What Does Advertising Cost? A Budget Guide That Works

“What does advertising cost?” is the question almost every budget plan starts with. And it has no answer in euros, at least not one that helps you. A price per click, per ad or per month tells you nothing about whether the spend pays off for your business.

The number that actually helps you isn’t in a price list, it’s in your own business: what is a new customer allowed to cost you? Once that’s set, every channel price becomes decidable. Before that, it’s just a number.

Here’s the plan: first the question flipped around, then the channels one by one, with real figures where I have them and without where I don’t, then the maths that comes before any channel decision.

1. The first question isn’t the price

Advertising doesn’t have a list price, it has a payoff. What you’re allowed to spend on it comes from two numbers you already have: what’s left over from a job after costs (your margin), and how many leads it takes to land a job (your close rate). Together they tell you the most a single lead is allowed to cost.

As long as that number is missing, every channel price is equally useless. Across the accounts I manage, the cheapest cost-weighted click price sits at €0.50 and the most expensive at €6.60, a factor of 13. Either can be right for the business behind it, and either can be wrong. The click price alone doesn’t decide that.

The second mistake is one of direction. Most people start with a monthly budget (“I’ve got about 500 euros spare”) and then go looking for a channel to spend it on. The right order runs the other way: the monthly budget is the result of the calculation, not its starting point. Which is why it only shows up right at the end of this article.

2. The channels, sorted honestly

Channels differ less in price than in what you get for that price. One captures demand that already exists. Another has to create it first. A third costs no money at all, just months. Those differences explain the prices better than any table could.

Google Ads: the channel where I can show you real numbers

Once a year I publish the click prices actually paid in the accounts I manage: Google Ads CPC benchmarks 2026. As of Q3 2026 that’s 19 accounts across the German-speaking region (DACH) and 17 industries, cost-weighted over the last 90 days, ranging from €0.50 per click (sports car rental) to €6.60 per click (event technology, B2B). No estimate, no third-party source, no converted US study.

What you get for that price: someone who’s actively searching right now. The distance between click and lead is shorter here than in any other channel, and that’s exactly why search click prices are the highest on this list. You’re not buying attention, you’re buying intent.

What the click price doesn’t tell you: what a lead actually ends up costing you. That’s click price divided by conversion rate, and I work through the full chain up to your daily budget step by step in what does Google Ads cost; industry benchmarks live at Google Ads costs by industry (in German).

With Google you’re tapping demand that already exists. With Meta you’re interrupting someone who isn’t searching for anything right now. That’s not a downside, for offers nobody actively googles, it’s often the only route in. But it does mean the ad and the offer have to create the demand themselves. And that’s why the price per lead scatters more here than in any other channel.

How much, the one case I can show publicly demonstrates: the Zitberg website relaunch (in German), a patio-roofing business, a single account. In the same window, July 1 to 17, a lead through Meta cost €219.53 in 2025 and €58.30 in 2026. Same account, same industry, same channel, a year apart. What changed was the website, the offer presentation and the campaigns, not the price Meta charges for a click. The case study also names the limit of that number: budget, campaigns and market conditions moved too, so the relaunch isn’t isolated as the sole cause.

For your own planning, that means “X euros per lead through social ads” isn’t a property of the channel. It’s the result of your offer, your creative and the page behind it. Anyone who quotes you a lead price for Meta before your first test is guessing, and you’ll only know your real number after a few weeks of your own data.

SEO: costs time instead of a click price

With SEO there’s no price per visitor, but there is a lead time. A page built today doesn’t rank today. You pay in working hours, yours or a provider’s, and in months of patience. In exchange, the ongoing cost per visitor drops to zero once a ranking is established. I’ve broken down which route to take first in SEO vs. SEA compared; the short version: SEO is time, SEA is now.

The honest catch is the lack of control. You can’t turn SEO up because your order book is empty in January. It’s an investment, not a dial.

“Free” channels: paid for in your hours

Referrals, organic social, directories, your Google Business Profile, the channels that never show up on an invoice. They’re not free, though. A post that actually performs costs you an hour. A referral programme costs follow-up. And an hour you’re not spending with a client has a price you know better than any ad platform does.

The real difference from paid advertising here, too, isn’t price but control: you can’t double your referrals because you need more orders this month. That’s why these channels belong in almost every mix, but they don’t replace a budget for the specific month things are tight.

Print, local paper, flyers: the price is known, the effect isn’t

I’m deliberately not giving numbers for traditional advertising here. Not because none exist, but because I don’t have any from my own measurement, and borrowed numbers are worthless for your decision. The structural point stands on its own anyway: you know the price of the ad, but not the price of the lead it brings. Without that second number you can’t decide whether to buy more of it.

That’s not a judgement on the channel. Measurable doesn’t automatically mean better, it means repeatable. A flyer can work, you’ll just never learn which part of it did.

3. The maths that comes before every channel

Now the number from section 1, worked through completely. The figures are deliberately round assumptions, plug in your own, the chain stays the same.

Say an average job brings you €3,000, of which 30% remains after all costs, and one in five leads becomes a job (a 20% close rate).

What’s left per job: €3,000 × 30% = €900
How many leads a job costs: 1 ÷ 0.20 = 5 leads
What a lead is allowed to cost at most: €900 ÷ 5 = €180

That €180 is your ceiling, not your target. At exactly €180 per lead you break even and earn nothing from the advertising itself. Want to keep half your margin, and your target price is €90 per lead.

From here, every channel price becomes decidable. Take €3 per click:

At a 5% conversion rate: €3 ÷ 0.05 = €60 per lead. Comfortably under the €90 target.
At a 1% conversion rate: €3 ÷ 0.01 = €300 per lead. Doesn’t fit, and not because of the click price, but because of the page behind it.

Same click price, two opposite decisions. That’s why “is €3 per click expensive?” isn’t an answerable question until you know your own €180. And that’s why, when a lead costs too much, the first lever is almost never the bid, it’s what happens after the click.

To run your own numbers instead of doing the maths in your head, use the Google Ads calculator (in German), which turns margin, click price and conversion rate into your maximum price per lead and your budget.

In e-commerce, the same logic runs through ROAS instead of price per lead: break-even ROAS = 100 ÷ margin in percent. Both describe the same limit, once as a cost ceiling per lead, once as a ratio of revenue to ad spend, worked through in how to calculate ROAS.

4. How much budget, without inventing numbers

I don’t have a table that tells you how much to spend per month. Anyone who does doesn’t know your business. What exists instead are three decision rules that hold regardless of industry or channel.

Your budget is a result, not a starting point. Target leads per month × target price per lead. Want ten leads a month and each one can cost €90, you’re talking about a €900 ad budget, not “about 300 euros to try it out”. If that sum doesn’t fit your cash flow, that’s an honest answer: either the target is too big or the lead is too expensive, and it’s better to sort that out before you start than after.

More budget mainly buys speed. Ad platforms learn from conversions, and so do you. With four leads a month you can’t decide anything, with forty you can. A small budget isn’t disqualifying, it just extends the time until you get your first reliable answer. If you have neither the budget nor the patience, don’t start yet. It follows that one channel with enough budget beats three channels with a third each. Three half-tests don’t answer a single question in the end.

If someone else is running this for you, the ad budget has to clearly exceed the management fee. Otherwise you’re mostly paying for management and only incidentally for reach. At small budgets, the more honest entry point is a one-off consultation plus running it yourself, which is exactly what I tell people in the intro call, and it’s also what’s written on my page for Google Ads freelancers (in German).

The bottom line

“What does advertising cost?” is the second question. The first one is: what is a new customer allowed to cost you? The takeaways:

Ceiling first, channel second. Margin and close rate give you the most a lead is allowed to cost. Without that number, every channel price is just a number.
Channels sell different things, not different prices. Search captures existing demand, social has to create it, SEO costs time instead of a click price, and “free” channels cost your hours.
Your monthly budget is a result: target leads × target price per lead. More budget mainly buys speed, not automatically better results.

And if you want to know whether your assumptions about margin, close rate and cost per lead are realistic, rather than guessing at them, I’m happy to look at it with you as an independent advisor. Book a free intro call (in German).