What a $1,500 a Month Google Ads Budget Actually Buys on the Sunshine Coast

Fifteen hundred dollars a month is a common starting budget for a Sunshine Coast business trying Google Ads for the first time. It is enough to learn something and not enough to waste. Here is what it actually buys, and the three ways it usually gets wasted anyway.

The arithmetic

Google Ads charges per click, and the price of a click depends on who else wants it. On the Coast, clicks for most trades and local services land somewhere between a few dollars and fifteen or so. Professional services and anything with "lawyer" or "insurance" in it cost more. The figures below are illustrative, not a quote.

• $1,500 at $6 a click is about 250 clicks a month.
• If one in ten of those people calls or fills in a form, that is 25 enquiries.
• If you win one in three enquiries, that is eight jobs. At that point you know your cost per job and whether the budget should go up, down or away.

Change the click price to $12 and you have half the clicks and half the enquiries from the same money. That is why the first job in any account is not writing ads, it is working out which searches are worth paying for at the price Google is asking.

The three faults in most accounts we take over

We have inherited a lot of Google Ads accounts from Sunshine Coast businesses. The same three problems turn up in most of them.

1. Broad match with no negative keywords

Google's default settings let your "electrician Maroochydore" ad show for "electrician jobs Maroochydore", "electrician course" and "how to become an electrician". Every one of those clicks costs the same as a real customer. A negative keyword list stops it, and in a new account it is normal for a third of the spend to be going on searches that could never become a job.

2. Conversion tracking that counts a page view as a lead

If the account counts a visit to the contact page as a conversion, Google will cheerfully optimise towards people who look at the contact page and leave. Track the things that are actually leads: calls over a sensible length, form submissions, booking completions. Everything downstream depends on this being right.

3. Nobody has looked at it properly in months

Ads accounts drift. Search terms change, competitors arrive, a landing page gets edited and the form breaks. An account that was good in March can be quietly burning money by September. Somebody needs to read the search terms report and check the conversions every week or two. If your agency's reporting is a monthly PDF and nothing else, ask when a human last opened the account.

Management fees, and the percentage trap

Many agencies charge a percentage of your ad spend. The incentive is obvious: the more you spend, the more they earn, whether or not the extra spend works. We charge a flat fee with no percentage taken from the budget, so the advice to spend more or less is not tangled up with our invoice. Whatever you pay, the fee should come with the account in your name, so you can see everything and leave if you want to.

When Ads is the wrong tool

If your website is slow, has no clear phone number or does not say which suburbs you cover, fix that first. Ads sends people to the site; it cannot make them stay. If your average job is worth less than a few hundred dollars and clicks cost more than ten, the maths may never work, and local SEO is the better long-term spend. And if you are already turning work away, you do not need more enquiries. You need a better site that wins the right ones.

Where Ads earns its place is at the start, when a new business cannot wait six months for rankings. Suncoast Garage Door Repairs is the pattern: Ads caught the urgent searches from day one while the SEO built, and four years on the business is first on Google and we still run both. Our Google Ads management page covers how we run accounts.