What a click costs in New Zealand
The average Google Ads click in NZ costs around $3.24, with an average conversion rate of 6.7% (Web Antler NZ benchmarks, 2026). That’s an average across industries; the spread is wide. Broad retail and hospitality searches can be $1–$3. Trades sit around $2–$8. Legal, finance, insurance and some medical searches run $8–$20 or more, because the customer is worth a lot and everyone knows it.
Location matters too: Auckland clicks cost more than Dunedin clicks for the same search, simply because more businesses are bidding. New Zealand businesses spent $1.44 billion on search advertising last year, up 12% (IAB New Zealand, CY2025), so the competition is real.
The only maths that matters
Cost per enquiry = cost per click ÷ conversion rate.
If a click costs $5 and one in twenty visitors calls or fills in a form (5%), an enquiry costs you $100. If you close one in three enquiries, a customer costs $300. Is a customer worth more than $300 to you? Then ads work. If not, fix the conversion rate or the offer before spending more.
Notice which number you control: the conversion rate. That’s the landing page. A slow, generic page converting at 1% makes the same click cost five times more per enquiry than a fast, specific one converting at 5%. This is why we fix the page before we spend the budget.
A sensible starting budget
For a local service business, $1,000–$2,500 a month in ad spend is usually enough to learn what works. Below about $800 you don’t get enough clicks to tell a good keyword from a bad one. E-commerce and competitive professional services often need $3,000–$5,000 to be meaningful.
Plan for three months. The first is learning, the second is fixing, the third is the one you judge. Anyone who promises a return in week one is guessing.
What management costs
NZ agencies typically charge $500–$2,500 a month or 10–20% of spend to manage Google Ads (Lucid Media NZ pricing guide, 2026). Some charge a flat fee, some a percentage, some a minimum plus a percentage. Cheaper isn’t automatically worse: a $250-a-month operator who checks your account weekly beats a $2,500 agency that touches it monthly. But ask exactly what the fee buys: how often is someone in the account, do they build landing pages, do they set up call tracking, and who owns the account when you leave.
Our management fee is a flat monthly amount agreed in writing before the first campaign goes live, and the account is always yours. Details here.
Five ways small businesses waste ad spend
- Paying for the wrong towns. Default location settings show your ads to people “interested in” your area, including someone in Sydney researching a holiday. Tighten it to where your vans go.
- Broad match with no negatives. Bidding on “plumber” buys clicks from people looking for plumbing jobs, plumbing courses and plumbing memes. A negative keyword list is the cheapest fix in advertising.
- Sending clicks to the homepage. Someone who searched “emergency electrician Hamilton” wants a page that says exactly that, with a phone number, not a tour of your company values.
- No conversion tracking. If you can’t see which searches produced calls, you’re optimising for clicks, which Google is very happy to sell you.
- Set and forget. Costs drift, competitors change, Google adds “recommendations” that spend more. Someone needs to be in the account every week.
When ads are worth it, and when they aren’t
Worth it: people already search for what you do when they need it; the customer is worth several hundred dollars or more; you can answer the phone; you have or can build a decent landing page.
Not yet: nobody searches for your product because it’s new (try Meta); margins are too thin for a $15 click; your website is slow or untrustworthy (fix that first); you can’t sustain three months.
37% of inbound phone calls to businesses convert during the call itself (46% for home services) (Invoca, 60 million calls analysed, 2024), which is why a call from an ad is worth so much more than a click. Build the campaign to make the phone ring, and make sure someone picks it up.