How much does PPC cost?
PPC cost breaks down into three separate questions that often get conflated: what you pay per click, what you pay per acquired customer, and what you pay an agency or internal team to manage the account. Cost per click on Google Ads averages around $5 in 2026 across all industries, but ranges from under $1 for retail and hospitality to $8-80 for legal services, financial services, and B2B SaaS, and $500+ for extreme niches like personal injury law and mortgage.
Monthly PPC budgets for small and mid-market businesses typically run from $1,500-$5,000 for testing and early-stage programs, $5,000-$25,000 for established campaigns generating measurable ROI, and $25,000-$100,000+ for enterprise and scaled programs.
Agency management fees for PPC typically run $1,600-$5,000 per month for small accounts and a percentage of spend (often 10-15%) for larger accounts. None of these numbers tell you whether PPC is affordable for your specific business, because that depends on your unit economics, not industry averages.
What you pay per click
CPC is determined by an auction system that factors in your bid, your Quality Score, and the competitive dynamics of the keywords you are targeting. Commercial and transactional keywords cost more than informational keywords because more advertisers are bidding on them.
High-value industries with large deal sizes push CPCs up because advertisers can afford higher bids.
Geographic targeting matters. CPCs in major metros run 15-30% higher than the same keywords in smaller markets.
Time of year also matters. CPCs in Q4 retail categories spike during holiday season, and tax-adjacent keywords peak in the first quarter.
Rough CPC ranges by category in 2026:
- Legal services: $8-15+ per click, with personal injury and mortgage-adjacent queries running $50+ and some PI niches exceeding $500 per click (!)
- Financial services and insurance: $5-12 per click
- B2B SaaS and enterprise software: $7-80 per click on commercial terms
- Professional services (consulting, accounting): $5-30 per click
- Healthcare and medical: $3-7 per click
- Ecommerce and retail: $0.70-3 per click, with Shopping campaigns typically cheaper than Search
- Travel and hospitality: $1.50-3 per click
These are averages. The CPC you actually pay depends on your Quality Score, which Google calculates from ad relevance, landing page experience, and expected click-through rate. A well-structured account can pay 20-40% less per click than a poorly managed one bidding on the same keywords.
What you pay per acquired customer
Cost per click is the input. Cost per acquisition is the output, and it is the number that actually matters to the business. CPA is determined by CPC divided by conversion rate. If your CPC is $5 and your landing page converts 5% of clicks into leads, your cost per lead is $100. If only 20% of those leads become customers, your cost per acquired customer is $500. For businesses with a $50 customer lifetime value, that is a disaster. For businesses with a $50,000 customer lifetime value, it is excellent.
Average cost per conversion across all industries sits around $50 in 2026, but ranges from $24 for ecommerce to $130+ for legal services. The useful framework is not comparing your CPA to industry averages but calculating your break-even CPA from your own unit economics. If your gross profit per customer is $500 and you are comfortable spending 25% on acquisition, your maximum tolerable CPA is $125. Any PPC program that produces CPA above that number is unprofitable at scale regardless of what industry benchmarks say.
What you pay to manage the account
Running PPC well takes ongoing work: keyword research, negative keyword management, ad copy testing, landing page optimization, bid management, and attribution reporting. Companies pay for this capability in one of three ways: an internal hire, an agency, or a freelance consultant.
Internal hires typically range from $80,000-$150,000+ per year fully loaded for a mid-level paid search manager, and $200,000+ for senior roles. This is efficient at scale but expensive for small programs, and it concentrates expertise in a single person who may leave.
Agency fees vary by account size and complexity. Small accounts (under $10K monthly spend) typically pay flat fees of $1,500-$5,000 per month. Larger accounts typically move to percentage-of-spend pricing, usually 10-15% of media spend, with a minimum retainer. Enterprise accounts sometimes negotiate performance-based pricing tied to pipeline or revenue metrics.
Freelance consultants can be cheaper ($1,000-$3,000 per month for smaller accounts) but availability and accountability are inconsistent, and the depth of platform expertise varies widely.
The cost that matters is your payback economics
The most useful way to think about PPC cost is not "how much does it cost" but "what does it cost relative to what the customer is worth." A $10 CPC is expensive for a B2C product with $30 LTV and cheap for a B2B SaaS product with $30,000 LTV. A $5,000 monthly agency retainer is expensive for a business generating $20,000 in monthly revenue and cheap for one generating $500,000 through paid media.
The practitioners who get PPC economics right tend to calculate their maximum tolerable CAC first, back into the required conversion rate, and only then evaluate whether CPCs in their category allow that math to work. The practitioners who get it wrong tend to start from industry averages, aim for "good" CPC numbers, and discover the unit economics are broken only after they have burned through a few quarters of budget.
For B2B paid media specifically, the cost question is almost always a question about whether the pipeline a campaign produces justifies the investment required to produce it, not whether individual clicks are cheap.