Services
Google Ads in London
- 31,935businesses listed
- 60%no website
- 24%publish hours
- Price
- from £300/mo + spend
- Terms
- monthly, cancel whenever
- Turnaround
- live within a week
What the numbers say
London is comparatively thin online, which usually means cheaper clicks
Only 40% of the 31,935 businesses we list in London have a website at all, so the pool of businesses able to run a serious search campaign is smaller than in London or Manchester. Less competition in an auction generally means lower cost per click.
That makes ads unusually attractive here, with one caveat: you still need somewhere for the click to land. If you have no site, that is the first spend, not the ads.
The other consequence is that search volume is lower too. Cheaper clicks and fewer of them can still work well, but it makes tracking essential, because at low volume the difference between working and not is easy to misread.
By trade
Where the auction in London is crowded and where it is not
Not every trade in London costs the same to advertise in. Pubs & bars are the most established online here, with 57% of the 3882 we list holding a website. Hairdressers & beauty are the least, at 24% of 5079. Whoever has a site is who can plausibly run a campaign against you.
A gap that wide usually shows up in what you pay. Expect pubs & bars to be the more expensive auction in London and hairdressers & beauty to be the cheaper one, though volume in the cheaper trade will be lower to match.
Either way this is an estimate from who is present, not from auction data. The only way to learn what a click actually costs in London is to run it for a month with conversion tracking on from the first day, which is why we set that up before spending anything.
- Restaurants7826 listed51%no website
- Cafes5351 listed68%no website
- Takeaways5298 listed65%no website
- Hairdressers & beauty5079 listed76%no website
- Pubs & bars3882 listed43%no website
- Pharmacies1054 listed57%no website
By area
Where in London the gap is widest
London is not one market. Across the 8 areas where we hold enough listings to compare, Walthamstow has the most businesses with no website at 82% of 363, and West End the fewest at 32% of 660. Where you trade inside the city changes who you are actually competing with.
| Area | Listed | No website | Publish hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Walthamstow | 363 | 82% | 10% |
| Fairfield | 251 | 77% | 14% |
| Spitalfields & Banglatown | 267 | 67% | 39% |
| Bloomsbury | 303 | 56% | 39% |
| Hoxton East & Shoreditch | 210 | 56% | 31% |
| St James's | 620 | 51% | 31% |
| Holborn & Covent Garden | 242 | 48% | 37% |
| West End | 660 | 32% | 36% |
Areas are ONS ward names, which is how the underlying data records them rather than how anybody says them out loud. Only wards with at least 40 listings are shown, because below that a single business moves the percentage several points.
What we hold for London
31,935 businesses, of which 7,633 (24%) publish opening hours and 9,628 have a phone number recorded. The trades break down like this:
- Restaurants7826
- Cafes5351
- Takeaways5298
- Hairdressers & beauty5079
- Pubs & bars3882
- Pharmacies1054
from £300/mo + spend, monthly, cancel whenever
What you get
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.
What is included
- 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
What is not included
- 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.
We reply by email and read every enquiry ourselves. Nothing is charged from this page.
Before you buy anything: if your Google Business Profile has never been set up properly, that is almost always the bigger change for the smaller invoice. We fix those for £149, one off. What that covers.
If the job is bigger than this
The prices above are where each service starts, and they cover what most small businesses need. Larger jobs get quoted properly rather than squeezed into a package: multiple locations, booking or payments, a shop, a rebuild that has to keep its existing rankings, ongoing work across more than one service, or anything where the answer depends on what you already have.
Tell us what you are trying to do and we will come back with a scope and a fixed price, or say plainly if we are not the right people for it.
Questions
Questions
How many businesses in London have a website?
Of the 31,935 we list in London, 12,869 have a website recorded and 19,066 do not, so 60% have none. Counted from this directory, sourced from OpenStreetMap, so treat it as a floor.
What does google ads management cost in London?
from £300/mo + spend, monthly, cancel whenever. 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.
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.
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