PPC & Paid Advertising

Pay-per-click advertising means exactly what it says: you pay each time someone clicks your ad, rather than paying for the ad to simply be shown. For a small business, that makes it one of the few marketing channels where you can see results within days rather than months — and one of the easiest to overspend on without realising it.

What it actually costs in the UK right now

There’s no single answer to “how much does PPC cost,” whatever a quick search result promises. UK average cost-per-click sits somewhere around £3.50, but that figure hides enormous variation by industry and location. A solicitor in London might pay close to £9 a click. An online retailer outside a major city might pay under £1 for the same platform, the same month.

A more useful starting point than a national average is working out your own realistic monthly floor. Below roughly £450–500 a month in ad spend, most accounts simply don’t generate enough data for Google’s systems to optimise properly — you’re paying without learning much from it. A common guideline is to allocate 5–10% of revenue to marketing overall, rising to 10–15% if the goal is active growth rather than maintaining where you already are. Where PPC sits inside that percentage depends on how much of your growth needs to come from paid visibility specifically versus organic and referral routes.

Why costs keep climbing

Cost-per-click in the UK has been rising 5–9% year on year, and a meaningful part of that isn’t just “more competition” in the usual sense. Google’s AI-generated answers now sit above the paid results on a growing share of commercial searches, which physically pushes ads further down the page and shrinks the number of visible ad positions. Fewer places to appear, the same number of advertisers bidding for them — the auction price goes up. That’s a structural change to how the results page works, not a temporary spike that will correct itself.

None of that is within an individual business’s control. What is within your control is what happens after someone clicks. A rising cost-per-click matters far less if the landing page converts well — and most small businesses spend their attention trying to push CPC down rather than improving what a visitor sees once they’ve already paid for the click. That’s the wrong end of the funnel to focus on first.

PPC or SEO first?

This gets asked as an either/or question and it isn’t really one. They solve different problems on different timelines. PPC gets you visible this week, which matters if you currently show up nowhere organically for the searches that matter to your business. SEO takes months to build momentum but stops costing you per visitor once it’s established.

For a business starting from nothing, running a modest, disciplined PPC budget while building the organic foundations in parallel tends to work better than picking one and waiting. The mistake isn’t choosing PPC or SEO first — it’s treating whichever one you start with as the whole strategy, rather than the first stage of something that eventually needs both.

What separates a working account from a wasteful one

Tight, specific targeting over broad reach. Broad match keywords and wide geographic targeting feel like they’ll catch more customers. In practice they mostly catch more of the wrong clicks, which is where budgets quietly leak. Narrower targeting, reviewed regularly, tends to outperform “cast a wide net” every time on a limited budget.

A landing page built for the specific ad, not the homepage. Sending paid traffic to a general homepage wastes a large share of the value in the click. The page someone lands on should answer the exact thing the ad promised, with a clear single action — not a menu of options.

Regular, honest review of what’s actually converting. Not clicks, not impressions — enquiries or sales. It’s common for an account to look busy and healthy on the surface while quietly wasting a third of its budget on keywords that generate clicks but never convert. A monthly look at cost-per-conversion, not just cost-per-click, catches this early.

Where PPC fits for this business

PPC isn’t a replacement for the SEO and content work described elsewhere in this strategy — it’s the fastest lever available while that longer-term work builds. Used well, it buys visibility and data now. Used carelessly, it’s the easiest marketing spend to lose track of, because the bill arrives whether or not the account is actually working.

Sources: UK Google Ads CPC benchmarks and 2026 pricing trends referenced from published UK PPC industry data (Whitehat SEO, Visionary Marketing, Repeat Digital); marketing budget percentage guideline from Smart Choice Digital’s 2026 small business budgeting research.