Is £100 a month enough for Google Ads for a salon?
Yes, just. £100 a month is the lowest we will run a salon’s ads on, and below it we say no. But it only works if you spend it narrowly: one service, the area your clients actually come from, and the hours when somebody can pick up the phone. Spread across everything you do, the same £100 does nothing you can see.
Here is the sum behind that, so you can check it against your own prices rather than taking our word for it.
What £100 a month looks like as a day
Google Ads normally runs on an average daily budget rather than a monthly one. Google’s own billing help says a campaign “might spend up to twice your average daily budget” on a given day, and that by the end of the month you will have spent no more than 30.4 times the daily figure.
So £100 a month is a daily budget of £3.29. A busy day can take up to £6.58 of it and a quiet day less, and it evens out at £100 over the month.
There is one more line on the bill. Google adds a 2% UK Digital Services Tax fee to ads shown in the UK, so a £100 month you run yourself comes to £102.
How many people that is
The price of a click is set by an auction in your area, on the day, against whoever else is bidding. Nobody can tell you yours without looking at your town, so here is the same money at three round prices. They show the shape. They are not a forecast of your bill.
| Monthly budget | Per day | Clicks at £1 | Clicks at £2 | Clicks at £3 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| £50 | £1.64 | 50 | 25 | 16 |
| £100 | £3.29 | 100 | 50 | 33 |
| £200 | £6.58 | 200 | 100 | 66 |
A click is a person near you who searched, saw your ad and tapped it. At £3 a click, £100 is 33 of them in a month, a little over one a day. Not all of them ring. Some are checking your prices, some are in the wrong town, and some will book next month.
Now put your own price against it. Say your full head of colour is £120. One new colour client in the month and the £100 is back before she has even rebooked. A client who found you through your own ad costs you nothing the next time she comes in, which is the whole reason to do this rather than pay a marketplace for every new client it finds you.
Why £50 is a no
Halve the money and you halve the people, but you do not halve what it takes to learn anything. £50 a month is £1.64 a day. At £3 a click that is 16 people in a month, about one every other day.
Two things go wrong at that size. You are not in front of people often enough to be noticed, so the ad shows now and then and the phone stays quiet. And you cannot learn from it. After a month of 16 clicks you cannot tell a bad advert from a quiet month, so the money buys you neither clients nor an answer.
Google has a name for a budget that cannot keep up. Your campaigns table can show a status called “Limited by budget”, and Google’s help page lists “a daily budget that’s too low for your targeting and keyword competitiveness” as one of the causes. The same page says a limited campaign “can still be successful”, and on a narrow £100 campaign that is often true. At £50 across a whole price list, it is hard to see how.
If £50 is the honest figure, spend nothing on ads this month and fix your free Google listing instead: the photos, the services, the opening hours, the replies to reviews. That works without a budget, and it is what the ads lean on when you do switch them on. Why a salon does not show up on Google Maps is the place to start.
How to make £100 do a full job
The money is small, so the decisions have to be tight. Four of them do most of the work.
One service. Pick the one with the most money in it and the most gaps in your book, which is often colour. Split £100 four ways across cuts, colour, extensions and treatments and each gets £25 a month, which is 82p a day: less than one £3 click. At £3, that is 8 clicks a month each, against 33 on colour alone. Four campaigns too thin to tell you anything is an easy way for £100 to vanish.
Your real area. Draw the radius your regulars actually come from, not the whole county. Every click from someone forty minutes away is money spent on a person who was never going to make the trip.
Your own hours. If nobody can answer the phone after six, a call at seven is a lost call you paid for. There is more on this in should your ads run when you are closed.
The rubbish blocked before the first click. Hairdressing courses, salon jobs, free hair models, “cut your own hair” videos. On a big budget that waste is an annoyance. On £100, every click from someone hunting for a course is a click a real client did not get. Where it goes, and how to block it.
What to judge it on after the first month
Not bookings, not yet. At this size a month is too few people for a booking count to mean much either way.
Judge it on three things you can see. Did people ring, fill in the form or tap through to your booking page? What did they actually type? Google’s search terms report shows the searches behind your clicks, and at 33 clicks a month it is a short list you can read in a tea break. And is the quiet day you were aiming at a little less quiet?
If the searches are the right ones and people are getting in touch, £100 is doing its job and you can decide whether to give it more. If the searches are wrong, fix the blocking before you add a penny, because more money on a leaky campaign just leaks faster. How long to give it before deciding has its own answer.
When £100 is the wrong question
Some salons should not spend the £100 at all. If you could not fit fifteen more clients in next month, more searches buy you a waiting list. If you are holding your takings under the VAT line on purpose, more clients is the last thing you want. If you cannot hire, demand is not your problem. Those are the same reasons we turn people away at any budget, and they are set out in full here.
If none of that is you, £100 is a real start. Through us it sits in the bottom band, £15 a month on top, with no commission on bookings: the price, plainly. If you would rather run it yourself, the sums above work the same way.
Either way, start from your own numbers. The free assessment works out what your quiet days cost you in a year, and roughly how many new clients a monthly budget could bring in. No account, no card.
Questions people ask
Can I run the £100 only on my quiet days to make it go further?
You can choose the days and hours your ads show, but it will not make the money last longer. Google's own help page on ad scheduling says a campaign still paces towards 30.4 times its daily budget however few days it runs, so the same £100 is spent across fewer days. That can suit a quiet Tuesday. It is not a saving.
Is £100 a month enough for a barbershop?
It can be, but the sum is tighter. A cut is a smaller ticket than a colour, so you need more new clients to pay the month back: at £25 a cut, four new clients cover £100. Keep it to one service and a short radius, and block the clipper and tutorial searches before you start.
Is it better to spend £300 in one month than £100 a month for three?
A bigger month answers the question sooner, because more people means a clearer picture of what they search and whether they ring. A steady £100 keeps you there when someone searches in week six. If cash is what limits you, three steady months is the safer test. If you just want to know quickly, one bigger month is.
Should I boost an Instagram post with the £100 instead?
They do different jobs. A boosted post is shown to people scrolling who were not looking for a hairdresser that minute. A search ad is shown to someone who has just typed what you do, near where you are. When there is only £100, paying for people who are already looking is usually the better use of it.
Can I start at £100 and put it up later?
Yes. Through us the fee stays £15 a month for any ad budget up to £200, so going from £100 to £200 changes what Google gets, not what we charge. Above £200 the band moves to £29. Put it up once the searches look right, not before, or the extra money just finds more of the wrong people.
