Are Google Ads worth it for a small salon?
Usually yes, if you can take more clients next month than you are taking now, and if you can put at least £100 a month behind it. That is most of the test.
There are four situations where the answer is no. We turn those away rather than take the money, and since nearly every page answering this question was written by somebody who sells the service, they are worth putting first.
The four times the answer is no
You are already full. If you could not fit fifteen more clients in next month, advertising buys you a longer waiting list and a few annoyed regulars. Put your prices up instead.
You are sitting just under the VAT threshold. You have to register once your takings pass £90,000 in any rolling twelve months. On £90,000 of takings that is about £15,000 a year handed over, and your biggest cost is wages, which carries no VAT to claim back. So you either put your prices up by a fifth or you absorb it. If you are at £84,000 and deliberately staying there, more clients is the last thing you want, and no amount of clever advertising changes that arithmetic. Plenty of good salons hold under that line on purpose.
You can spend under £100 a month. Below that you are not in front of people often enough for anything to happen. You show up now and then, spend the money, and learn nothing from it. We say no to this rather than take £15 a month to run something that cannot work.
You cannot hire. If you are already turning work away because there is nobody to do it, demand is not your problem. Fix the chair first.
If none of those is you, the rest of this is the sum.
The sum
Take colour, because that is where this works best.
A click on a local colour search costs around £2.20. The month we publish as a worked example ran £300 of spend and produced 38 calls and 21 enquiries, which is £14 an enquiry. If half the enquiries book, a new client has cost you under £30.
You pay that once, not every time she comes in.
A full head is £150 to £280 in most of the country, and a colour client who likes you comes back every couple of months for years. Her second visit costs you nothing and so does her tenth. One new colour client a month covers a £250 budget before you count a single rebooking.
Barbering works differently. A fade click is around £1.25 and the appointment is £25, so you need volume rather than one big win, and the room for error is much thinner. It still works. It just needs the blocking done properly to get there, where a colour column can survive some waste. The going rates for every service are worth a look if you want to run your own numbers.
What a new client costs, three ways
All three of these are paid once per new client. None of them charges you again when she rebooks.
| One new client, £150 full head of colour | Cost |
|---|---|
| Your own Google ad | under £30, plus a management fee |
| Fresha marketplace, 20% | £30 |
| Treatwell marketplace, 35% plus VAT | £63 |
The marketplace figures are from their own pricing pages, correct as of 17 August 2026. We went through both in full yesterday.
The marketplaces only charge you when somebody actually books. An advert costs the same whether it fills the chair or not. That is a real advantage they have over us, and over every other way of finding clients. If you cannot afford for £200 to do nothing this month, the marketplace is the lower risk option and waiting is a sensible decision.
The trade is that a client who found you through your own ad is then yours. She rebooks by text, and nobody takes a cut of the next three years.
What you block matters more than what you spend
Set up loosely, roughly a third of a salon’s budget goes to people who were never going to book: hairdressing courses, NVQ qualifications, salon jobs, apprenticeships, free hair models, “cut your own hair” tutorials, clipper sets and wholesale supplies. Google charges you the same £1 to £3 for those clicks as it does for a real client, and its own five-minute setup inside your Business Profile gives you no proper way to say no.
This is why so many owners decide ads don’t work for salons after one burned month. On £200 a month, a third is about £65 you are paying every month for people who wanted a course. Here is where it goes, and a starter blocklist you can copy.
Should you just run it yourself?
You will read that under a certain budget you ought to manage it yourself. You can, and it is a fair thing to weigh up, so here is what it actually takes:
- an evening fixing your Google listing
- a weekend learning the dashboard well enough not to break something
- an hour building the campaign
- fifteen minutes every week, for as long as you run it, reading what people actually typed and blocking the rubbish
- the wasted spend while you work out what to block, which is the cost nobody mentions
The fifteen minutes a week is the part that decides it, and it is not difficult. It is just the first thing to go in a week where two people call in sick, and an account nobody reads drifts back towards paying for courses.
We charge from £15 a month by spend band, no commission on anything booked, and your ad spend goes straight to Google. On a £200 budget, getting that wasted third back is worth more than the fee for that band. The price, plainly.
What you can honestly measure
Calls from the ad, enquiries through your page, and taps through to your booking system. Those are real and countable.
What you cannot count is which client walked through your door from which search. Treatwell and Fresha do not share booking data, and anybody promising you a perfect number is pretending. Judge it the way you would judge a new stylist: are the quiet days less quiet than they were. Exactly what we can and cannot count.
If you want your own numbers
Rachel Hartley runs The Lockhouse on £300 a month: “I’d tried boosting posts and it got me students. This got me eight colour clients in the first month and I didn’t touch a thing after signing up.” That is one salon, which is what we have so far, and we are not going to dress it up as a pattern.
Yours will be different, so start with your own figures rather than ours. The forty-second assessment shows what people near your postcode are searching for, what an enquiry should cost you, and what we would block. No account, no card, no phone call. There is also a budget calculator if you would rather put a figure in and see what it buys.
Questions people ask
Am I signing a contract?
No. It is month to month, cancelled in a click, with no phone call and no notice period. That is deliberate. We would rather you could leave easily than have to be argued into staying, and it keeps the pressure on us to be worth the fee.
What do I keep if I stop?
Everything built in your name: the ads account, the campaigns, the blocked search lists, your tidied Google listing and the page we wrote. None of it is held hostage. You can pause the spend and pick it up months later without rebuilding from nothing.
Can I run ads and stay on Treatwell or Fresha at the same time?
Yes, and plenty do. They are less alternatives than different trades: a marketplace only charges you when somebody books, while an advert costs the same whether it fills the chair or not. Running both while you compare what each actually brings in is a reasonable way to decide.
Does this work for one chair rather than a whole salon?
Chair renters are most of who we do this for. A single chair has the same problem as a salon and a thinner margin for waste, which makes the blocking matter more rather than less. The sums on this page hold; the budget is simply smaller.