What a monthly budget actually buys

Clicks a month, by budget and trade

Budgets are in US dollars so that they match the unit the click costs are reported in. Figures are rounded and assume the whole budget is spent at the average click price, which no real campaign does exactly.

Trade	Cost per click	$500 a month	$1,000 a month	$2,500 a month
roofer dublin	$13.00	38	77	192
accountant dublin	$3.50	143	286	714
locksmith dublin	$3.00	167	333	833
pest control dublin	$2.50	200	400	1,000
cleaning services dublin	$2.00	250	500	1,250
plumber dublin	$1.80	278	556	1,389
solicitor dublin	$1.60	313	625	1,563
dentist dublin	$1.30	385	769	1,923
chiropractor dublin	$0.60	833	1,667	4,167
barber dublin	$0.30	1,667	3,333	8,333

Read the first row and the last row together

The same money buys a roofer 38 visits and a barber 1,667. Anyone comparing advertising budgets across trades without that in front of them is comparing nothing.

It also explains why generic advice about minimum budgets is useless. Five hundred dollars is a serious test in a cheap trade and barely a fortnight of data in an expensive one.

Where the arithmetic stops

Here. To go further you would need two numbers this desk does not have: how many of those clicks become enquiries, and what an enquiry is worth to you. Multiply them and you get whether the budget makes sense; without them the click count is just a click count.

Any agency, this one included, that presents a projected number of customers from a budget is combining a real number with two invented ones. Ask which of the three came from your own records.

The two you can supply

Your conversion rate. From your own site analytics if you have them, or from counting enquiries against visits for a month. Anything else is a guess with a decimal point.

Your customer value. Not the first sale. The first sale plus what a typical customer spends afterwards, which in trades like dentistry or accountancy is the whole argument for advertising at all.

With those two, the table above becomes a decision. Without them, it is a warning about how differently the same budget behaves in different trades.

A note on the search volume

Volume caps this arithmetic. Painter and decorator dublin draws about twenty searches a month, so a budget that could buy 260 clicks at that price will never spend it on that term. In low-volume trades the constraint is demand, not money, and the click cost table shows both columns together for that reason.