaller budgets successfully in narrow, high-intent categories where there simply isn't much competition. We've also told businesses to wait entirely, because their website wasn't ready to convert the traffic we'd send it, and we didn't want to spend their money proving a point.

Budget also isn't only ad spend. Plan for management, and plan for the landing page or profile cleanup to make the clicks worth paying for.

What the first 90 days actually look like

Month one is learning. We gather data on which searches turn into calls, which ones burn money, and where your customers are really coming from. Some of what we learn will surprise you, it usually does.

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 runs on evidence, not 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 still lists last year's holiday hours, if your website takes eight seconds to load on a phone, if the contact form lands in an inbox nobody opens, none of that gets fixed by the ad budget. It only pays to send more people into it.

That's why we rarely sell Google Ads as a standalone product. It works best when your online presence, your website, and your ads are all pulling the same direction. If you're not sure what shape yours is in, start with what people see when they Google you before you spend a dollar on clicks.

A quick checklist before you turn ads on

• You know what an average customer is worth over time.
• You know how many new customers you can serve this month.
• Your phone gets answered, or calls get returned same-day.
• Your Google Business Profile hours, address, and phone are correct.
• Your site loads fast on a phone and makes it obvious how to contact you.
• You're prepared to run for 90 days, not 30.

If you can't check most of those boxes yet, that's genuinely good news, fixing them is cheaper than advertising around them.

The short version

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

That's the number. This isn't a package, a guess, or whatever the last agency quoted.

If you'd like, we're happy to run those numbers with you, even if the honest answer turns out to be "not yet." Let's talk.