Paid Search
The honest answer: most Katy small businesses should plan for $1,000 to $3,000 per month in total Google Ads investment to see meaningful results. That number frustrates people who want a single figure, so let me break down where it comes from, because the math is simpler than agencies make it sound.
You pay Google every time someone clicks your ad, and the price depends on how much your competitors bid for the same search. In the Katy and West Houston market, service businesses like HVAC, plumbing, and roofing typically pay somewhere in the range of $15 to $50 per click because one job is worth thousands. Restaurants, salons, and retail often pay $1 to $5. Legal and specialized medical can run higher still. Your industry sets the floor; there is no clever trick around it.
Work backward from clicks. If your clicks cost $20 and it takes roughly 10 clicks to generate one phone call, a lead costs you about $200. If you close one in three calls, a customer costs about $600. Now the question is simple: is a new customer worth more than $600 to you? For most Katy service businesses the answer is clearly yes, which is why competitors keep bidding.
For ad spend paid to Google, $500 per month is the realistic minimum to gather enough data to optimize anything in a competitive suburb like Katy. $1,000 to $2,000 per month is the comfortable range where campaigns can be tested, trimmed, and scaled. Below $500, clicks trickle in so slowly that you spend three months learning what a proper budget teaches you in three weeks.
If someone manages the account for you, expect a fee on top of ad spend. Freelancers and consultants typically charge $300 to $1,000 per month; agencies often charge more or take a percentage of spend. A good manager earns that fee by cutting wasted clicks, which on an unmanaged account commonly eats 20 to 30 percent of the budget. On $2,000 per month of spend, that waste is real money. For reference, my studio Appdore manages Google Ads for $800 per month.
Three things burn local budgets fastest: targeting all of Houston when your customers come from Katy, Cinco Ranch, and Fulshear; running ads 24/7 when nobody answers the phone after 6 PM; and sending clicks to a homepage instead of a page about the specific service someone searched for. Fixing just these three usually cuts cost per lead by a third.
If you want a second opinion on your numbers, reach out. I will tell you honestly whether Google Ads makes sense for your business, and at what budget, even if the answer is not yet.