How Much Does Google Ads (AdWords) Cost?

AdWords costs vary from business to business. There’re many factors that go into these costs including competition levels, average CPC rates, AdPosition and more.

Google AdWords is a pay per click (PPC) advertising platform. So, you only pay for clicks to your website and nothing more. Unlike other advertising platforms that charge for space and visibility, AdWords only charges for visits to your website.

However, there’re other charging formats like Cost Per Thousand Impressions (CPM) on Display and Views on YouTube , but PPC remains the core pricing format.

Your average Cost Per Click (CPC) for example will be determined at auction time. So you’re unlikely to know what that is until you run some test campaigns. But there’re research tools in AdWords that will help you forecast CPC rates for your keywords and what the likely spend will be.

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Controlling costs in AdWords is important of course. There’s no point in spending a fortune and getting back little or no results. However, what’s more important is the Return On Investment (ROI) your campaigns achieve.

One of the benefits of AdWords advertising is that you can change and update your budget spend easily. And you can do that on a daily basis. If for example you’ve started with a £50 daily budget and decide you want to reduce it to £40, then that can be done easily.

It’s important to bear in mind that average CPC rates vary from sector to sector. It’s common to find rates as high as £15 for keywords in the insurance sector. For other sectors, CPC rates can be as low as 20p because of less auction time competition.

So for these, starting with a low budget is fine. However, conversion rates can often be low for these less competitive sectors and you may have to start with a higher budget to get a decent number of conversions.