Google Ads vs SEO: a real $24,000 year
7 min read
By Param, Webstallion
The short answer
An Australian small business spent $24,000 on Google Ads over one year: $14,400 in ad budget plus $9,600 paid to the person managing it. No conversion tracking was ever configured on the account, so the return on that $24,000 was never measurable in the first place. When new leads were asked how they found the business, none of them named the ads. Some may have come through the ads and been invisible, because nothing was in place to attribute them. Nobody knows, and that is the finding rather than a caveat on it.
Every article comparing Google Ads and SEO for Australian small businesses quotes the same thing: industry averages. Typical cost per click in your sector. Average conversion rates. Benchmark return on ad spend.
This one has a real account with real figures behind it, which is the only reason it is worth writing. The business stays anonymous, and deliberately so: in a small market, "a business spending $2,000 a month on ads" narrows to a handful of names, and one of them recognising themselves here would be a real cost to them for no benefit to you. So there is no industry, no city and no size detail below. The numbers are the story.
What the year cost
Two line items, paid monthly, for twelve months.
| Item | Monthly | Annual |
|---|---|---|
| Google Ads budget | $1,200 | $14,400 |
| Management fee | $800 | $9,600 |
| Total | $2,000 | $24,000 |
Look at the split rather than the total. The management fee is 40% of what was actually spent on ads, or 67% on top of the ad budget. For every three dollars that reached Google, a further two went to the person operating the account. That ratio is not an industry claim or a survey average. It is what one Australian business actually paid.
The question the account cannot answer
There was no conversion tracking configured on the account. Not partially set up, not misconfigured, not tracking the wrong thing. None at all, for the entire year.
Conversion tracking is the piece that tells Google which clicks turned into something the business wanted: a phone call, a form submission, an enquiry, a booking. Without it, an ad account still reports plenty. Impressions. Clicks. Click-through rate. Cost per click. Money spent. It reports everything except the only thing that matters, which is whether any of it produced a customer.
So the return on $24,000 was not disappointing. It was unmeasurable, and it was unmeasurable by construction, from the first day of the campaign to the last.
The sharpest part of this is not the client's doing. Setting up conversion tracking is a one-off configuration job. It is free, it takes well under an hour, and it is the standard first step on any new account. The person being paid $800 a month to run the campaign never set it up either. That is $9,600 for a year of management that left the business unable to answer whether the other $14,400 had worked.
What can be said, and what cannot
With the tracking absent, the business fell back on the manual method: asking. When new leads came in, they were asked how they had found the business.
None of them named the sponsored ads.
That is worth stating precisely, because it is tempting to round it into something stronger than it is. It does not mean the ads produced no customers. People genuinely do not always remember, or notice, where they first saw a business. Some leads may well have arrived through the ads and been counted as something else, or as nothing at all, because there was no mechanism to attribute them.
So the honest version is narrower and, I think, more damning than the exaggerated one: they spent $24,000 across a year and there is no way to tell what it bought. Not a bad result. An absent one. The business cannot know, the person they paid cannot know, and neither can anybody reading this.
What happened over the next six months
The campaign stopped and the money went into organic search instead: the site itself, the content on it, and the technical work that decides whether any of it can rank. Six months later, from Search Console:
| Measure | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Average position | 40 | 13 |
| Clicks per month | 30 | 150 minimum |
Twenty-seven positions in six months, and five times the monthly clicks. Enquiries also started arriving faster, though that one is an impression rather than a measurement and should be read as such.
One important limit on those two rows: this is a single business in a single market over a single six-month window. It is an illustration, not a benchmark. What is worth taking from it is not the size of the numbers, it is that they exist at all. Every figure in the second table came out of a free tool that was already installed. Every figure in the first table required a setup step nobody performed.
When paid ads are the right call
None of this is an argument that Google Ads does not work. It plainly does, at scale, for a great many businesses. The useful question is not paid or organic, it is order.
Ads amplify whatever a visitor lands on. If the destination is slow, thin, hard to navigate on a phone, or simply unconvincing, paid traffic does not fix that. It makes the shortfall more expensive, because now you are paying per click for the same outcome you were getting for free. Advertising a page that does not convert is the most efficient way there is to spend money proving that the page does not convert.
Paid search earns its place when at least these are true:
- Conversion tracking is live and verified before a single dollar is spent, not added later when someone asks what the return was.
- The destination page already converts organic visitors. If it does not, you have a page problem, and paid traffic will not solve it.
- There is a genuine reason not to wait, such as a launch, a seasonal window, a new location, or a service with no existing search demand to capture.
- You know the fee as a percentage of spend. A flat monthly management figure sounds neutral until you divide it by the ad budget it is managing.
- The organic ground is already taken. Buying clicks for terms you could rank for permanently is renting something you could own.
Read that list against the case above and the pattern is clear enough. The spend was not the mistake. The spend was made before there was any way to evaluate it, on top of a foundation nobody had checked, and it kept running for twelve months because there was no measurement that could have told anyone to stop.
Five things to check on your own account today
If someone runs ads for you, these take about ten minutes and do not require their cooperation.
- Open Goals or Conversions in Google Ads. If it is empty, nothing in your reporting is measuring outcomes, whatever the monthly report says.
- Check that a conversion has actually fired recently. A configured action that has recorded nothing in months is the same as no tracking, and it looks like tracking.
- Divide the management fee by the ad budget. Write down the percentage. Then ask what it buys.
- Confirm you own the account. If the agency created it under their own manager account, you may lose every year of history the day you leave. Ownership should be yours, with access granted to them.
- Open Search Console next to it. It is free, it is probably already collecting, and it will tell you what you are earning without paying for it. If organic clicks are climbing while ads cannot be measured, that gap is worth understanding before you renew anything.
If you want to put rough numbers against the trade-off for your own situation, the ads versus SEO calculator works it through in AUD, and when paid ads do make sense sets out the cases where buying attention is the right move.
Common questions
Is Google Ads worth it for a small business in Australia?
It depends entirely on whether you can measure it, and most small businesses running ads cannot. Google Ads buys attention immediately, which is genuinely useful when you have something worth sending attention to and a way to count what happens next. Without conversion tracking configured, the spend is unmeasurable by definition: you can see clicks and cost, but not whether a single click became a customer. Set up conversion tracking before you set a budget, not after.
How much does Google Ads management cost in Australia?
Management is usually charged either as a percentage of ad spend or as a flat monthly fee. In the case documented on this page, an Australian small business paid $800 a month to manage a $1,200 a month ad budget. That is a management fee equal to 40% of what was actually spent on ads, or 67% on top of the ad budget, and it totalled $9,600 across the year. Whatever the structure, ask what the fee is as a percentage of spend before agreeing to it.
What is conversion tracking and why does it matter?
Conversion tracking is the configuration that tells Google which clicks turned into something the business wanted: a phone call, a form submission, a booking, a sale. Without it, the ad account reports impressions, clicks and cost, and nothing about outcomes. It is the difference between knowing you spent $14,400 and knowing what $14,400 bought. It is set up once, it is free, and it is the first thing to check on any account someone else is running for you.
Should I do SEO or Google Ads first?
The useful way to frame it is not either or, it is sequence. Ads amplify whatever a visitor lands on. If the destination is slow, thin or unconvincing, paid traffic makes the shortfall more expensive rather than less visible, because you are paying per click for the same outcome. Organic work fixes the destination and compounds, but it takes months. Ads are immediate and stop the day you stop paying. Most small businesses get better value fixing the destination first, then buying traffic to it once there is something worth buying traffic to.
How long does SEO take to show results in Australia?
Months, not weeks. In the case on this page, six months of organic work moved a site from an average Search Console position of 40 to 13, and monthly clicks from 30 to at least 150. That is one business in one market, so treat it as an illustration rather than a benchmark: competition, starting position and how much content already exists all change the timeline substantially.
The bottom line
A year, $24,000, and a question the business still cannot answer: did any of it work? The figures that were available cost nothing and were sitting in a free tool the whole time. The figures that were not available would have cost nothing either. Whatever you decide about paid search, decide it against something you can measure, and check that the measurement exists before the spending starts rather than after it stops.