“Is £40 a good cost per enquiry?” is one of the most common questions in Google Ads, and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on your industry, your location, and what an enquiry is actually worth to you. A number that would be a disaster for one business is a great result for another.
Why there’s no single “good” number
A local plumber and a solicitor’s firm can both be running perfectly healthy Google Ads accounts with wildly different costs per enquiry, because the value of a plumbing enquiry and the value of a legal client are nowhere near the same. The only meaningful comparison is against businesses genuinely like yours — same trade, same country, similar scale.
A more useful question
Rather than asking “is this a good number in general”, ask two things:
- What can I actually afford? Work out what a real customer is worth to you, and what you can spend to win one and still make a profit.
- How do I compare to similar businesses? A benchmark from businesses genuinely like yours tells you whether you’re paying a normal amount or an unusually high one — which is a very different conversation to a generic industry average pulled from a blog post.
How Ads Toolbox handles this
Ads Toolbox lets you set what a good enquiry costs for your business, and compares your actual cost per enquiry against real, anonymised benchmarks from similar local service businesses — never a single account shown on its own, only ranges built from enough businesses that no one’s individual numbers are exposed.
See it on a real account → — the demo account’s “Is this normal?” tool shows a real benchmark comparison for a local service business.
