How the price is formed
Every time somebody searches, an auction runs. Your position and price depend on your bid, on the quality of the ad and the page it leads to, and on competition for that query. That is why the same budget buys a hundred clicks in one niche and twenty in another. For small business services the cost per click is usually modest, while competitive niches can run many times higher.
What budget makes sense
For a small local business, a daily budget of five to fifteen EUR is a realistic start. Below that the campaign gathers too little data to optimise, so the money goes on a learning phase that never finishes. Budget also for the first two to four weeks going on finding the queries that actually convert: that is not wasted money, it is market research that stays useful for SEO too.
What an agency charges
On top of the budget that goes to Google there is a management fee. It is normally either a percentage of spend, commonly ten to twenty percent, or a fixed monthly amount. A fixed amount is fairer on small budgets, because a percentage of a small budget does not cover serious work, so in practice the campaign gets neglected.
How you know it pays
Not by click count but by cost per enquiry. Divide monthly spend by the calls, messages and orders the campaign brought. If one enquiry costs less than the margin an average job earns you, the campaign works. That is why conversion tracking is set up before launch: without it you are watching traffic and guessing. How this compares with organic growth is covered in ads versus SEO.
We run Google Ads with measurement in place, tell us what you sell.