What a Google Ads budget must clear
Not a price list. The arithmetic that decides whether a paid programme can teach you anything, and the number below which we say no.
Below roughly ten thousand dirhams a month in media, the management fee becomes most of what you spend and the data is too thin to decide anything with. Above it, the question stops being the budget and becomes what a qualified lead is worth to you.
The floor is set by evidence, not by ambition
A paid programme is a series of decisions: which queries to keep, which to exclude, which landing page wins. Every one of those decisions needs enough conversions to be more than an anecdote. Thirty conversions in a month is a signal you can act on. Three is a story you tell yourself.
So the floor is arithmetic. Take the cost per click in your market, multiply by the clicks it takes to produce a conversion, and multiply again by the number of conversions a month you would need to make a decision. In most of the sectors we work in that lands between eight and fifteen thousand dirhams a month before fees.
The fee has to be a minority of the spend
A management fee that is half the media budget is a bad trade whatever the quality of the management. There is not enough money in the account for skill to show up. We would rather say that at the first call than take the retainer and explain it later.
What to do when you are under the floor
This is not a dead end, and it is not a reason to leave the money in a drawer.
- Run one campaign on your best queries and manage it yourself for a quarter
- Spend the budget on the offer and the landing page instead, which lifts every channel
- Put it into search visibility you keep, where money buys an asset rather than a month
- Come back when the arithmetic clears, and bring what the quarter taught you
Above the floor, the number that matters changes
Once the account can produce a decision a month, budget stops being the interesting question. What a qualified lead is worth to you is: it sets the ceiling you bid to, it decides which campaigns survive, and it turns a spend report into a business one. Most accounts we inherit have never had that number written down.
What to take from this
- 01Roughly ten thousand dirhams a month in media before management is worth buying
- 02Thirty conversions a month is a decision, three is an anecdote
- 03A fee that is half the media budget cannot be rescued by skill
- 04Above the floor, what a qualified lead is worth replaces the budget as the number to argue about
Ask the question directly
- Is the floor different for social ads?
- The arithmetic is the same and the creative adds to it, because a test queue needs enough production to keep moving. In practice the floor sits slightly higher rather than lower.
- Do you take smaller accounts at a lower fee?
- No. A cheaper fee on an account that cannot produce evidence buys you a worse version of the same problem, and we would be taking money to look busy.
Related answers
Performance marketing
Google Ads, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn run as one account structure, with conversion tracking you can defend and spend paced against cost per qualified lead rather than clicks.
SEO or Google Ads first?
Bring the decision you are stuck on
A call, forty five minutes, no deck. We will tell you if we are the wrong firm.