“How much should I spend a month” is the most common question in this field, and “it depends” is a useless answer.
Here is a calculation you can run yourself. It answers two things: how much you need to spend before the result means anything, and whether your current budget reaches that.
Accept one premise first
In the first month, the purpose of advertising is not profit. It is collecting enough data to judge whether this is worth continuing.
This matters. People spend three hundred dollars, stop after a fortnight, and conclude it does not work. That budget cannot support any conclusion — the sample is too small and everything visible is noise.
So the question is not what it costs to win a customer. It is what it costs to find out whether this channel works for you.
Work backwards
Four steps from your own business:
1. What a customer is worth.
Not one transaction — their total value to you. A renovation client may be one job and several referrals; a dental patient returns for years. Estimate a figure.
2. How many enquiries become one customer.
From your own history. Most service businesses sit between three and ten. If you have never measured, use five.
3. How many clicks produce one enquiry.
Your conversion rate, which depends on how well the landing page matches the ad. Typically 2% to 5% — so 20 to 50 clicks per enquiry. Well-executed reaches 8%; poorly executed falls under 1%.
Use 3%, which is 33 clicks per enquiry.
4. What a click costs.
Broad New Zealand ranges: $1 to $5 in ordinary categories; over $10 in competitive ones — legal, insurance, building, lending; under $1 in genuinely niche areas.
Google’s keyword planner gives real figures for your industry, free.
Run the numbers
Assume $3 a click, 33 clicks per enquiry, five enquiries per customer.
Advertising cost per customer: 3 × 33 × 5 = about $495.
Then judge: if a customer is worth substantially more than $495, this channel works. If it is close or lower, either the conversion rate has to improve or this is not your channel.
Now the minimum budget. Judging anything requires seeing several enquiries — one could be luck. Take three:
3 × 33 × 3 = about $300, purely to produce three enquiries.
The advertising system also has a learning period, during which it is still working out who to show ads to and performs below its eventual level. That typically takes two to four weeks.
So a realistic floor is $500 to $800 a month for two to three consecutive months. Below that, the money rarely buys a reliable conclusion.
If the budget does not reach that
Two options, both better than spending a little and hoping:
1. Narrow the scope until your budget covers it.
Do not advertise on “renovation”. Advertise on “kitchen renovation” plus the two suburbs you work in. Narrower terms, less competition, cheaper clicks, and clearer intent from whoever arrives.
Spending enough within a small scope beats spreading the same money across a wide one, where no direction accumulates enough data to read.
2. Do something else first.
If two hundred a month is the limit, that money returns more elsewhere: a decent set of photographs, publishing prices on your website, completing a Google Business Profile.
The last especially — a business profile is free, and for many local trades the map results produce more visibility than ads.
Where the money leaks
Common losses:
Terms too broad. “Website” is searched by students, jobseekers and competitors. You are paying for their clicks. Specific is better: “auckland business website cost” is far more precise than “website”.
No exclusions. Negative keywords let you exclude “free”, “tutorial”, “jobs”, “DIY”. Without them a real share of the budget goes to people who were never going to pay for anything.
Landing pages that do not match the ad. The ad says “kitchen renovation quote” and the click lands on a home page, leaving the visitor to search. The drop-off here is severe and entirely avoidable — build a page for whatever the ad promised.
No conversion tracking. Without knowing which clicks produced enquiries there is nothing to optimise, only guessing. Setting it up is free and frequently skipped.
How ads and SEO divide the work
Treated as alternatives, they are tools for different timescales:
Ads: traffic today, gone when you stop, cost predictable. Good for testing demand, covering quiet periods, launching something new.
SEO: months to start, and what accumulates is yours. Core industry terms usually take over a year.
They work best in sequence: advertise first, use the data to identify which terms actually produce enquiries, then concentrate SEO on those. SEO then follows verified demand instead of guessing.
Later, once organic positions arrive, advertising can contract or shift to competitive terms organic search will not reach.
A practical suggestion
If you have never advertised, do not begin with three months.
Spend a fortnight and two or three hundred dollars on three to five of the most precise terms, purely to see whether anyone clicks and whether the people who arrive resemble your customers. Do not expect a sale; you are confirming demand exists.
Few clicks at all suggests the demand you assumed may not be there, and stopping is wiser than adding money. Normal clicks from the right sort of people means proceeding with the budget calculated above.
Our campaign management is a monthly fee separate from ad spend, which goes directly to the platform. Worth establishing with any provider — if the two are quoted as one figure, you cannot tell how much of your money reaches an audience.