Google Ads for hairdressers: the plain-English guide
Somewhere near you, tonight at about nine o’clock, someone will type “balayage near me” into her phone. She has money, she has a date in mind, and she’ll book whoever comes up first and looks right. This guide is about being that salon — what it costs, where it goes wrong, and how to tell if it’s working.
No jargon. Where there’s a number, it’s a real one.
Why search beats boosting posts
A boosted Instagram post is shown to people who were doing something else. Some of them like hair. Almost none of them were looking for a hairdresser at that moment.
A Google search ad is shown to someone who just typed “hair colourist wigan” or “keratin treatment near me”. She isn’t browsing. She’s choosing. That’s the whole difference, and it’s why a pound spent on search usually works harder than a pound spent interrupting people.
Instagram still matters — it’s your portfolio, and she’ll check it before she books. It’s just not where she starts.
What a click actually costs
Rough going rates for local hair searches in the UK:
| What they’re searching for | Typical cost per click |
|---|---|
| Cuts and blow dries | around £1.35 |
| Barbering | around £1.10 |
| Skin fades | around £1.25 |
| Colour | around £2.20 |
| Balayage | around £2.65 |
| Extensions | around £3.10 |
| Bridal and occasion | around £2.80 |
Notice the pattern: the expensive clicks are the expensive services. A balayage click costs twice a barbering click because the appointment is worth ten times as much. That’s also why a proper setup bids differently on every service instead of treating them all the same.
The only maths that matters
Take colour. 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.
Now the ad side. At around £2.20 a click, and with roughly one in ten of the right visitors getting in touch, an enquiry costs £10 to £15. If half of those book, a new colour client cost you £20 to £30 — once, ever. Her second visit costs you nothing. Her tenth costs you nothing.
That’s the entire argument for doing this. One new colour client a month covers a £250 budget before you count a single rebooking.
Where the money leaks
Most salon ad budgets don’t lose to other salons. They lose to searches that were never going to become clients:
- hairdressing courses and NVQ qualifications
- salon jobs, apprenticeships and “hairdresser salary”
- free hair models for training nights
- “cut your own hair” tutorials
- clipper sets, wholesale supplies, mannequin heads
Google will happily charge you for every one of these unless each is blocked, by name, before you start. Set up loosely, roughly a third of a salon’s budget quietly disappears this way. We wrote a whole piece on where the money goes, including a starter blocklist you can copy.
The five pieces that make it work
- Your free Google listing, corrected. Right category, services and prices filled in, real photos of the work, hours that include bank holidays, a booking link, and the listing connected to the ads account (almost every salon is missing that last one). This moves you up the map for free, whether you advertise or not.
- Somewhere worth sending people. If you have no website — most chair renters don’t — you need a simple page: your services, your area, a big button to call or book. Sending paid clicks to an Instagram profile wastes them. (More on that here.)
- One search campaign, split by service. So a £25 fade and a £280 balayage are never bid alike.
- The blocked list. Hundreds of time-wasting searches, removed before your first click.
- Weekly attention. Not a rebuild — just moving money towards whatever is filling chairs and cutting whatever isn’t. Fifteen minutes a week that most owners never have.
What you can honestly measure
You can count calls from the ad, enquiries through your page, and taps through to your booking system. You cannot reliably count which client walked through the door from which search — booking platforms don’t share that, and anyone who promises you a perfect number is pretending. Judge it the honest way: calls, enquiries, cost per enquiry, and whether your quiet days are less quiet than they were. (Exactly what we can and can’t count.)
Do it yourself, or hand it over
You can absolutely do this yourself. Budget an evening for the listing, a weekend to learn the ads dashboard, an hour to build the campaign, and a standing fifteen minutes a week for as long as you run it — plus the wasted spend while you learn what to block.
Or hand it to someone whose whole job is the boring parts. That’s what we do: everything above, built for you, from £15 a month with no commission on anything booked. Either way, the forty-second assessment will show you what’s being searched near your postcode, what an enquiry should cost, and what we’d block — no account, no card, no phone call.