· Valten Studio
How much does Google Ads cost in the UK?
The short answer
You set the budget, and a month's spend will not exceed 30.4 times your average daily budget. Whito's Q1 2026 compilation puts most UK small business clicks at £1.50 to £2.50, and home services at £3.20. Management comes on top: £200 to £800 a month from a freelancer and £500 to £1,500 from a small agency, by the same source. Ours is £350 to set up and from £280 a month.
What you pay Google
Search ads charge by the click. You set an average daily budget, and Google may spend up to twice that on a busy day and less on quiet ones. Across a month, it will not charge more than 30.4 times the daily figure, the average number of days in a month.
A budget of £30 a day, for example, caps the month at £912. You can change it or pause it whenever you like.
What does a click cost?
It depends on the search, the area and how many firms bid on it. Whito's compilation of UK benchmark data for the first quarter of 2026 gives these averages.
| Industry | Average cost per click |
|---|---|
| Most small businesses | £1.50 to £2.50 |
| Home services | £3.20 |
| Healthcare and dental | £2.80 |
| Travel and hospitality | £1.60 |
| Legal services | £8.25 |
For your own trade and town, Google's Keyword Planner shows the bid ranges for the searches you care about. It is free inside a Google Ads account.
What does management cost?
Management is the work of building the campaigns, reading the search terms, cutting waste and reporting. Whito puts it at £200 to £800 a month from a freelancer and £500 to £1,500 from a small agency. These are our fees.
Valten Studio ads fees, United Kingdom, before VAT
Google Ads setup
from£350
Campaigns built, tracking in place, spend visible from day one.
Meta Ads setup
from£350
Facebook and Instagram campaigns, built and measured the same way.
Ads management, Starter
£280/mo
One channel, run monthly, with a report you can read in five minutes.
Ads management, Standard
£460/mo
Two channels, ongoing testing, the same plain-English report.
Ads management, Growth
£775/mo
For bigger budgets: more campaigns, more testing, monthly call.
Setup builds the campaigns and the tracking once. Management runs them each month and cancels with 30 days' notice, and the report shows our fee beside what the budget bought.
How much budget does a small business need?
No single figure fits. Spend enough to learn which searches turn into work in your area, then move the money towards those. Redfern Plumbing & Heating, a two-van firm in Manchester, spends £900 a month and has held that figure since the first month; the extra jobs came from moving it to the keywords that book.
How to spend less for the same work
- Send each ad to a page about the thing that was searched, instead of the home page.
- Fence the campaign to the postcodes you can reach.
- Add negative keywords for job, course and do-it-yourself searches.
- Count calls and forms, so you can cut what spends without booking.