Most agency pages will not tell you what a lead costs. Here is a real number from a real account.
An earthworks contractor in the Bay of Plenty. When we took over, search was producing leads at $577.98 each. Sixty days later, $148.10. A reduction of about seventy four per cent.
Clicks from Google over the same period went from zero to one hundred and seventy five.
How it came down
Not by finding cheaper clicks. We paid more per click on purpose.
Cheap clicks come from broad terms. Someone searching "excavator" might be a student, a hire customer, a competitor, or somebody researching for a school project. The click is cheap because almost nobody clicking it will ever hire anyone.
Someone searching "retaining wall contractor Papamoa" is about to hire a person. That click costs more and it is worth several times as much.
So the work is not finding cheap traffic. It is buying the expensive traffic that converts and refusing the cheap traffic that does not. That is the whole of our Google Ads method.
The part that does the work
The search terms report. Not the keywords you chose, the actual phrases people typed to reach you.
Read it weekly. Anything that is clearly not a customer becomes a negative keyword. Do that consistently and the account gets cheaper every month without touching a bid.
Most accounts we inherit have never had a negative keyword added.
What else has to be true
The landing page has to load and it has to ask for something. Paying for a click that arrives at a slow page is paying for a visitor to leave.
And the lead has to be trackable back to the search term that produced it. Without that you are optimising blind and you will end up cutting the campaign that is working.
What to expect
Sixty days is a reasonable window to know whether it is working. Less than that and you are reading noise.
Budget matters less than most people think. A small budget spent on terms that convert beats a large one spent broadly. What matters is that the money goes to people who are about to hire someone.