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If you ask a reddit thread "how much does PPC cost?" people will jump in with anything from £500 to £2,000 a month. And while that's a fair number range for a local trades business running one Google Ads campaign in one city. It's not much use if you're a Series A SaaS company about to launch in the US, running Google, Microsoft and LinkedIn, with a sales team asking why half the demo requests are students.
What's more, for B2B, SaaS and FinTech companies, the media budget is only one line of the real cost. Management fees, extra markets, extra platforms and the measurement stack that tells you whether any of it worked all sit on top of that spend. This post breaks down each of those lines with current figures, so you can build a budget your CFO will recognise, and see where our PPC pricing fits into it.
How much does PPC cost?
The total cost of PPC for a B2B or SaaS company is media spend plus management plus measurement. Media is what you pay Google, Microsoft, LinkedIn or Meta for clicks. Management is what you pay an agency or in-house team to run it. Measurement is the CRM, tracking and analytics software that connects ad spend to revenue.
For the companies we work with, media usually runs from £10,000 to £100,000+ a month across more than one channel. Management is typically a flat fee at the lower end and a percentage of spend as budgets grow. The measurement stack can be anything from under £100 a month to £5,000+ a month, depending on whether you have an app, how many markets you run and which CRM tier you're on.
The rest of this post explains what drives each number up or down.
Media spend: what clicks actually cost in B2B in 2026
Across all industries, WordStream's 2026 Google Ads benchmarks put the average cost per click at $5.42 and the average cost per lead at $66.69, based on more than 13,000 US search campaigns. But B2B campaigns. rarely sit near this average.
Commercial B2B keywords are some of the most expensive in paid search. For one UK SaaS client in the office real estate space, Google Ads CPCs average around £50. Meanwhile terms like "payroll software", "expense management platform" or "SOC 2 compliance tool" can go for anywhere between £15 and £30 per click, as they attract every well-funded competitor in the category, and smaller buyer pools mean fewer cheap long-tail searches to fall back on.
LinkedIn works differently because you pay for the audience rather than the search. The B2B House's LinkedIn ad benchmarks put the global average CPC at $5.58, rising to $6.40 for senior decision-makers in North America, with an average CPM of $33.80. The narrower the job title and company filters, the higher those numbers go.
Working out a minimum budget that can learn
Here's the thing most pricing advice skip. Google's Smart Bidding needs a steady flow of conversions to optimise, and a common working rule is around 30 conversions a month per campaign. Below that, the algorithm is guessing.
So work backwards. If a demo-intent click costs £36 and 3% of those clicks book a demo, each demo costs £1,200 in media. Thirty demos a month means roughly £36,000 in spend on that campaign alone. You can lower that floor by optimising towards an earlier conversion, such as a trial sign-up, and using offline conversion import to feed back which of those became pipeline.
Remember - a budget too small to learn is more expensive than a slightly bigger one, because you pay for the clicks without getting the optimisation.
PPC management fees: the main pricing models
Agencies price PPC management in four main ways.
- Flat monthly fee. Predictable, and fair at smaller budgets where the work doesn't scale with spend.
- Percentage of ad spend. Commonly 10% to 20%. It scales with the account, but a pure percentage model can reward spending more rather than spending well.
- Hybrid. A flat fee up to a spend threshold, then a percentage above it.
- Hourly or project-based. Usually for audits, builds or one-off fixes rather than ongoing management.
We use a hybrid model. Accounts under £15,000 a month in media pay a flat monthly fee. Above that, the fee moves to a percentage of spend. LinkedIn and ChatGPT Ads are each added at £500 a month on top of an existing retainer, because they need their own campaign structure, creative and reporting. There's no 6 or 12-month lock-in. The full breakdown by growth stage is on our PPC pricing page.
Whichever model you're quoted, ask what's actually included. Does the fee cover CRM integration and offline conversion import? Landing page recommendations? Reporting on CAC and pipeline, or only on clicks and platform conversions? Two quotes at the same price can buy very different amounts of work.
Multi-market PPC: what changes when you go international
Expanding from the UK into the US, DACH or APAC doesn't just add media. It multiplies structure.
Each market needs its own budget floor. The 30-conversion logic above applies per campaign, per market. A company spending £40,000 a month in the UK can't simply split that five ways across new countries and expect each one to learn. US CPCs for software terms are often higher than the UK, so the US launch budget usually needs to be the biggest line in the plan, not a share of the UK one.
Each market needs its own campaigns and copy. Separate campaigns for bidding, budgets and time zones. Localised ad copy, and ideally localised landing pages, because a UK English page converting German or Dutch buyers will underperform however good the ads are. Currency, VAT messaging and data residency questions (particularly for FinTech) all show up in the landing page and the ads.
Reporting gets harder. Pipeline from five markets in three currencies, feeding one CRM, needs a clear account structure from day one or nobody can tell which market is paying back. This is where multi-market account architecture matters more than any single campaign setting. Our SaaS PPC agency page covers how we structure this under the Scaling Internationally stage.
Multi-platform PPC: the cost of each extra channel
Every channel you add needs its own budget to learn, its own creative and its own measurement job.
Google Ads and Microsoft Ads capture demand that already exists. Microsoft usually costs less per click and reaches a more desktop-heavy, corporate audience, which makes it one of the cheaper additions for B2B. Much of the Google build can be imported, so the extra management time is modest.
LinkedIn creates demand, targeting job titles, company sizes and named accounts. It needs design resource for image, video and document ads, and a meaningful test budget, since high CPCs mean a small budget buys very few clicks. LinkedIn Ads for B2B usually earns its place once search is working and you need to reach buyers who aren't searching yet.
Meta is audience-led for B2B. It can work well for product-led SaaS with a broad user base and for eCommerce, and poorly for niche enterprise tools.
ChatGPT Ads is the newest option. For the same UK SaaS client mentioned above, ChatGPT Ads CPCs have averaged £1.96 against £36 on Google, with CAC at £200 against £600. That's one account over a few months, and the channel is still in beta, so we only run it alongside an existing account with a test budget of around £1,500 to £3,000 a month. Our ChatGPT Ads service page has more detail.
The measurement stack: the cost nobody quotes you for
This is the line most PPC pricing guides leave out, and for Series A+ companies it's often where the real value sits. Ad platforms report on clicks and conversions they can see. To know what's producing revenue, you need software that tracks the whole journey, and it costs money.
CRM
Your CRM is where leads become opportunities and customers, and it's the source of truth for offline conversion import. According to SpotDev's UK HubSpot pricing guide, checked July 2026, HubSpot Marketing Hub Professional costs £702 a month with three seats and 2,000 marketing contacts, and Enterprise costs £3,000 a month. Professional and Enterprise both carry a mandatory onboarding fee, and Sales Hub Professional adds £85 per seat per month. Salesforce and Pipedrive have their own tiers, but the principle is the same: the CRM tier you need is driven by contact volume and how many people in sales and marketing use it.
Server-side tracking
Browser tracking loses data to ad blockers, consent choices and cookie restrictions. Server-side Google Tag Manager recovers some of that and gives you more control over what's sent to each platform. Hosting is cheap relative to media. Stape's published plans run from free (10,000 requests) to $17 a month (500,000 requests), $83 a month (5 million) and $167 a month (20 million). The bigger cost is the setup time, which is a one-off.
Product analytics: Mixpanel
For SaaS, the conversion that matters is rarely the sign-up. It's activation: the user who connects their bank account, invites a colleague or creates their first project. Product analytics tools like Mixpanel track those in-product events, so you can see which campaigns bring users who stick around and which bring tyre-kickers.
Mixpanel's pricing documentation lists a free plan up to 1 million events a month. The Growth plan also includes the first 1 million events free, then charges $0.00028 per event (28 cents per thousand). Enterprise starts at $20,000 a year, and add-ons like Group Analytics (useful for B2B, where you care about accounts rather than individual users) carry a surcharge on overage.
Mobile measurement: Adjust
If you have an app, you need a mobile measurement partner. Since Apple's App Tracking Transparency framework arrived with iOS 14.5, most iOS users can't be tracked across apps by default, and the ad platforms each report app installs their own way. An MMP like Adjust sits between them, deduplicates the data, handles Apple's privacy-preserving attribution frameworks and tells you which campaign drove which install and in-app action.
Vendr's Adjust pricing data puts the median annual contract at $44,000, with a range from about $10,800 to $370,080, priced mainly on monthly tracked users. Fraud prevention and other modules are often priced separately.
Adjust and Mixpanel do different jobs. Adjust answers "which ad brought this user in?" Mixpanel answers "what did they do once they were here?" Connected together, and feeding back into your CRM and ad platforms, they show the whole user journey from click to paying account. That's the difference between attribution and measurement, which we cover in more depth in measurement vs attribution in PPC.
What the stack adds up to
A web-only SaaS company might add a few hundred pounds a month to its existing CRM. A Series B fintech with an app, running five markets, could be spending £5,000+ a month on measurement before a single click is bought. Neither is wrong. What matters is that the stack matches the questions you need to answer.
What PPC costs by growth stage
The mix changes as the business grows. This maps to the four stages on our PPC pricing page.
Starting out. One market, Google and possibly Microsoft, a CRM you already have. The biggest risk is spreading a small budget too thinly. Keep channels few and get conversion tracking right before adding anything.
Fixing efficiency. You're spending, but CAC is drifting upwards. The cost here is usually in measurement rather than media: connecting the CRM, importing offline conversions and cutting spend that produces leads sales won't touch.
Scaling to enterprise audiences. LinkedIn joins search, account lists get tighter and sales cycles get longer. Expect higher CPCs and a longer wait before pipeline shows up, and budget for creative.
Scaling internationally. New markets, localised pages, multiple currencies and often an app. This is where Adjust, Mixpanel and a higher CRM tier start to pay for themselves, because without them you can't tell which market is working.
Sector differences: SaaS, FinTech and eCommerce
Product-led SaaS has cheaper conversions (sign-ups and trials) but needs product analytics to know which ones activate. Budget for Mixpanel or a similar tool early.
Sales-led SaaS has fewer, more expensive conversions and needs a CRM properly connected to the ad platforms. Most of the waste we see in these accounts comes from bidding on form fills.
FinTech adds compliance time. Financial promotions rules mean ads and landing pages often need sign-off before launch, and many FinTechs are app-first, which brings in an MMP. Our FinTech digital marketing agency page covers this in more detail.
eCommerce has the most direct measurement, since the purchase happens online, but adds product feed management and, at scale, a feed tool. eCommerce PPC is judged on revenue-based ROAS rather than platform-reported conversions.
The costs that don't appear on any invoice
A few more lines belong in an honest budget. Landing pages are the obvious one: if your page converts at 2% instead of 4%, every channel costs twice as much per lead, which makes conversion rate optimisation one of the cheapest ways to lower PPC costs. Creative for LinkedIn and Meta needs design time every month. Internal time matters too, from sales feeding back on lead quality to finance reconciling spend across currencies. And the first 60 to 90 days of any new channel or market includes spend that's buying data, not customers.
None of that is a reason not to invest. It's a reason to plan for it, so month three doesn't turn into a debate about whether PPC works.
So, how much does PPC cost for a company like yours? More than the £500 a month the generic guides suggest, and less than you'll waste if the measurement isn't there to tell you what's working. If you'd like a real number, get a free proposal. We'll look at your current accounts, markets and tracking set-up, and give you a budget broken down by media, management and measurement, including whether you need tools like Adjust or Mixpanel yet.
Last reviewed: September 2026 by Michéal Breslin, Managing Director
