There are two obvious costs of running an AdWords account. The biggest cost will be the money you pay to Google every time someone clicks your ad, and then there is a cost of managing the account.  

Google costs

The actual amount that you pay to Google for the cost of their pay per click ads will depend on many factors. The biggest of those are:

• How many people click your ads - the more clicks you get, the more money you will pay.
  
• How hard you work on your account.
  
• The quality of your overall account.
  

The harder the account is worked the less you pay to Google PLUS you get more conversions, leads or sales. On the other hand, the less account management you do, the more you pay to Google. Quality work is reflected in your Quality Score. If you have high Quality Scores across your account you will pay less to Google relative to your competitors.

Account management costs

The cost of managing your account will also depend on many factors:

• If you manage the account yourself, there is the opportunity cost of not doing other work in your business, such as tax returns, selling, networking or designing and building an even better widget.
  
• If you engage an AdWords' specialist such as Optimum Results, you will be paying a management fee.
  
• An AdWords management fee is likely to be determined by the size of your account, which determines the work involved. 
  

Taking the time to get the biggest return

The biggest factor influencing how much time and resources are invested in managing an optimised account is the search volume.  More ad groups, ads and negative keywords will help you get the best return on investment.

If your budget is stretched, which is very common for small businesses, you will need to spend much more time on your account trying to get top performing keywords triggering ads and not the wasteful keywords that Google might be looking to trigger.

So what costs can I expect?

As you might have guessed by now there is no single Google ad campaign cost.  Even organisations in a similar market can’t compare costs. Their brands resonate differently and the value proposition in their ads will be different.

If you’re a small business you may need around $1,000 a month to test the waters. If you market a popular product or service nationwide, your monthly bill may be in the tens of thousands.

Value for money

A very good question you will be asking yourself is “What value will I get from my AdWords investment?”  

You won’t know that until you take the plunge but like any marketing channel, you’ll want to get the best return for your investment and that’s what you should focus on when managing the detail. For example, if one click costs $5 and results in sales of $100, that is obviously better than three clicks that cost $1 each but resulted in no sales. Yes, your costs are 60% higher but you made plenty of cash.

Set your own benchmarks

Once you’re started, our advice is to use your own results including clicks, costs, sales or conversion data to determine your budget and act as a benchmark for you to outperform.