How much do Google Ads cost? Real numbers from our own ad account

Google Ads has no fixed price. Search campaigns are paid per click. This article opens two weeks of numbers from our own campaign: the average cost per click, what happened when we raised the budget, Google's daily budget rules, the VAT to add, and what ad management costs in Thailand.

The first question anyone asks before running Google Ads is how much it costs. There is no fixed price. Search campaigns are paid per click, and each click costs more or less depending on how many others bid on the same keyword. The numbers below come from our own campaign on web design keywords, from 4 to 17 October 2026.

Real cost per click for web design keywords

• "Website coding service": about $1.5 per click, from 47 clicks
• "Website design service": about $1.9 per click, from 18 clicks
• "Website price": about $2.0 per click, from 35 clicks
• "Find someone to build a website": about $2.1 per click, from 15 clicks

Across the campaign, the ads showed 2,030 times and got 138 clicks, about 7 out of every 100 people who saw them, at about $1.9 per click on average.

Five times the budget did not bring five times the clicks

At first we set a budget of $6 a day and got about 6 clicks a day, at about $1.1 per click. When we raised the budget to $30 a day, clicks rose to about 15 a day, but the average cost per click rose to about $2.2. Five times the budget brought about two and a half times the clicks. Counting only the extra, actual spend rose by about $27 a day for about 9 more clicks a day, so each extra click cost about $3.

This campaign uses the strategy that lets Google bid for as many clicks as possible within the budget. We think that with a bigger budget, the system was willing to pay more to win the auction on keywords with a lot of competition. These numbers are for one group of keywords over one period. Other businesses will see different numbers.

Budget rules to know before you set one

• The daily budget is an average. Google writes that on some days a campaign may spend up to twice the daily budget. On one day in our account, with a budget of $30 a day, it spent $52.
• Over a month, it spends no more than 30.4 times the daily budget.
• Google charges 7% VAT on ad spend if you haven't given Google a Thai VAT registration number.
• Searches from people who are not customers, such as job seekers or people looking for how to do it themselves, really do eat the budget. Add them as negative keywords.

What ad management costs in Thailand

On top of the ad spend you pay Google directly, hiring someone to manage the ads is a separate fee. From my survey of Thai freelancers and agencies in October 2026, a first campaign setup costs about $15 to $240, monthly management about $45 to $449, and some charge a percentage of the ad budget, about 10 to 20%.

How to set a starting budget

Work backwards from clicks. I use about 200 clicks as the minimum to read the results. If a click in your business costs about $1.8, you need about $360 of ad spend, plus VAT. With much less than that, the numbers may be too few to tell whether the ads work.

The cost per click is different for every business. The most accurate way is to check keyword prices in the Google Ads Keyword Planner before you start, then look at the real numbers after two weeks.