Will  Google Ads actually make you money?

Your margin decides what a click is worth to you. Put your numbers in and find out before you spend anything.

ROAS and cost per customer calculator

£
What one customer pays you, on average
%
What is left after delivering the job
£
Pick a sector below if you do not know
%
Typical range is 3% to 12%
%
Be honest, not hopeful

Each customer earns you

£94

after you have paid for the clicks

Clicks to win one customer
31
Ad cost per customer
£156
Profit on that customer
£250
Most you can pay per click
£8.00
Your ROAS
3.2x
Break-even ROAS
2.0x

A click costs what your sector says it costs

You do not set this price. The auction does, and it is set by what a customer is worth to whoever is bidding hardest. These are real UK figures, taken on 14 October 2026. Tap one to load it into the calculator.

Real UK cost per click and monthly search volume by sector
SearchSearches a monthCost per click
Engagement rings201,000£3.93
Private jet charter2,900£7.44
Dental implants22,200£9.23
Hair transplant London5,400£17.40
Divorce solicitor London480£48.11
Emergency plumber London1,600£54.38

Fourteen times between the cheapest click and the dearest, and the pattern is not the one people expect. Engagement rings draw two hundred thousand searches a month at maximum competition and still cost under four pounds, because most of those people are browsing. A divorce solicitor pays twelve times more for a search that happens four hundred times. Volume is not value. What sets the price is how close that search sits to someone spending money, and how much they spend.

What a hundred clicks actually becomes

Every dot is one click, bought and paid for. This moves with the numbers you typed above, so change them and watch what happens to the dots.

A grid of one hundred dots representing one hundred clicks, with the enquiries and the paying customers highlighted.

  1. 100 clicks bought costing £500
  2. 8 people enquire 8% of the clicks
  3. 3.2 become customers 40% of the enquiries
  4. £300 left over after the ad spend

The ninety-odd dark dots are the part nobody shows you. They are paid for at exactly the same price as the ones that worked, and they are where almost all of your budget goes.

Which is why the enquiry rate is the lever that matters. It is a divisor: it sits underneath everything else in the sum, so moving it from 4% to 8% halves what a customer costs you. Doubling your budget doubles the dots and changes nothing about the ratio between them.

Break-even ROAS is just 1 divided by your margin. On a 50% margin you break even at 2.0x, on 20% you need 5.0x. That is the whole reason a target ROAS quoted without reference to your margin is a meaningless number.

Common questions

What is a good ROAS?
There is no universal answer, because it depends on your margin. Break-even is 1 divided by your margin: 2.0x on a 50% margin, 5.0x on 20%. A 3x ROAS is healthy in the first case and loss-making in the second. Anyone quoting a target without asking your margin first is guessing.
Why is my cost per click so high?
The auction price is set by what a customer is worth to the highest bidder in your category, not by what you want to pay. Emergency plumbing in London runs near £54 a click because a call-out is worth hundreds. Engagement rings run near £4 despite two hundred thousand monthly searches, because most of those people are browsing. Your sector sets the floor and optimisation only moves it so far.
Can paid search work for a small local business?
Yes, when the cost of winning a customer sits below the profit on that customer. The calculator above will tell you plainly when it does not. Small changes to your enquiry rate matter far more than the size of your budget, because that rate divides into everything else.
How much should I budget?
Work back from customers, not from a round number. Clicks per customer, times cost per click, times the customers you want each month. If that lands under roughly £300 a month you will not gather enough data to learn from, and paid search is probably not your next move.
Does a higher budget lower my cost per customer?
No. Budget buys more clicks at roughly the same price, so it multiplies whatever your current maths does. If you are losing money on each customer, a bigger budget loses it faster. The levers that actually change the cost per customer are your enquiry rate, your close rate and the quality of the traffic you bid on.

If the number came out negative, that is useful

It means the problem is the funnel, not the budget. We run paid search for businesses across Essex and East London, and the first thing we do is this sum. If it does not work, we say so.

Talk it through