Answer four questions and get the real numbers for your industry — clicks, leads, cost per lead and whether the maths works before you spend anything. Built on 13,474 US campaigns, not guesswork.
Costs swing enormously by industry — a legal click costs nearly five times a restaurant click.
Ad spend only — what goes to Google, before any management fee.
Revenue from an average sale or case. This is what turns a cost estimate into a decision.
Your numbers are already showing. This sends the detailed version — keyword-level cost ranges for your industry, the budget floor below which search doesn't work, and what to fix first.
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Your estimate
Pick your industry and budget — numbers appear here as you go.
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leads per month
Benchmarks: WordStream 2026 Google Ads study — 13,474 US search campaigns, April 2025 to March 2026, medians. Your account will differ; these are a starting range, not a forecast.
Almost every "Google Ads is too expensive" story starts with misunderstanding this one mechanic. It takes two minutes and it changes how you set a budget.
Every search runs a fresh auction. Not a daily one, not a weekly one — a new auction each time anyone types anything, millions of times a day.
Not by bid alone. Google combines your bid with how relevant and useful it expects your ad and landing page to be, then ranks on the result.
Your bid is a ceiling, not a price. You're charged the least it took to stay ahead of the advertiser below you — often well under your maximum.
This is the part that decides whether your budget goes far or disappears. Two advertisers bidding on the same keyword, in the same city, on the same day, routinely pay very different amounts.
The practical consequence: a well-built account can outrank a competitor while bidding less. Send paid traffic to a page that matches what was searched and your cost per click falls. Send it to your homepage and you pay a premium on every click to compensate — which is the single most common reason a campaign quietly stops being profitable.
Legal clicks are expensive because a case is worth thousands and every firm in the city knows it. Restaurant clicks are cheap for the same reason in reverse. You cannot bid your way out of your category's economics.
The same keyword costs more in a dense metro than in a small market, and more on a Monday morning than a Saturday night. Seasonality moves some categories by half.
A page that answers the exact search converts better and costs less per click. This is the highest-leverage thing most advertisers never touch, because it sits outside the ads account.
Broad keywords collect searches from people who were never going to buy. Most wasted spend isn't overpaying for good clicks — it's paying full price for irrelevant ones.
Sorted by cost per click, most expensive first. These are the same figures the calculator above runs on — so whatever it told you, you can check the source here.
| Industry | Cost per click | Click-through rate | Conversion rate | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Attorneys & Legal Services | $9.87 | 5.87% | 5.55% | $131.63 |
| Home & Home Improvement | $8.33 | 6.47% | 8.05% | $90.92 |
| Dentists & Dental Services | $8.00 | 5.66% | 10.67% | $72.97 |
| Personal Services | $7.17 | 7.16% | 12.34% | $54.60 |
| Health & Fitness | $6.17 | 5.81% | 6.94% | $67.36 |
| Business Services | $5.87 | 6.10% | 4.85% | $93.69 |
| Industrial & Commercial | $5.87 | 6.57% | 8.20% | $75.19 |
| Career & Employment | $5.81 | 5.88% | 3.05% | $67.36 |
| Education & Instruction | $4.81 | 7.56% | 13.14% | $77.48 |
| Physicians & Surgeons | $4.76 | 6.61% | 12.43% | $40.04 |
| Beauty & Personal Care | $4.62 | 6.75% | 10.35% | $39.25 |
| Apparel / Fashion & Jewelry | $4.44 | 6.64% | 4.50% | $97.51 |
| Automotive — Repair, Service & Parts | $4.35 | 5.56% | 15.51% | $29.96 |
| Shopping, Collectibles & Gifts | $4.14 | 8.28% | 4.01% | $49.40 |
| Animals & Pets | $4.06 | 7.49% | 16.22% | $31.50 |
| Furniture | $3.97 | 6.57% | 2.99% | $106.70 |
| Finance & Insurance | $3.39 | 9.83% | 2.64% | $74.44 |
| Real Estate | $3.22 | 7.61% | 3.70% | $102.51 |
| Sports & Recreation | $2.77 | 8.75% | 7.69% | $44.26 |
| Automotive — For Sale | $2.27 | 8.28% | 6.01% | $44.26 |
| Travel | $2.14 | 9.32% | 5.83% | $44.70 |
| Restaurants & Food | $2.05 | 6.83% | 8.05% | $30.57 |
| Arts & Entertainment | $1.63 | 12.75% | 5.91% | $26.84 |
Legal has the dearest clicks at $9.87 — but converts at 5.55%, so each lead costs about $132. Pets converts at 16.22%, which is why a $4.06 click becomes a $31.50 lead. Judge a channel on cost per lead, never cost per click.
Finance & Insurance has clicks at $3.39 and the worst conversion rate on the table at 2.64%. The result is a $74 lead from clicks that looked like a bargain. Furniture is the same trap at $107 a lead.
Half the campaigns in the study performed below every number here. If your account sits near these figures you are average, not good — and the gap between median and top quartile is usually account structure rather than budget.
Source: WordStream 2026 Google Ads benchmarks — 13,474 US-based search campaigns across Google Ads and Microsoft Ads, April 2025 to March 2026, with a minimum of 52 active campaigns per subcategory. Figures are medians, which reduces the distortion a handful of very large accounts would otherwise cause. All values in USD.
Five things we find in nearly every account we're handed. None of them are exotic, and all of them are cheaper to fix than to outspend.
Broad match collects everything adjacent to your keyword. An emergency plumber ends up paying for "plumber salary", "how to fix a leaking tap" and "plumbing apprenticeships" at full price.
Read the search terms report, not the keyword report. The gap between them is your waste, and it's usually visible in ten minutes.
Someone searched for one specific thing and landed on a page about everything you do. They have to find their own way, and most won't — while you pay a quality penalty on every click for the mismatch.
One landing page per thing you sell. This usually moves cost per lead more than any bid change.
If your reporting ends at "form submitted", you're optimising toward form fills rather than revenue. Google will happily find you more of the cheap leads that never buy.
Pass the outcome back — closed or not, and for how much. Then the bidding optimises toward money instead of activity.
You've paid full price for the click. Then the lead waits four hours while a competitor who answers in five minutes takes the job. The ads account looks like it's failing; it isn't.
Measure speed to first contact. It's often the cheapest improvement available and it sits entirely outside Google.
Google's bidding needs conversion volume to optimise. Below roughly 30 conversions a month it's guessing, which is why small accounts feel random — good week, bad week, no pattern.
Narrow to one service and one area until the volume is there. A small budget spread thin learns nothing.
A real look at your search terms, your landing pages and your tracking — with the specific line items costing you money, in writing.
If Google Ads isn't right for your business, we'll say so. The calculator above tells you that for free, and so will we on a call.
There's no fixed price — you pay per click, and what a click costs depends entirely on what you sell. Across 13,474 US search campaigns the median cost per click ranged from $1.63 in arts and entertainment to $9.87 in legal services.
The more useful number is cost per lead, because a cheap click that never converts is the expensive option. Medians there run from about $27 to $132 depending on industry. The calculator on this page works it out for yours.
Google sets no minimum. The practical floor is set by your own industry's click cost, and it's about having enough conversion volume for the bidding to learn from — roughly 30 conversions a month before automated bidding does anything useful.
In a cheap category that can mean a few hundred dollars a month. In legal or home improvement, where clicks run $8 to $10, the same volume needs several thousand. Below that threshold results feel random, because they are — there isn't enough data for the system to optimise against.
Because your bid isn't the only input. Google ranks each auction on your bid combined with how relevant and useful it expects your ad and landing page to be — so a better-matched account can outrank you while bidding less.
The usual culprit is where the click lands. Paid traffic going to a homepage rather than a page about the specific thing someone searched for pays a premium on every single click.
Ads can serve within hours of approval, but that isn't the same as working. Expect the first two to four weeks to be data collection rather than performance — the bidding is learning, and the search terms report is telling you which keywords to cut.
Meaningful cost-per-lead improvement usually shows in month two or three. Anyone promising profitability in week one is describing luck.
It depends on one number: what a customer is worth to you. If an average sale is worth $150 and leads cost $90, the maths fails unless you close almost everyone. If a customer is worth $4,000, a $90 lead is excellent.
That's the single calculation worth doing before you spend anything, and it's what the calculator on this page is for. For some businesses the honest answer is that search isn't the right channel — and it's cheaper to learn that here than after three months of spend.
If your budget is under about $1,500 a month, run it yourself. An agency fee on top of a small budget usually consumes the margin that made the channel worth trying.
Above that, the question is whether you'll actually do the weekly work — reading search terms, cutting waste, building landing pages. An unmanaged account doesn't stay still, it drifts, and the drift is always toward spending more on worse traffic.
No. This is an independent resource with no affiliation to, endorsement from or sponsorship by Google LLC. Google, Google Ads and related marks are trademarks of Google LLC.
The benchmark data here comes from a third-party study of 13,474 US campaigns, not from Google. For Google's own documentation and official rates, go to Google Ads directly.
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