How much should I spend on Google Ads?

For a local business, meaningful testing usually starts around £300 to £500 a month of ad spend on top of the management fee. Below that there is rarely enough data to tell what is working from what is noise. If a customer is worth £40 to you and clicks cost £3, the arithmetic is difficult; if a customer is worth £400, it is straightforward.

Is Google Ads better than SEO?

They answer different questions. Ads produce traffic the day the campaign goes live and stop the day you stop paying. SEO takes months and then keeps working. If you need enquiries this month, ads. If you are building something over a year, SEO. Most businesses that can afford it run both, with ads carrying the early months.

Who owns the ads account?

You do. It is set up in your name with your billing, and we are added as a manager. If you stop working with us the account, the history and the conversion data stay with you. Agencies that run your ads inside their own account are holding your data hostage.

Why do I need a separate landing page?

Because an ad promising emergency boiler repair that lands on a homepage listing nine services makes the visitor start again. You paid for that click. Matching the page to the ad is usually the single largest improvement available in a small account.

What is a realistic cost per enquiry?

It varies enormously by trade and area, and anyone quoting a figure before looking at your market is guessing. What we can do in the first month is find out what it actually is for you, which is the number that decides whether to continue.

Home/Google Ads

Google Ads for UK businesses

For when you need the phone to ring this month. from £300/mo + spend, monthly, cancel whenever.

Get a quote Find your city

We can show you the market, not just describe it

This site is a UK business directory built from open data, holding 55,823 listings across 16 cities. That means the advice on these pages is grounded in a count rather than an assertion — and it differs by city, which is the useful part.

55,823

businesses counted

38%

are online and could be bidding

cities broken down

Counted from this directory, sourced from OpenStreetMap. A business whose website we have not recorded shows as having none, so treat these as a floor rather than an exact figure.

What you get

from £300/mo + spendmonthly, cancel whenever · live within a week

Search campaigns on the terms people use when they are ready to buy, with tracking set up so you can see what an enquiry actually costs.

Search campaigns on high-intent local terms, not broad awareness spend

Negative keywords from day one, so budget stops leaking to the wrong searches

Conversion tracking on calls and form submissions, set up before launch

A landing page that matches the ad, rather than dropping people on a homepage

Monthly reporting in cost per enquiry, not impressions

Management fee only. Your ad spend goes to Google directly, from your own account.

The account is yours. If you leave, the history and the data stay with you.

No minimum spend commitment from us. Below roughly £300/mo of spend, ads rarely make sense.

Get a quote

We reply by email and read every enquiry ourselves. Nothing is charged from this page.

How it actually goes

Work out if it is worth it

What a customer is worth and what the clicks cost. If the arithmetic does not work we will say so before taking a fee, because a campaign that cannot pay back is worse than no campaign.

Tracking before traffic

Calls and forms measured first. Running ads without conversion tracking is buying clicks and guessing, and it is astonishingly common.

Small and tight to start

A narrow set of terms you would be happy to pay for, with negatives already in place. Widening later is easy; unlearning wasted spend is not.

Then prune weekly

Most of the work in a good account is switching things off. Search terms that do not convert get excluded rather than optimised.

Google Ads by city

Each city page carries the real figures for that market. Ordered by how many listings we hold, not by how much we would like to sell there.

London

60%have no website

31,768 listed · mostly restaurants

Edinburgh

53%have no website

3,151 listed · mostly hairdressers & beauty

Birmingham

60%have no website

3,140 listed · mostly takeaways

Manchester

70%have no website

2,927 listed · mostly takeaways

Bristol

77%have no website

2,391 listed · mostly hairdressers & beauty

Leeds

74%have no website

2,181 listed · mostly takeaways

Glasgow

60%have no website

2,106 listed · mostly restaurants

Newcastle

61%have no website

1,952 listed · mostly takeaways

Sheffield

77%have no website

1,544 listed · mostly restaurants

Brighton

60%have no website

1,444 listed · mostly cafes

Liverpool

66%have no website

1,015 listed · mostly pubs & bars

Cardiff

52%have no website

533 listed · mostly restaurants

Belfast

64%have no website

499 listed · mostly restaurants

Nottingham

54%have no website

484 listed · mostly restaurants

Coventry

64%have no website

387 listed · mostly pubs & bars

Leicester

73%have no website

301 listed · mostly restaurants

Questions

How much should I spend on Google Ads?: For a local business, meaningful testing usually starts around £300 to £500 a month of ad spend on top of the management fee. Below that there is rarely enough data to tell what is working from what is noise. If a customer is worth £40 to you and clicks cost £3, the arithmetic is difficult; if a customer is worth £400, it is straightforward.
Is Google Ads better than SEO?: They answer different questions. Ads produce traffic the day the campaign goes live and stop the day you stop paying. SEO takes months and then keeps working. If you need enquiries this month, ads. If you are building something over a year, SEO. Most businesses that can afford it run both, with ads carrying the early months.
Who owns the ads account?: You do. It is set up in your name with your billing, and we are added as a manager. If you stop working with us the account, the history and the conversion data stay with you. Agencies that run your ads inside their own account are holding your data hostage.
Why do I need a separate landing page?: Because an ad promising emergency boiler repair that lands on a homepage listing nine services makes the visitor start again. You paid for that click. Matching the page to the ad is usually the single largest improvement available in a small account.
What is a realistic cost per enquiry?: It varies enormously by trade and area, and anyone quoting a figure before looking at your market is guessing. What we can do in the first month is find out what it actually is for you, which is the number that decides whether to continue.

The other things we do

Web design

Sites for businesses that have not got one yet.

from £900

SEO

For businesses already online and still not found.

from £350/mo

Not sure any of it applies yet?

The cheapest useful thing for most local businesses is the £149 google business profile fix — a one-off, no retainer. We would rather sell that first.

What it covers

Who you would be dealing with

The same people who built this directory. That is the portfolio at the moment: 55,000 UK business listings, the search behind them, and the data work that keeps them accurate. There is no client list on this page because there is not one yet, and inventing one is not something we are willing to do.

What that buys you is a low price and direct contact with whoever does the work. What it costs you is the reassurance of a case study. If that trade is wrong for you it is a reasonable thing to decide, and an established agency with a portfolio is a perfectly sensible alternative.

Being listed in this directory is free and buying anything from us changes nothing about where a business appears in it. The organic order is not for sale.

Tell us what you need