What does Google Ads cost? Cost per click, budget and the 5% surcharge

Google Ads cost exactly the budget you set; there is no list price. What you get for it is decided by an auction for every single search, and for ads in Austria a 5% surcharge comes on top. This article shows how the cost per click comes about, where Google's limits for the day and the month lie and how to calculate your monthly budget backwards from your goal. As of November 2026. What an agency costs is covered in the article What does performance marketing cost?; how we manage accounts is on the page Google Ads agency in Vienna and Zurich.

In short

• No list price, no minimum budget: you set bid and budget yourself.
• The cost per click is set in the auction from your bid, the quality of ad and landing page and the competition for the search term.
• Two limits from Google: on one day at most twice the daily budget, in a month at most 30.4 times.
• 5% surcharge in Austria since 1 November 2020, on top of the ad costs, regardless of where your company is based.
• The honest metric is the cost per enquiry or purchase that actually reaches you, not the cost per click.

How the cost per click comes about: the auction

On Google Ads, you do not buy a fixed slot. For every search, Google calculates an Ad Rank for all matching ads and uses it to decide whether and where an ad appears. According to Google Ads Help, your bid and the ad quality at the time of the auction feed into Ad Rank. Quality includes the expected click-through rate, the relevance of the ad to the search and the user experience on the landing page. Added to this are the context of the search and the competitors.

The actual cost per click is the amount Google charges you for a click. You pay at most what is needed to reach the Ad Rank thresholds and keep a better rank than the competitor directly below you. That is often less than your maximum bid.

For your budget, this means: an ad that matches the search exactly and leads to a fast, clear page gets the same position more cheaply than a generic one. On Google, quality is not a beauty prize but a discount.

What the costs depend on

How qualified enquiries get back into the account is covered in the article Sending leads back to Meta and Google.

Daily budget, monthly limit and the surcharge for Austria

The average daily budget is the amount you want to spend per campaign and day on average. Google spreads spend across days with more and less demand. According to its help pages, two limits apply to most campaigns: on a single day, Google spends at most twice the daily budget, in a month at most 30.4 times. An expensive Tuesday is therefore not a mistake. What counts is the month.

In Austria, the surcharge for the digital services tax comes on top. Since 1 November 2020, Google has added 5% to the invoice for ads delivered in Austria. Three things you should know:

1. What counts is where the ad is delivered, not where the company is based. A retailer from Munich pays the surcharge for its impressions in Austria.
2. The surcharge comes on top of the ad costs. €1,000 in ad costs for Austria becomes around €1,050.
3. For Germany and Switzerland, Google's list shows no surcharge (as of November 2026). If a campaign runs in several countries, it only affects the Austrian share.

Meta has charged the same rate for Austria since July 2026; details in the article What do Meta ads cost?. How to treat the surcharge in your accounts is something to clarify with your tax adviser.

What does Google Ads cost per month? How to calculate it

You derive a sensible monthly budget from the goal. Most of the data for this is in your own account:

1. Set the goal: Z enquiries or purchases per month.
2. Estimate the landing page's conversion rate: from past data or cautiously from a test. This tells you how many clicks you need: Z divided by the conversion rate.
3. Look up the cost per click: for each search term, Keyword Planner shows the top of page bid as a low and a high range, plus the monthly searches.
4. Base budget: clicks needed times cost per click.
5. Factor in qualification: if only every second enquiry is usable, you need twice as many.
6. Add the surcharge: for the Austrian share, times 1.05.

A worked example with assumed values, not as a benchmark: if you need 40 enquiries, every twentieth click becomes an enquiry and a click costs €2, that makes 800 clicks and €1,600 in ad costs, or €1,680 with the surcharge. If only every second enquiry turns into a conversation, one conversation costs €84. Whether that is a lot or a little depends on your order value.

If the search volume in Keyword Planner is not enough for the clicks you need, more budget does not solve the problem. Then demand is missing, and a channel that creates demand is a better fit. The comparison is in the article Meta ads or Google ads.

Is Google Ads worth it?

Google Ads are worth it when three conditions come together: people actively search for your offer, your landing page turns visits into enquiries, and an enquiry costs less than it brings you. The calculation is short. The allowed cost per enquiry is the contribution margin per order times your close rate. For an online shop, the break-even ROAS applies, i.e. 1 divided by the margin, and correspondingly higher with the surcharge for Austria. Run the numbers with your own figures in the ROAS calculator.

Google is not worth it when nobody searches for your solution because it is new, or when the margin cannot carry the cost per click in your industry. Knowing this before money flows is the real value of the calculation.

Five cost traps

1. Search terms that are too broad: the ad appears for searches that have nothing to do with your offer. The search terms report shows it.
2. No clean conversion tracking: Google then optimises for clicks instead of enquiries.
3. Brand searches flatter the average: searches for your company name are cheap and would often have come anyway. Separate them in reporting.
4. Forgetting the surcharge: budget and metrics without the 5% for Austria, and the plan does not add up.
5. Too many campaigns for too little budget: each gets too little data, none of them learns.

Whether your account has one of these weak spots is shown by the free Google Ads audit with a 10-point checklist.

How we handle Google costs at ad.boutique

At ad.boutique, you usually pay the ad budget directly to Google and see every figure live in the live dashboard. Before launch, we agree a metric, such as cost per qualified enquiry or ROAS, and calculate it with the real costs: spend plus surcharge, divided by the results that reach you. For our work there are fixed models instead of hourly rates, see Pricing and models.

ad.boutique is a performance marketing agency in Vienna and Zurich and manages Google Ads accounts in Austria, Germany and Switzerland. If you want to work through your budget with us, book an intro call: 30 minutes, no obligation.