PPC without guesswork
Is PPC worth itfor your business?Run the numbers.
Work out how much you can afford to spend on ads before it stops making economic sense. Then decide on the numbers, not on what everyone else is spending.
No sign-up · Free · Takes a few minutes
That many orders pay for the budget. Each one may cost you at most €34.00.
- Find your break-even point
- Set a budget that holds up
- Understand the numbers that matter
Seven sections,
one library.
Every article answers one concrete question and ends with what to do about it. No “it depends” without saying what it depends on. Where we use figures from research, we always name the source and its limits.
What PPC is, what it costs, how to work out a budget and which metric actually decides.
4 articles →02AI and searchAI Overviews, AI Mode and assistants: what they do to clicks, where you can already advertise and how to get cited in answers.
4 articles →03Channels and campaignsGoogle Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta. Performance Max, AI Max, Smart Bidding and account structure.
9 articles →04Measurement and dataConversions, attribution, consent mode, first-party data and incrementality. Why the numbers never match.
5 articles →05E-commerce and feedsProduct feeds, Merchant Center, margin by category, marketplaces and seasonality.
4 articles →06Site and conversionLanding pages, speed, copy and forms. The place where a paid click turns into money.
3 articles →07Management and peopleAccount audits, reporting, the most common mistakes and choosing between an agency, a freelancer and in-house.
5 articles →How to approach PPC
in five steps.
In this order, not another. The most common mistake is not a badly configured campaign — it is a campaign built before anyone knew what the business could afford or how it would know the ads were working.
Work out what you can afford
Before you set a single keyword you need to know your margin and what a customer is worth. Without those you cannot say whether a given cost per order is good. That is what the calculator on this page is for.
Build measurement, then campaigns
A campaign with broken measurement does not get optimised, it just gets more expensive. First conversions that match real orders, a correct consent setup, and the first data from your own systems.
Start where people are looking for you
The cheapest conversions come from searches for your brand and for specific products. You work outwards from there, not the other way round. And keep brand separate, or you will distort the whole report.
Fix the site before you raise the budget
Every hole in the landing page and checkout gets bigger as the budget grows. Speed, mobile, the form and the delivery cost often do more for the result than rebuilding campaigns.
Raise budget in steps and verify
Before each change, write down what you expect and when you will check. And for big decisions, verify the ads bring in business that would not have arrived anyway.
A calculator
that does not flatter.
Ordinary calculators multiply budget by conversion rate and get linear growth. That does not exist in advertising. This one accounts for clicks getting more expensive and conversion rates falling as you spend more — and tells you exactly where adding money stops paying off.
The model peaks at around €2,413 and you are at €2,700. Further profit will not come from budget now, but from a better conversion rate, margin or lower CPC.
| Budget | Conversions | Marginal CPA | Profit from step | Gross profit total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| €405 | 29 | €14 | €583 | €583 |
| €810 | 47 | €22 | €212 | €796 |
| €1,215 | 63 | €26 | €122 | €917 |
| €1,620 | 77 | €29 | €71 | €988 |
| €2,025 | 90 | €31 | €36 | €1,024 |
| €2,430 | 102 | €33 | €10 | €1,034 |
| €2,835 | 113 | €35 | −€10 | €1,024 |
| €3,240 | 125 | €36 | −€27 | €997 |
| €3,645 | 135 | €38 | −€41 | €956 |
| €4,050 | 146 | €39 | −€53 | €903 |
Want to know whether this holds for your account? We will go through your real numbers and say where the next unit would earn.
I want an account reviewHow we calculate it and what the model cannot do. We model conversions with a power-law advertising response, K(S) = A · S^e. The exponent e expresses market saturation: as budget grows the click gets dearer and the conversion rate worsens, because you are reaching less certain searches. From that follows the key figure of the whole calculator: marginal CPA = average CPA ÷ e. At e = 0.7 the last conversion added is therefore about 43 % dearer than the account average. The profit optimum is the point where the gross margin from a marginal conversion equals one unit spent. The model does not know your competitors, your season, your stock capacity or the learning phase of automated bidding, and it does not account for returns, repeat purchases or management fees. It is a frame for a decision, not a forecast. The real response of your account will only show in a controlled budget test or a geo experiment. The industry defaults are our estimates for that market, not measured data — which is why every number is editable and the result will be far more useful with yours.
Last
reviewed.
PPC ages fast, so every article carries the date it was last reviewed rather than the date it was published. What is out of date gets rewritten or removed.
AI Overviews and AI Mode: what they do to search and to PPC
A randomised field experiment from January and February 2026 measured about 38 % fewer outbound clicks on queries with an AI overview, and zero-click searches rising from 54 to 72 %. What that means for paid advertising — and what has not changed.
Article library →What is PPC advertising and when is it actually worth it
PPC is not “ads on Google”. It is an auction where you pay for attention — and it only pays off when you know your margin and people are actively searching for what you sell. Here is the whole mechanism without the gloss.
Article library →Advertising in AI search and assistants: where it already works
Google shows ads inside AI answers, OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT in February 2026, and sources contradict each other about Perplexity. An overview of what exists, what is only written about, and what is worth acting on today.
Article library →How much does PPC advertising cost in 2026
There is an honest answer to “what does it cost”, it just is not a single number. It splits into media, work and tools — and most benchmarks circulating online do not apply to your market. Here is the breakdown and how to work out your own figure.
Article library →Traffic from AI assistants: small, but it converts. How to earn it and measure it
There is little traffic from ChatGPT and other assistants, but studies agree it converts markedly better than organic search. How to get into the answers, how to measure it, and why most companies have no idea how much arrives.
Article library →PPC budget: why double the money never doubles the orders
The number that decides a budget is not average cost per conversion but marginal — the cost of the conversion the last unit of spend brings. It is always higher, it can be calculated, and it changes everything.
Article library →Common
questions.
The answers we give on a first call. Shortened, but not simplified.
What is PPC advertising?
PPC (pay per click) is paid advertising where you only pay when someone clicks. Most often that means search ads on Google and Microsoft Bing, shopping ads for online shops, and ads on social networks. Price is set by an auction: it is not only who bids more, but also how relevant the ad and the landing page are.
How much does PPC cost per month?
There is no universal minimum, but there is a sensible one: enough for the campaign to gather sufficient conversions in a month to be evaluated. For online shops that usually means low thousands of euros a month; for local services it can be far less, and for expensive fields such as law or finance far more. The right number is worked out backwards from margin and customer value, not from what everyone else is spending.
Is PPC worth it for a small business?
If people actively search for your product or service and you know your margin, yes. The most common reason PPC does not pay for a small business is not the size of the budget but too low a margin or missing measurement, which means nobody knows what the campaign delivered. The second common reason is that there simply is not enough demand in that field, and the budget would do more elsewhere.
What is the difference between PPC and SEO?
PPC is a paid position that works from day one but stops the moment you turn the budget off. SEO is work on organic results: it takes months and holds without further payment. In practice you do not choose between them. PPC quickly reveals which searches actually lead to business, and SEO then builds on those for the long term.
How do I know whether PPC campaigns are working?
By profit, not by clicks, impressions or click-through rate. The minimum is to compare conversions in the ad platform with real orders or enquiries in your own systems, separate brand searches from the rest, and know your margin. At larger budgets it pays to verify incrementality: how much business would have arrived without the ads.
Is this site advertising or education?
Both, and we say so. We write the articles so anyone can read them and run PPC themselves. Behind them are the agency Independency and the tool ClientDeck, so if someone decides to look for help we are glad to put our hand up. But we do not shape the content to push you there: in some articles the honest answer is “you do not need us for this”.
Who writes this
and why.
Chci PPC is run by Independency, a firm that has managed PPC for over twelve years, and ClientDeck, the tool where we log every change we make to an account. This site is the library we had to write for ourselves anyway.
Independency
PPC, measurement and analytics for e-commerce and companies that want to see inside the account, not just receive a report.
- We judge results by real orders, not by platform attribution
- Every change has a written reason, an expected result and a review date
- Free initial account audit, even if no engagement follows
ClientDeck
Our own system for running ad accounts: it watches for anomalies, keeps the history of changes and makes someone approve each edit.
- Daily account checks and alerts on anomalies before you see them in revenue
- Changes only with a named person’s approval, and reversible
- Data from Google Ads, Meta and Merchant Center in one place
Want to talk it
through with a person?
Tell us what you are dealing with. We reply within one working day and the first answer will be concrete — even if it has to be “you can handle this yourself, here is how”.