Find out what you’ll be expected to pay in our no-nonsense PPC pricing guide, and what factors can drive your PPC costs up or down.
If you’re a business owner looking to get started with PPC, the chances are you’re simply looking for quick estimations to know what you can expect to pay. Unfortunately, there is no ‘one size fits all’ answer, and many factors influence the cost of PPC.
In this article, we’re going to look at all of the different PPC pricing plans and tiers that are popular in digital marketing today, both at an industry standard and also that we currently offer at Add People. So you can quickly see what might be appealing to you and easily gauge price estimations.
So let’s jump right in:
Table of contents
1) The cost of PPC
2) Common PPC pricing tiers
3) Factors that push the cost up or down
4) PPC costs by ad network
5) Cost of retargeted ads
6) FAQs
Full disclosure: yes we are a digital marketing industry with our own PPC services and ecommerce PPC services. But in the interests of you, the reader, we are going to be looking at PPC advertising costs in general across the UK in an impartial way.
At a glance: The cost of PPC in 2025 & what you’ll be expected to pay.
Average PPC costs vary widely based on the industry you’re in, how fierce the level of competition is you’re going up against, and your business goals. That being said, we typically see a range of:
➡Lower-cost estimations: £500-£2,000/month
➡Mid-range estimations: £2,000-£10,000/month
➡Higher-cost estimations: £10,000+/month
These figures are broadly typical of the digital marketing industry in the UK today. Some clients, at the extreme higher end of the scale, can spend anywhere from £20,000-£30,000/month.
Good to know: Some industries have more competitive cost per clicks, such as finance or legal-based industries. So if you’re operating within these industries, you can expect to need a higher budget to compete effectively.
What is the most basic PPC campaign you can buy – and is this appropriate for my business?
Most businesses, if they want to grow quickly and see results faster, will not want to go for a basic, barebones PPC campaign. A basic campaign might be a good starting point, but it won’t be beneficial for long-term growth.
PPC consists of lots of different campaigns that your PPC manager will strategise and run either on your behalf or with your help. Read more about the day-to-day responsibilities of PPC managers here: What is PPC management?
However, if you are:
➡ an ecomm website with a small ad budget and a small selection of products (under 100), then a standard campaign of about £10 a day might work as a starting point.
➡ a local lead-generation website or a new business with a very straightforward offering, then a basic campaign will also be appropriate for the short term.
What a ‘basic PPC campaign’ looks like:
If you are just starting with PPC you might be wondering what a most basic, entry-level campaign looks like.
From an ecommerce perspective, it will be an ad via the Google shopping ad network. To do this, you’d have to integrate your website with Google Merchant Centre and list all of your products there, including the price, name and shipping details of each product. This would enable your products to appear in an image carousel at the top of the search engine results.
To appear in the actual text-based search results, the most basic search campaign advertisement would be what’s referred to as a Single Keyword Ad Group (otherwise known as the unsexy acronym ‘SKAG’). So to do this we would create an ad with just one keyword and one ad for that keyword and that would be it.
At a glance: the different PPC cost pricing tiers, payment plans and packages.
As you shop around for PPC experts across the UK, you are likely to encounter three popular types of payment plan:
➡The monthly fee payment plan — in which an agency will charge you a set amount per month for their services. (This is the most common plan and the same one we use at Add People.)
➡The hourly fee payment plan — in which an agency will charge you per hour for their PPC services.
➡The % fee payment plan — with this plan, your agency may charge a percentage of your ad spend for services like strategy planning, keyword research and reporting.
At Add People, we operate on a monthly fee payment plan (as most agencies do). As this is by far the most common type of payment plan, let’s dig into it a little deeper. You’ll see that there are different tiers and packages to the monthly payment plan that are common across agencies also.
Monthly fee packages and the cost of PPC.
Regardless of the payment plan you choose, how much you’ll pay for your PPC management costs will depend on your business size and also what it is you want to get out of your campaign.
At Add People, we offer various different tiers or packages, as is the industry standard. The more you spend, the more additional benefits you will receive. All of these packages will also include a PPC management fee.
Here’s an overview of our PPC packages:
| Package | Price | What’s Included: |
|---|---|---|
| Basic package | £250+ VAT | ➡A professional PPC strategy & campaign, implemented by our expert team. ➡If you have a lead-gen website, we can build new lead-gen service pages for you. ➡Conversion tracking analytics. ➡This is for businesses that are happy to run the campaign without frequent communication by an account manager. With this package, your account manager will review your account once a month. |
| Gold package | £499+ VAT | ➡With this package, you will have a dedicated account manager who will send over a report and call you every four weeks. |
| Platinum package | £649+ VAT | Our platinum package comes with a lot more additional features, including:
➡Email automation to help you re-engage with potential customers who came close to making a purchase but ‘abandoned’ the process. |
| Diamond package | £999+ VAT | With the diamond package, you get all of the above, plus:
➡As well as the automations for Welcome and Cart Abandonment offered in the platinum package, we can offer bespoke email campaigns to help reach more of your customers. ➡Additional videos – Sometimes one video a quarter will not be enough and for businesses with multiple revenue streams or large product offerings, therefore one video will not be enough. We can offer more than one approach to cover multiple angles. ➡Frequent communication with your PPC management team. (For example, some of our customers might wish to speak to us every two weeks or sooner.) ➡Other add-ons that will help the wider marketing strategy efforts of your business, in addition to the Google ads we are running. |
| ⭐Our low-risk, no-obligation six-week trial | £599* | ➡Most agencies will want you to sign up to PPC marketing for a long period (typically contracts start at six months).
➡We don’t. Instead, we are offering a risk-free trial period. ➡The reason for this is simple. Google Ads isn’t for everyone. Some businesses might find their gross profit margins are sustainable, or that their business offering isn’t PPC friendly. And if that’s the case with you, the trial can end after six weeks with no strings attached. ➡However, we run these trials to prove that we can work with any client and make your PPC campaign successful. It’s our chance to say that we can: 1) Help businesses in a short amount of time. ➡This trial period is essentially our ‘gold’ package. This means you will be able to talk to an account manager. |
Good to know: Our low risk, no-obligation trial price is slightly higher for businesses that aren’t making revenue yet or don’t have much data for us to go off. Google Ads runs on data. If your company is a new one, or new to Ads, then we’ll need to collect the data first to make assumptions on how best to run your campaign.
Factors that can push the cost of PPC pricing up and down.
There are lots of factors at play that can influence the cost of your PPC campaigns — no matter what digital marketing agency you partner up with. Here are the most common ones:
| ⬆️Factors that can make PPC cheaper | ⬇️Factors that can make PPC more expensive |
| ➡ Your average order value is low. If you are selling products with a low AOV, then the ‘lifetime value’ of your business offering is likely to be quite strong. Example: An ecommerce store selling affordable trainers might sell 15-20 pairs a month with an AOV of £30, and so can probably spend as little as £300 a month on pay per click rates and still make a healthy profit. ➡High-quality scores or high-quality ads lead to lower costs. So we make sure the ad copy and content we provide are accurate and beneficial.
➡Ad extensions. By implementing extensions such as sitelinks, callouts or price extensions, we can provide additional information to ‘catch the eye’ of your potential customers as they see your ads. This means they’ll be more likely to click on your ads, improving click-through rates.
➡Feed optimisation.This involves making sure all the details about your products submitted to Google’s merchant centre are as detailed and as accurate they can be. This is important because, when displaying your ads, Google’s shopping network will need to rely heavily on the details you’ve provided in the merchant centre. Having more (and more accurate detail) about your products will result in better ad quality, and can reduce your cost per click as Google will deem them more informative.
➡If the agency you’re working with is an official Microsoft Partner. Microsoft offers vouchers to new accounts that incentivise businesses to spend. For example, if you spend £100 you might be entitled to as much as up to £500 in advertising vouchers/credits. At Add People, we’ve found that this takes an excess cost off of the client and we can implement them right at the beginning of a campaign Most agencies work with Microsoft but aren’t ‘Partners’ with them. So make sure you ask them to clarify their relationship, and if there’s the possibility you could benefit from ad vouchers/credits.
➡Our low risk, no-obligation trial. Most agencies don’t offer a six-week trial but we do. So if, for whatever reason, PPC doesn’t seem to be a good fit for your business model, you can move on without being locked into a six-month contract (that most agencies offer, at minimum).
➡A dedicated PPC account manager. How competently your campaign is managed will have a big influence on the amount you’ll spend.
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➡Your average order value is high. If your AOV is quite high, then you might have to wait a bit longer for your potential customers to make a purchase. (This is normal, as most people want to think things through before spending a big chunk of money on goods or a service.) Example: A gym equipment business selling treadmills, weight benches, and so on might be spending up to £6,000 on paid ads. But they can expect their returning revenue to be much higher, earning up to £100,000 in revenue a month.
➡You’re in a competitive industry. If there are lots of businesses bidding on the same keywords as you are, this will drive up the advertising costs of these keywords. PPC works on a cost-per-click (CPC) model, meaning that you’ll have to pay a fee every time a potential customer ‘clicks’ on your advertisement.
➡You have a lead-generation website (sometimes). In our experience, lead-generation businesses often have to deal with higher CPC costs. This is mainly because the the returning revenue for a ‘lead’ is often much higher than it is for a typical ecommerce product.
➡You have a gambling website. The pay-per-click prices for gambling websites could be as high as £60-70. That’s usually because, once on the website, online casinos and gambling websites can usually expect their customers to spend a lot of money.
➡How ‘aggressive’ you want to be with your bidding strategy. If you’ve got a bigger budget to play with, you can advertise more, which will obviously cost you more, but it will also help you to achieve greater visibility quicker.
➡High volume, high-intent keywords. If a lot of people are searching for, say, 600 searches a month for ‘PPC agency’ and we have good reason to assume that those searchers are looking to hire a PPC agency, then that is an example of a high volume, high-intent keyword. These keywords have lots of people searching for them and ready to buy, so they’re the most expensive keywords to bid on.
➡Machine-based bidding. This is a data driven approach in which Google uses elements of AI to understand your customers based on the information fed into the campaigns by our Account Managers and the data collected from your account.
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Example of an ‘aggressive PPC strategy’:
‘Aggressive’ is a term we use in PPC to signify how quickly a customer wants to push their ads and drive better results.
For example, we currently work with a business that builds machinery but also sells tools. This means their products can have price ranges that span £10 to £10,000. To get results quickly across all of their products, they embarked on an aggressive PPC strategy in which we built up to 20 different campaigns covering many of their different product types and brands.
This company spent just under £20,000 on PPC ads across these campaigns in a single month but earned up to £270,000 in revenue as a result.
PPC costs by advertising network.
In PPC parlance an ‘advertising network’ is basically the platform that you choose to place your ads on. By far the most common industry-standard ad networks — and the ones we use at Add People — are:
1) Google Ads (formerly known as ‘Adwords’)
2) Microsoft Ads (the ‘Bing! network’)
These two giants represent the biggest search engines with the highest amount of daily usage. Actually, most agencies stick almost exclusively to Google Ads. But because we are a Microsoft Partner, we work more closely with Microsoft advertising too.
It’s also common for agencies to run ad placements on social media platforms such as Facebook Ads, LinkedIn and Instagram. but from an ecommerce and lead-generation standpoint, the most important ones are Google and Microsoft Ads.
Did you know?
Microsoft uses Bing! as the default for its laptops and computers. And so many ‘older generation’ potential customers use this search engine regularly. But because the average number of users is not as high as with Google Ads, the cost-per-click on the display ads tends to be cheaper.
The cost of PPC retargeting ads.
There’s no exact number we can give here, as the cost-per-click of retargeted ads can be down to many factors. Some of which we’ve already mentioned, such as competition, what industry you’re in — and so on.
Some retargeted ads belonging to the same campaign may have CPCs that ranges from £0.05p to £3. As this is primarily a brand awareness campaign, CPC will depend on where they are advertised and the strategy implemented.
But we can tell you how we can keep the costs of retargeted ads down.
Inefficient retargeting campaigns can waste a lot of money. The reason is that remarketing ads run on a Google display network of about 2.5 million websites. But obviously, your target audience won’t be on every website. Nor would it be possible to display your ads on all of these millions of websites. The key to success is to find out where your ideal audience is and to exclude channels and audiences that might not be relevant.
Example: You have a company that manufactures bespoke bicycle sheds. A YouTube channel on the subject of mountain biking might represent the ideal channel to advertise your products. A website that sells Christmas hampers, on the other hand, is not likely to be a sensible place to retarget.
In most agencies, a PPC manager should be able to compile a list of valuable channels and audiences in about six months, along with a list of invaluable ones.
What are retargeted ads?
‘Retargeted ads’ are, as the name suggests, ads that are purposely reshown to potential customers who may have visited your website or interacted with one of your ads. The idea behind it is simple: if they’ve expressed interest in your product or service before, then by retargeting them with the same adverts, we may be able to help them remember or reinvigorate their interest — increasing the likelihood of conversion.
For example, if you’ve ever added an item to a checkout basket but then not gone through with the order, that will be one of the behaviours that Google and Microsoft Ads will ‘track’. If you’ve ever browsed for clothes on ASOS and then been ‘followed around’ with adverts and images of the same products you viewed for about a month after, then you’ve experienced a retargeted ad.
Cost of PPC — FAQs
It all depends on your business focus. If you have an ecomm website then usually we’ll start a PPC campaign on further promoting your best-selling products. If you have a healthy profit margin we might also push to create ads that sell other products on your website that we think would do well.
Generally, your budget will be allocated towards:
➡Keyword bidding
➡Ad extensions
➡Ad copy testing
Your budget is also allocated depending on the data we’re getting from your campaign management, too. We might also:
➡Perform A/B testing to see what iterations of ads work better at getting clicks.
➡Experiment with ads based on brand, product type, size, colour, etc. (it all depends on what your goals are, and what you want to focus on).
➡If you have a ‘standard shopping campaign’ we might progress this to a ‘performance max campaign’ that utlilises the machine-based bidding aspect (mentioned above).
➡Create, test and optimise new landing pages for your PPD ads
£500 a month. Obviously, this can depend on a lot of factors. But at Add People, we have a minimum £500 monthly ad spend. The reason behind this is: if you only spend £500 a month, you’re likely going to see very little results from your PPC ads.
Some agencies might offer as low as £200 a month. But we wouldn’t recommend it.
Freelancers tend to be cheaper than agency-based PPC managers (but not always, it depends on experience), and some of them can be very knowledgeable.
However, PPC is quite broad and complex, with a wide range of areas to understand. By using an agency, you can benefit from our diverse team of technical specialists, website developers, UX developers, technicians, video editors and copywriters. Agencies also have large marketing budgets and invest these into powerful PPC tools that can make for more effective data-driven campaigns and results, such as Clickfraud and Ahrefs.
If the freelancer you settle on is particularly cheap, then bear in mind this is likely to mean they are less experienced, and have fewer analytical tools at their command. It could end up costing you money in the long run.
It depends on various factors, but typically the larger a company is, the more they tend to spend on their PPC strategies.
1) £200 – £5,000 tends to be approximately what start-ups and small businesses can be expected to pay overall on PPC.
2) £5,000 – £50,000 for mid-sized businesses or larger SMEs.
Most businesses (approx. 44%) tend to have a total ad spend of around £500 – £10,000.
Most PPC marketing agencies charge a PPC management pricing fee. Put simply, it covers:
1) Your account manager’s experience, time and resources that they use to set up, optimise and analyse the data of your PPC campaigns. And also to compile and deliver campaign performance reports to you.
The more individual campaigns you have running, the longer it takes to do this. For example, it’s not unusual for some of our larger clients to have 20+ campaigns running all at once.
2) It also covers any technical work that your website might need. For example, if there are any tracking issues, or if your ads have been hit with a suspension, our technical team can work on this.
3) Everyday tasks such as additional feed optimisation to build out product data and increase visibility; CCS providers; click fraud detection; ad copywriting and so on.
Read more: Find out what our PPC managers do and what to expect from our PPC management services here.
You can certainly try PPC by yourself, you just need to get an Ads account and start practising! The Google Ads platform is free to operate. You’ll only pay if a potential customer clicks on your ads. Other free — but invaluable tools — include:
➡ Google Keyword Planner. This tool will give you the average search volume and average cost per click for keywords. So you’ll know how popular (and how costly) the keywords you will be targeting are.
➡ Google Ads and Google Analytics. These free tools will allow you to closely look at how your website is performing, along with other key metrics.
With the Google Ads platform, Google Keyword Planner and Analytics, you’ll have a great starting point. The key to successful ad campaigns, however, is to learn more about the theory behind what works and what doesn’t.
Fortunately, there are plenty of free resources to develop this knowledge too. Including Google Skillshop. LinkedIn, Reddit and YouTube also all have plenty of great tutorials to build your knowledge.
Conclusion: How should I pay for my PPC management?
To sum up: it depends on many factors such as your business goals and how ‘aggressive’ you want to be in pushing and promoting your products and services with PPC ads. It also depends on what other types of work you might need in order to build out your PPC campaign — including the creation of landing pages, SEO, conversion-tracking setups and more.
We can’t speak for other agencies — and to be sure there are some great ones out there — but we are specialists in working to help small businesses build their online presence and drive more conversions with targeted PPC ads. With Add People you’ll be in more than capable hands.Find out more about our PPC services here.
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