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£30,000 a month on Google Ads is £360,000 a year. For most B2B companies that's far more than any single hire costs, yet it rarely gets the scrutiny a new head of sales would. The account runs, leads come in, the dashboard shows a cost per conversion, and nobody can say with confidence what the money turned into.
So what should £30k a month on Google Ads actually buy? Not clicks, and not form fills. At this level of spend, a B2B account should produce a predictable number of qualified opportunities each month, at a cost per customer your margins can carry, inside a structure that can take the next £10k without results falling away. If you can't name last month's qualified pipeline from Google Ads, the budget isn't being managed, it's being spent.
Below is what that looks like in numbers, what the account itself should include, where budgets of this size usually leak, and what you should expect to pay someone to run it.
What £30k a month on Google Ads buys in pipeline
Start with the arithmetic, because it's the part most reporting skips. The figures below are an illustration of a mid-market B2B account running mostly non-brand search, not a benchmark. Swap in your own rates.
The bottom row is the one that matters. £3,333 in media per new customer is excellent if your average contract is worth £15,000 a year at 80% gross margin, because you earn the ad cost back in a little over three months. At a £5,000 contract value the same account takes ten months to pay back, before you've added the agency fee or sales time.
Most accounts we audit at this spend can fill in the first two rows and stop. Google Ads reports clicks and form fills well. It knows nothing about which of those 150 leads your sales team qualified, unless you tell it. That gap is where the rest of this article comes from.
Six things a £30k B2B Google Ads budget should buy
A bigger budget doesn't just buy more of the same traffic. It buys options a £5k account doesn't have, and you should be getting all of them.
Bidding trained on qualified pipeline, not form fills
At £5k a month there often isn't enough data to optimise towards anything deeper than a lead. At £30k there is. Forty-odd SQLs a month is enough signal to import qualified stages from your CRM through offline conversion import and enhanced conversions, so Smart Bidding learns which searches turn into opportunities. When Sprintlaw's account was rebuilt around buyer intent, its qualified lead rate rose from 20% to 39% and ROAS went from 0.8 to 2.3. That kind of shift comes from changing what the account optimises towards, not from finding a cheaper click.
An account structure built for the next step up
A structure that worked at £5,000 a month can't direct £30,000 well, let alone £45,000. Brand and non-brand should sit in separate campaigns with separate budgets. Non-brand should be split by product, intent or market, so you can see which areas will take more spend profitably and which are already at their ceiling.
Room to test without risking the core
Ring-fence 10 to 15% of the budget for experiments: competitor and alternative-to terms, a Performance Max or Demand Gen campaign, a new market, Microsoft Ads. At £30k that's £3,000 to £4,500 a month, enough to get a readable result in a few weeks. Each test has to prove itself against pipeline before it earns a bigger share.
Search terms reviewed every week
5,000 clicks a month means thousands of search queries. Broad match and AI Max will find you new demand, and they'll also match you to searches that have nothing to do with what you sell. Someone should be reading the search terms report weekly and adding negatives, not quarterly.
Reporting in CAC and pipeline
Your monthly report should open with qualified pipeline, cost per SQL and customer acquisition cost from Google Ads, ideally pulled from your CRM. Click-through rate and cost per click still matter, but as diagnostics that explain movement in those numbers. They aren't results.
A senior person who owns the account
At this spend the management fee is a real line item. It should buy the attention of someone experienced enough to make structural calls, and you should know their name. If the person who pitched the work never logs into the account, that's worth asking about.
Why £30k Google Ads budgets get stuck at a ROAS of 1
We hear a version of the same brief every month: spend somewhere between £20,000 and £50,000, return on ad spend hovering around 1, and nobody quite sure why. It's rarely one big mistake. More often it's a handful of small ones that were harmless at a lower budget and now cost thousands.
The first place we look is what Google Ads counts as a conversion. If every form fill, newsletter sign-up and content download is a primary conversion, Smart Bidding will happily spend more to get more of them. The account looks efficient in the platform while sales complain about lead quality.
Next is spend that never reaches revenue. Performance Max can take credit for brand searches you'd have won anyway. Search partners can soak up budget on sites your buyers never visit. Broad match without weekly search term reviews drifts towards loosely related queries. None of this shows up as an error, which is why it survives for months.
The last check is whether ROAS is measured on revenue you can actually trace back to a click. Spell Payments had invested in paid media for years without being able to optimise it, because attribution was broken. Once enhanced conversion tracking was in place and the campaigns shifted towards lead quality, cost per lead fell 20% and revenue grew 300% year on year.
Fix these before raising the budget. Extra spend poured into an account with these leaks drains out the same way, only faster.
What Google Ads management should cost at £30k a month
Most agencies price management at this level as a percentage of spend, a flat fee, or a mix of the two. Lever charges a flat monthly fee while Google Ads spend is under £15,000 a month and a percentage of spend above that, with the full breakdown on our pricing page. Whichever model you're quoted, the headline number tells you less than what sits around it.
A few questions separate a fair fee from an expensive one:
- Who runs the account day to day? You should speak to that person before you sign.
- Is conversion tracking in scope? Without CRM-linked tracking, nobody can optimise towards pipeline. We won't manage an account until tracking is reliable, and fix it first if it isn't.
- What's the contract term? Ours is rolling monthly with one month's notice. A long lock-in protects the agency, not you.
- Is there a markup on media? Your ad spend should be paid directly to Google, with no margin added on top.
A fee that's a small share of £30,000 is only good value if the £30,000 is working. On an account wasting a quarter of its budget, the leak costs far more than any management fee. That's why we'd always look at the account before quoting for it.
Audit the account before you add budget
The most expensive time to discover a tracking problem is after a budget increase. Before moving from £30k to £40k, or deciding your current agency isn't working, get an independent view of where the money goes now.
Lever's Google Ads audit is a standalone service, with no retainer attached. Within seven days you get a written report with prioritised fixes, a competitor analysis and a walkthrough call, covering conversion tracking, structure, bidding, keywords and wasted spend. For clients who then move from click-based optimisation to SQL-based optimisation, we typically see customer acquisition cost fall 25 to 40% within two quarters, without reducing spend.
Go back to that £360,000 a year. If you can say exactly what it bought in qualified pipeline last quarter, you're ahead of most B2B advertisers. If you can't, book a Google Ads audit and find out before the next increase, or see how our Google Ads management is built for accounts ready to scale.
