Google's minimum is zero. That is not the useful number
You can run Google Ads on AED 20 a day. The platform will happily take it. The question is not what Google accepts but what produces a cost per lead you can rely on rather than a number that swings wildly month to month.
We do not take on campaigns below AED 5,000 per month in ad spend. That is not a sales floor — below it there is genuinely not enough data to optimise toward anything, and you would be paying us to guess.
Why the floor exists
Smart Bidding needs conversions to learn from. With a handful of leads a month, the algorithm cannot distinguish a good click from a lucky one, so it keeps exploring instead of exploiting. You pay for that exploration.
The arithmetic is simple enough to do yourself. Take a realistic cost per click for your sector in Dubai, assume a conversion rate somewhere between two and five percent, and work out how many clicks you need for a statistically meaningful number of leads. In most competitive UAE verticals that lands above AED 5,000 a month before management fees.
What management should cost on top
Our fee is the greater of AED 1,000 per month or 10% of spend. Media is paid to Google directly from your own account, with no markup, so you can see every figure yourself.
The markup model — where the agency buys the media and bills you a marked-up total — is worth asking about specifically. If you cannot see the raw platform spend, you cannot verify your own cost per lead.
When paid search is the wrong tool
If your budget is below the practical floor, more Google Ads is not the answer. Usually one of these is:
- Fix the website first — traffic into a page that does not convert is the most expensive mistake in the account
- Google Business Profile, if you are a local business. Map pack visibility is free and often outperforms paid for near-me searches
- SEO, if you can wait three to six months and want the traffic to keep coming after you stop paying
- A tighter geographic or service focus, so a small budget concentrates instead of spreading
Before you increase spend, check the search terms report
The single most common finding when we open an existing account is that a large share of spend went to searches with no commercial intent — job seekers, students, competitors, people researching a term that merely contains your keyword.
That report is free and takes ten minutes to read. Doing it before raising a budget is usually worth more than the extra budget would have been.
Common questions
Can I run Google Ads myself on a small budget?
Yes, and for a very small budget it is often the right call — an agency fee on AED 3,000 of spend is a large proportion of the total. Get conversion tracking correct first, or you will have no idea whether it worked.
Why is the fee the greater of AED 1,000 or 10%?
Because the work does not scale down below a point. Building and maintaining a small account still takes the same setup, the same tracking and the same weekly attention as a slightly larger one.