Google Ads is worth it when a client is worth more than it costs to buy one, with enough margin left over to make the effort worthwhile. That is the whole answer, and almost every business that asks the question cannot fill in either side of it. They know their ad spend to the dollar and have no idea what a client cost, because the agency reports clicks and the CRM does not know which clients came from the ads.
We have managed more than $7 million of Google Ads spend since 2015, about $3.4 million of it for law firms and the rest across accountants, trades, local services, healthcare, B2B and retail. The figures in this article come from the last 18 months of those accounts, $1.65 million across 24 businesses, which is recent enough for the costs to be current. Older data is used for nothing here; prices move too fast. Where a business was not profitable on Google Ads, we say so, because the firms that should not run it are as much the point of this piece as the ones that should.
If you want the short version, scroll to the calculator, put in your own client value and margin, and it will tell you whether the maths works before you read on.
Key Takeaways
- Worth it when: client value multiplied by gross margin is more than three times what a client costs to acquire. Below that, the ads are funding Google, not the business. The formula and three worked examples are below.
- A click costs between $1 and $56 in our accounts depending on the industry, an enquiry between $27 and $560, and the spread inside a single industry is wider than the spread between the US benchmarks everyone quotes.
- Five situations where Google Ads is not worth running: a ticket under about $500 with no repeat, margin under 30%, nobody answering the phone inside the hour, demand that is all brand, or a site converting under 2%. Each has a number attached below.
- $10 a day is not a campaign. At Australian professional-services click prices it buys a click every two or three days. The minimum that produces a verdict is around ten times your expected cost per enquiry per month.
- You can know in 30 days. Tracking verified before day one, search terms cleaned by day 14, ten to fifteen real enquiries scored by day 30. If the agency cannot show cost per client by then, the problem is the agency, not the channel.
What Google Ads actually costs by industry
Every article on this question quotes the same US benchmarks: WordStream's 2026 study puts the median click at USD $5.42, the median conversion rate at 8.2% and the median cost per lead at USD $66.69 across 13,000 American search campaigns. Useful as a sanity check, useless for deciding whether to spend $3,000 a month in Brisbane. These are our Australian accounts, April 2025 to October 2026, in Australian dollars.
| Industry | Accounts | Cost per click | Click-through rate | Conversion rate | Cost per tracked action |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ecommerce (retail, two accounts) | 2 | $0.77 to $3.19 | 1.8% to 9.6% | 2.0% to 7.9% | $38 to $40 per purchase |
| Local services (electrical, cleaning, music tuition, facilities) | 4 | $3.29 to $11.23 | 2.1% to 7.6% | 7.0% to 17.7% | $45 to $80 per enquiry |
| Healthcare (audiology) | 1 | $3.49 | 6.3% | 9.0% | $39 per enquiry |
| Immigration law | 1 | $3.50 | 6.0% | 11.3% | $31 per enquiry |
| Family law | 5 | $2.72 to $9.18 | 1.3% to 4.5% | 3.3% to 10.1% | $27 to $279 per enquiry |
| Personal injury | 3 | $5.47 to $56.20 | 2.9% to 6.6% | 2.3% to 11.0% | $190 to $1,028 per enquiry |
| Litigation | 1 | $8.95 | 2.8% | 3.1% | $287 per enquiry |
| Other law (employment, wills, general) | 2 | $6.34 to $10.52 | 1.9% to 3.3% | 1.3% to 10.9% | $97 to $491 per enquiry |
| B2B services and supplies | 2 | $4.51 to $6.69 | 2.6% to 9.1% | 1.5% to 6.9% | $97 to $304 per enquiry |
| Accounting | 1 | $19.36 | 2.6% | 5.8% | $332 per enquiry |
Three things the table says that the benchmarks do not.
The spread inside an industry is the story. Family law runs from $27 to $279 per enquiry across five firms with the same practice area, because one is a regional firm with little competition and a well-screened account, and another is a Sydney firm paying $9 a click in the most contested suburbs in the country. "Family law costs $70 per lead" is true as an average and useless for either of them.
The highest click prices do not mean the worst economics. The personal injury firm paying $56 a click and $1,028 per enquiry is running a small account on the most expensive phrases in Australian legal search, and a single signed claim pays for a year of it. The accounting practice paying $19 a click is in a similar position: a $332 enquiry against a client worth $5,000 to $30,000 a year in fees is a comfortable trade.
A tracked action is not an enquiry. The ecommerce rows count purchases. The local service rows count calls and forms. Two accounts in the raw data counted things we would not call an enquiry at all, and were left out. Before any of these numbers means anything for your business, the conversion has to be defined as a real lead, which is the first thing to check in the section on tracking below.
For law firms specifically, the cost per qualified enquiry and cost per signed client by practice area, which is a level deeper than this table, is in what a law firm lead should cost in Australia, and the full cost guide across industries is in how much Google Ads costs.
The break-even maths
Cost per client is the number that decides this, and it is built from three numbers most businesses already have.
Cost per client = cost per click ÷ landing page conversion rate ÷ close rate.
A business paying $8 a click, converting 5% of visitors to an enquiry and closing one in four enquiries pays $8 ÷ 0.05 ÷ 0.25 = $640 per client. Whether that is worth it depends entirely on what the client is worth after cost of delivery, and whether the business wants a 2x return or a 5x one.
| Business | Cost per click | Conversion rate | Close rate | Cost per client | Client value | Gross margin | Profit per client after ads | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Carpet cleaning, $300 job, no repeat | $8 | 15% | 50% | $107 | $300 | 50% | $43 | Barely. Worth it only with repeat work or a higher-value service to upsell |
| Electrician, $3,000 average job | $8 | 15% | 40% | $133 | $3,000 | 40% | $1,067 | Yes, at 8x. The constraint is capacity, not the ads |
| Family law firm, $8,000 average matter | $5 | 6% | 25% | $333 | $8,000 | 60% | $4,467 | Yes, at 13x. The constraint is intake speed |
| Personal injury firm, $25,000 average fee | $25 | 5% | 10% | $5,000 | $25,000 | 65% | $11,250 | Yes, at 2.3x on fees, with the fee arriving a year or more after the spend |
| Accounting practice, $6,000 a year, 5-year client | $19 | 6% | 20% | $1,583 | $30,000 lifetime | 45% | $11,900 | Yes, if the practice can wait for the lifetime value; no if it needs the first year to pay |
The rule we use with clients: gross profit per client should be at least three times the cost per client for a service business, because the cost per client in the table is the median and a third of months will be worse. Below 3x, the campaign is fragile. Below 1x, stop.
The $300 carpet cleaning row is the one to study, because it is the shape of most "Google Ads didn't work for us" stories. The ads are fine. The job is too small to carry the acquisition cost, and no amount of optimisation changes that. The business either sells something bigger (end-of-lease packages, commercial contracts) or it runs Google Ads for brand searches only and gets its new customers somewhere cheaper.
Google Ads ROI Calculator
Find out if Google Ads makes sense for your business in 30 seconds
Step 1 of 4
What industry are you in?
What is your average client worth?
Include total lifetime value if clients come back or refer others, not just the first transaction.
High ticket, strong Google Ads candidate
What's your approximate profit margin?
This helps us calculate your actual return after costs, not just revenue.
Profit per client: $2,500
What's your monthly ad budget?
Select your monthly Google Ads spend.For , we recommend at least /month. Competitors typically spend .
· $5,000/month · Avg CPC
Poor
Homepage traffic, slow follow-up, no tracking
Average
Landing pages, some tracking, decent follow-up
High Performance
Dedicated pages, fast intake, full-funnel tracking
These are estimates based on Australian industry averages. Actual results depend on your market, competition, and campaign execution.
When Google Ads is not worth it
Five situations, each with the number that decides it. A business in any one of them should fix the condition before spending, or spend somewhere else.
| Situation | The number | Why | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Low ticket, no repeat | Average sale under about $500 and under 20% of customers return | The cost per client in most Australian markets is $100 to $600; a $300 sale cannot carry it | Meta for impulse purchases, SEO, referrals; Google Ads for brand only |
| Thin margin | Gross margin under 30% | A 30% margin needs 3.3x return on ad spend to break even before management cost | Fix pricing first |
| Nobody answers the phone | First contact slower than an hour; voicemail during business hours | Leads decay fast; the trackers show answer rates falling from 70% to 50% when calls wait a day. How fast you should call a lead has the figures | Fix intake, then run ads |
| Brand-only demand | Searches for your category in your area under a few hundred a month | Google Ads buys existing demand; it does not create it | Meta, where the ad creates the demand |
| The website does not convert | Under 2% of visitors enquire, or no landing page separate from the home page | Doubling the spend doubles the waste. Our accounts convert at 1% to 3% on a home page and 6% to 10% on a purpose-built page | Build the page first; the landing page teardown has the rubric |
Then there is a sixth, which is not a business condition but a budget one.
Is $10 a day enough for Google Ads?
No, and it is the most-asked question under every version of this search. $10 a day is $300 a month. At a professional-services click price of $8 to $20, that is 15 to 37 clicks a month, and at a 5% conversion rate it is one or two enquiries. It cannot tell you anything, and Google's bidding cannot learn from it either, because the automated strategies need something like 30 conversions a month to find a pattern.
| Industry | Expected cost per enquiry | Minimum monthly budget for a verdict (about 10 enquiries) | Budget where automated bidding has enough data |
|---|---|---|---|
| Local trade or service | $45 to $80 | $500 to $800 | $1,500 to $2,500 |
| Allied health, audiology, dental | $40 to $100 | $500 to $1,000 | $1,500 to $3,000 |
| Family law, suburban | $100 to $200 | $1,000 to $2,000 | $3,000 to $6,000 |
| Accounting, advisory | $250 to $350 | $2,500 to $3,500 | $7,500 and above |
| Personal injury, capital city | $200 to $500 | $2,000 to $5,000 | $6,000 to $15,000 |
A business that cannot fund the middle column should not run a search campaign; it should put the money into its Business Profile and reviews, which our guide for lawyers covers and which applies to every local business. A business that can fund the middle column but not the right-hand one can still get a clear answer; it just has to be patient with the bidding and strict with the search terms.
How to know in 30 days
The campaign can be judged on day 30 if four things are done in order. Skip the first and the other three mean nothing.
The view a business needs on day 30: every enquiry by source, its status, and where it went. Without the right-hand columns, the campaign cannot be judged.
What an agency report should show
A report that stops at clicks and cost per click is marketing data. The decision needs business data, and the gap between the two is where most Google Ads money disappears.
| What the report shows | What it tells you | Is it enough |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions, clicks, click-through rate | Whether the ads are being shown and clicked | No. These are inputs |
| Cost per click | What Google is charging | No. A cheap click to the wrong page is wasted |
| Conversions and cost per conversion | How many tracked actions, at what cost | Only if the conversion is a real enquiry, which has to be checked |
| Qualified enquiries and cost per qualified enquiry | How many were worth a call back | Getting there |
| Clients signed and cost per client, by campaign | Which campaigns produce revenue | Yes. This is the number the decision is made on |
| Revenue or fee value by source | What the campaign returned | Yes, where the business can attribute it |
| Search terms, change history, negatives added | Whether anyone is managing the account | Open the change history yourself. If the last meaningful change was more than 30 days ago, nobody is |
The bottom three rows need the business's CRM and the agency's tracking to talk to each other, which is the closed-loop tracking we build every account around and the reason this article can quote cost per enquiry at all. How to tell if marketing is working is the law-firm version of that argument and applies to every service business, and the questions to ask before hiring a Google Ads agency are the ones that find out whether an agency can deliver those rows.
A search terms report from an account we took over: the first thing to read on day 14, and the fastest way to tell whether an account is being managed.
Google Ads against the alternatives
The question is rarely Google Ads or nothing. It is Google Ads or SEO, or Meta, or the money back in the business.
| Google Ads | Meta Ads | SEO | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reaches | People searching for what you sell, now | People with the problem, before they search | People searching, over time |
| Time to first enquiry | Days | Days | Months |
| Cost per enquiry, our accounts | $27 to $560 by industry | $23 to $77 for the industries it suits | Falls every month the content works; zero marginal cost eventually |
| Enquiry quality | Warm; they were looking | Cold; needs fast follow-up | Warm |
| Fails when | Demand is brand-only, ticket is low, site does not convert | The trigger is not a visible life event; intake is slow | The firm will not fund volume; needs results this quarter |
| Best for | Urgent, specific, high-value needs | Injury, immigration, family with the right offer, consumer purchases | Any business that can wait and publish |
The comparisons in full are in Meta versus Google Ads for law firms and Google Ads versus Meta for accountants, and the case for SEO alongside paid is in is SEO dead. For most service businesses with a real ticket size the answer is Google Ads first because it is fastest to a verdict, then Meta if the audience can be found, then SEO as the long-run replacement for both.
The honest verdict
Google Ads is worth it for the electrician, the family lawyer, the injury firm, the migration agent and the accountant in the tables above, and the accounts prove it month after month. It is not worth it for the $300 job with no repeat, the business with a 20% margin, the firm whose phone goes to voicemail, or anyone spending $10 a day and hoping. The difference between the two groups is not the platform and it is usually not the agency. It is whether the business knows what a client is worth, what one costs, and has someone to answer the phone when the ad works.
If you know those three things, the decision takes a minute with the calculator above. If you do not, that is the work to do before the next dollar, and how much you should spend on marketing is where to start it.
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