“How much do Google Ads cost in Ireland?” might be the most common question I get asked, usually right after someone has burned through their first €2000 with nothing to show for it.

The annoying answer? It depends. But don’t worry, I’m not leaving you with just useless consultant speak.

The Base Costs of Google Ads in Ireland

Let’s get down to brass tacks. In Ireland, Google Ads can cost anywhere from €1 to €80+ per click. But that’s like saying a house in Ireland costs between €50,000 and €5 million – technically true but about as helpful as a chocolate teapot.

What actually determines your costs? 3 main factors: industry, competition and purchase intent.

Industry Matters (A Lot)

If you’re in insurance, legal services, or financial products, you’re in for a rough ride. Mortage brokers are looking at €5-35 per click. “But they haven’t even contacted me yet!” Yes, that’s the game with competitive industries selling expensive things – you’re paying just for the chance to make your pitch.

Meanwhile, a someone selling artisan pottery in Galway is getting quality traffic at €1.50 per click. Same platform, wildly different costs. This isn’t because Google is playing favorites – it’s pure market economics. A mortgage will generate a lot more money than a pot, hence even if there are less competitors bidding for mortgage keywords than pots, pots will always be cheaper as no one is willing to pay more than 1.50 for a related click.

Intent Is King

Not all keywords in the same industry cost the same. Take “car insurance” – a general term that might cost €10-15 per click in Ireland. But someone searching for “car insurance quotes Ireland for over 50s” could cost you €30+ because that search shows someone ready to buy, likely with details about what they need.

I see this pattern repeat across every industry. In the travel sector you pay €2 for general “holidays in Ireland” clicks but €12 for “luxury weekend breaks Killarney with spa June”. Why? Because the second person knows exactly what they want and is likely booking today, not just dreaming about someday.

The Hidden Costs Beyond Clicks

Here’s where Irish businesses get caught out – Google Ads isn’t just about the click costs. There’s more to it –

Setup Time & Expertise

Let me be brutally honest: most Irish businesses trying to run Google Ads themselves are flushing money down the toilet. I’ve seen it dozens of times. A business owner spends a weekend setting up campaigns, throws €2,000 at Google, gets three leads that go nowhere, then declares “Google Ads doesn’t work for my business.”

The truth? Google Ads absolutely works, but only when set up and managed properly. And here’s a bombshell many don’t want to hear: those helpful Google representatives who offer to “optimize” your campaigns? They’re not there to maximise your ROI – they’re there to maximise Google’s revenue. I’ve taken over accounts “optimized” by Google reps that were spending 80% of the budget on irrelevant searches.

A proper Google Ads setup for an Irish business involves deep keyword research specific to your market. You need to understand not just what keywords to target, but which negative keywords to exclude. You need campaign structures that make sense for your business cycle, not generic templates. You need ad copy that speaks to potential customers, not cookie cutter garbage.

This isn’t quick work. For even a modest small business campaign, expect 5-20 hours of research, planning and implementation before you’re ready to spend your first euro. Most business owners simply don’t have that kind of time to invest in learning an entirely new skill.

PPC Management Agency Costs

“So how much does a decent agency cost in Ireland?” would be the next question, and the follow being “are ad agencies worthwhile”

Most PPC management agencies price their services in one of three ways:

First, there’s the percentage model. These agencies typically charge 10-20% of your ad spend. Sound reasonable? Well, ask yourself if the incentive structure makes sense. If you spend €10,000, they make €2,000. What’s their motivation to reduce your spend if it’s efficient? There isn’t one.

It might also seem like a good deal if you aren’t spending a lot, but it isn’t. You will have minimums and a flat fee.

Second, there’s just a flat monthly fee. This typically ranges from €300 for the most basic campaigns up to €2,000+ for complex multi-channel approaches. This model works better because the agency is incentivized to get you results regardless of spend levels.

Third, there’s the performance-based model, where you pay based on results. While this sounds ideal in theory, the reality is these contracts are usually loaded with clauses that make it easy for agencies to claim credit for your existing business, general bad incentives on both sides and what you see is that no established or reputable company offer this publicly.

However it’s quite common to do with companies you have established relationships and trust with, down the line or if people you worked with before spin-off a new venture and there’s big incentive on both sides for performance based compensation.

At That E-Com Dude, we start new advertisers at €599 per month. Why that figure? Because it’s the minimum we need to do the job properly. Agencies charging less are cutting corners, plain and simple – maybe they’re using templates, maybe they’re not doing proper research, or worst of all, maybe they’re taking on too many clients per account manager. You don’t want to be one of twenty accounts someone checks for 15 minutes each week.

However we do a mix of all 3 types of pricing models, where applicable.

“Should I run ads myself or work with a PPC Agency”

This is a good question, I have never seen an in-house account perform anywhere near as well as one managed by a killer agency.

Agencies have massive benefits from the amount of companies they work with – agencies get paid to try new things, make expensive mistakes, learn from them and craft killer campaigns across the entire suite of accounts they work with. They see macro trends and what’s working across a broader scope than one company.

It might be cheaper on paper to DIY your ads but the reality becomes quite grim when you spend many thousands going through the mistakes Pros know to avoid. When LinkedIn ads were quite new to me personally, I’ve spent many thousands and made some silly mistakes along the way before overtime and many tens of thousands later I know LinkedIn like the back of my hand.

Talking to Google will not help you at all, there’s a few types of rep but if you’re a new advertiser you’re always going to be given a rep that has a script and is adamant on creating the worst campaign of all time on your behalf.

Sometimes you may get lucky with a better one, that might even be local and will give genuine off-script advice, like to use “exact” match instead of “broad” or “phrase” match , that’s the first indication a rep knows the at least one thing about google ads and is going off script to help you, but those are getting scarce.

So, my advice is to talk to me – you can book a chat with me or my team here even if you’re dead set on doing your campaign DIY a quick chat with us will save you thousands. https://thatecomdude.com/contact/

Adspend Costs

This is where I often burst bubbles. Some Irish SMEs come to me hoping to spend €200 a month and transform their business. The reality? In most competitive industries, that’s simply not enough to generate meaningful data let alone results.

How much should you be spending for the actual ads? Well, that depends. The best approach is to have a goal in mind, a goal that’s structured in terms of quantity of result, over a set period of time.

So it could be, “I want 10 more leads a month” or “I want 12% more revenue per quarter”. These make it, really easy to find what budget you should be spending.

You would run a test campaign, over a few weeks to determine the rough range you’d be looking to pay, set a budget to hit your targets based on that test and go from there. A few weeks is nowhere near enough time to optimise a campaign, so this is something that gets revised with your dropping cost to acquire the result.

Alternatively, a set budget per month that fluctuates based on seasonality, it does depend on the business model.

As a rule of thumb, most Irish small to medium business are spending in the 2-4k a month mark.

If you’re using an agency with flat pricing, you benefit from spending more on the actual ads.

If you run ads with a monthly budget of only 1000 and pay a management fee of 1000, your ads would need a return of 200% to just break even on the marketing! Let alone product or service. This is inefficient and depending on margins, just plain doesn’t make sense.

If you have a management fee of 599, like we offer and spend 4000 a month, your ratio of adspend to management fee is 15%, giving plenty of room for your ads to crush it.

Attribution & Analytics Setup

“How do I know if my ads are actually making money?” – Here’s the part most Irish businesses completely miss: if you can’t measure it properly, you might as well not do it at all.

I spoke to someone in Dublin recently who had no idea if Google Ads was working for them. When I investigated, I discovered they were getting very few leads but spending thousands – Their tracking was never setup properly, leading to them making decisions based on completely wrong data and throwing money down the drain.

Setting up proper attribution isn’t optional – it’s essential. And since the migration to Google Analytics 4, it’s become significantly more complex. You need to understand how the conversion paths work, how to set up enhanced conversions, and how to connect your CRM system to truly measure return on ad spend.

The technical implementation can be quick or take a while if you’re dealing with a complex website or multiple conversion points. You need someone who understands not just the tracking code, but the business logic behind what constitutes a valuable conversion for your specific business model.

Without this, you’re essentially driving with your eyes closed, occasionally peeking to see if you’re still on the road. That’s why we build comprehensive attribution models for every client – so they know exactly what’s working and what isn’t.

Landing Page Creation

“Can’t I just send traffic to my existing website?” Is another common question I get, and the answer is almost always a firm no.

Your main website is designed to serve multiple audiences and purposes. Your Google Ads need to send people to pages specifically designed to convert the traffic you’re paying for. When someone clicks on your ad about “emergency plumber in North Dublin,” they don’t want to land on your homepage and have to navigate to find what they need – they’ll just hit the back button and try your competitor – who’ll have a landing page, clear and simple.

I worked with a shockingly big American firm who were sending traffic to their homepage. The conversion rate was a dismal 0.5%, meaning that out of 200 visitors, only 1 would fill out any sort of form or call. We created targeted landing pages addressing specific services and geographic areas, and without touching targeting or the ads themselves the conversion rate jumped to 8% – a 16x improvement from the same ad spend. Albeit this is an extreme example.

Creating effective landing pages isn’t just about design – it’s about psychology. You need to understand what questions a potential customer has at this specific stage of their journey, what objections they need overcome, and what proof they need to see before taking action.

For Irish businesses, this often means directly addressing local concerns. Dublin customers want to know you serve their specific area. Rural customers want assurance you’re willing to travel to them. These nuances matter enormously in conversion rates.

A basic but effective landing page typically costs €200-400 to design and implement. More sophisticated pages with custom features might run €1,000-3,000. And then there’s the ongoing optimization – because your first version will never be your best version.

The continued landing page optimisation is generally bundled with the ad management fee, at least in our case, so it costs nothing extra and just is part of the normal process of optimising your campaigns.

But a great landing page is worth its pixels in gold, as they can serve many years while printing cash with only minor changes or improvements. The landing pages I use for my linkedIn ads took a few months and hundreds of hours to get them to consistently convert in the double digits, but once they did I really didn’t have to worry again.

Landing pages are a process, with constant improvements, tweaks, testing of marketing and ad angles – just generally finding and creating a narrative that the most people will subscribe to.

Why Use a PPC Management Agency in Ireland?

I often hear business owners say, “Sure, I’ll just watch a few YouTube videos and do it myself.” Three months later, they call me after wasting thousands with nothing to show for it.

The biggest mistake I see is businesses either going with what Google tells them, which if you read or watched any piece of content I have ever, ever produced – will know is a big mistake, or alternatively – finding a strategy online and just doing what someone else said to do, without understanding the fundamentals and adapting it to your business.

Another mistake is going with a big international agency, “they big so they good”? Well – most of the time, no. In all likelihood you’re not getting assigned any sort of competent account manager unless you’re one of the top few accounts they manage.

You’re getting assigned someone entry level, who manages 15 accounts and plays it by the book – literally following a template prepared for them for all 15 accounts. This is something you can replicate, yourself, for free. You’ll see no great results from this.

My business started because so many growing e-commerce companies in the US were fleeing these large ad agencies like the plague, looking to work with someone competent and trusted instead and it keeps growing because so many Irish SMEs are getting terrible deals working with similar big agencies.

Who you work with will determine how Google can grow your business, it is by far the most powerful in terms of sheer scale, from YouTube to search and it has single-handily grown many businesses from zero to millions in revenue, using no other channel than Google paid.

Better Results, Faster

The hard truth is this: the learning curve for Google Ads is steep, expensive, and constantly changing. Every mistake you make costs real money.

Working with an agency means you’re benefiting from thousands of hours of experience and millions in managed spend. We’ve already made the costly mistakes, tested what works, and built systems to avoid pitfalls.

Someone shot me a DM on LinkedIn after spending €7,000 over three months with no conversions. Within two weeks, we had completely restructured their account and delivered their first qualified leads. It wasn’t magic – it was experience. We knew exactly what to look for because we’d seen the patterns hundreds of times before.

Working With That E-Com Dude

“So what exactly do I get for my money?” This is the question you should ask any agency, and I’m happy to be transparent about it.

If you’re new to Google Ads, we can get you set up and running for as low as €599 per month with one-time setup fees for landing pages and conversion tracking, consent management, and similar if not already set up.

This isn’t the cheapest rate in Ireland, and that’s deliberate – we dedicate real time to each account and refuse to cut corners.

For that investment, you get a complete Google Ads infrastructure: comprehensive account setup specifically for your market, proper attribution tracking across all conversion points, landing pages that convert, weekly performance reporting that actually makes sense, and continuous campaign refinement.

We’ve helped businesses in Ireland & the US make Google their No.1 top performing and best channel, from tech start ups to growing bathroom suppliers. Each required a different approach, but the principles of effective advertising remain constant.

The Bottom Line

Google Ads in Ireland isn’t cheap, but when done right, it’s not an expense – it’s a profit center. For every euro you put in, you should expect more coming back. If that’s not happening, something is wrong with your setup, targeting, or measurement.

The question isn’t really “Can I afford to advertise on Google?” It’s “Can I afford not to?”. The answer may be yes but also possibly, a no.

If you’re an e-commerce store, not advertising on Google is a blunder, competitors are picking up market share, optimising their product pages and getting better and better bids, hoping in later and later is damaging.

In contrast, a B2B cybersecurity company that works exclusively with larger companies, well – you’re unlikely to see much success on google in Ireland. It’s too niche, not very searchable, too narrow to target in this country. If you’re clever you can try but platforms like LinkedIn where you can target very specific cohorts with laser targeted messaging for your sales team to pick up, would be better to invest your time in.

If you’re tired of throwing money at Google without seeing results, or if you’re just getting started and want to avoid the painful learning curve, let’s talk. We’ll help you understand if Google Ads makes sense for your specific business model, and what kind of budget you’ll actually need to see meaningful results.

Got questions about Google Ads costs for your Irish business? Drop me a message – I genuinely enjoy talking through these challenges, even if you’re not ready to work with an agency just yet.