Google Ads that turn budget into booked work.
Prager has managed paid search from one office in Collegeville, Pennsylvania since 2003, and currently manages more than $20 million in spend each year across Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising. We cut the queries, bids, and placements that drain budget so more of every dollar reaches people ready to hire you.
Same auction, same click price. One of these ads earns a call and the other buys a bounce.
What is a paid search management company?
A paid search management company plans, builds, runs and measures search advertising on your behalf, on Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, in an account you own. The work is keyword and audience strategy, ad and landing page structure, bidding, conversion tracking, and the weekly discipline of cutting what does not convert while improving what does.
The distinction that matters is who owns the account. A management company builds in your Google Ads account, on your billing, with your data and your history. A lead reseller keeps the account and rents you the outcome, which means you leave with nothing. Ask any agency this before you ask about price.
The second distinction is where the work happens. Paid search rewards small, frequent, informed decisions. A negative keyword added on Tuesday, a landing page headline changed on Thursday, a bid adjusted because the phone rang at 11pm. That cadence only exists when the person making the decisions can see the whole system, which is why we keep media, development and analytics under one roof.
Search advertising does not create demand, it intercepts it. Someone already wants the thing. Our job is to make you the obvious answer at the moment they look.
Unlike most media, paid search can be traced from query to click to call to booked work, provided conversion tracking is built properly rather than inherited.
It produces leads this week, and it stops the day the budget stops. That is the trade against SEO, which is slower and compounds.
What does paid search cost in 2026?
Across more than 13,000 US search campaigns in 2026, the average cost per click was $5.42, the average click-through rate 6.64%, the average conversion rate 8.18%, and the average cost per lead $66.69. Home and home improvement ran considerably higher at $8.33 per click and $90.92 per lead. Cost per lead fell for the first time in five years.
Almost nobody pays the average. The spread across industries is close to sixfold, from $1.63 a click in arts and entertainment to $9.87 for attorneys. What decides your number is the service area, how many competitors are bidding on the same intent, how mature the account is, and what you are willing to count as a conversion.
Pick your industry and a metric below. The chart and the table are the same data, so if a figure looks wrong you can check it against the source rather than take our word for it.
| Industry | Avg CPC | CTR | Conversion rate | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cross-industry average | $5.42 | 6.64% | 8.18% | $66.69 |
| Attorneys and Legal Services | $9.87 | 5.87% | 5.55% | $131.63 |
| Home and Home Improvement | $8.33 | 6.47% | 8.05% | $90.92 |
| Dentists and Dental Services | $8.00 | 5.66% | 10.67% | $72.97 |
| Personal Services | $7.17 | 7.16% | 12.34% | $54.60 |
| Health and Fitness | $6.17 | 5.81% | 6.94% | $67.36 |
| Business Services | $5.87 | 6.10% | 4.85% | $93.69 |
| Industrial and Commercial | $5.87 | 6.57% | 8.20% | $75.19 |
| Career and Employment | $5.81 | 5.88% | 3.05% | $67.36 |
| Education and Instruction | $4.81 | 7.56% | 13.14% | $77.48 |
| Physicians and Surgeons | $4.76 | 6.61% | 12.43% | $40.04 |
| Beauty and Personal Care | $4.62 | 6.75% | 10.35% | $39.25 |
| Apparel, Fashion and Jewelry | $4.44 | 6.64% | 4.50% | $97.51 |
| Automotive Repair, Service and Parts | $4.35 | 5.56% | 15.51% | $29.96 |
| Shopping, Collectibles and Gifts | $4.14 | 8.28% | 4.01% | $49.40 |
| Animals and Pets | $4.06 | 7.49% | 16.22% | $31.50 |
| Furniture | $3.97 | 6.57% | 2.99% | $106.70 |
| Finance and Insurance | $3.39 | 9.83% | 2.64% | $74.44 |
| Real Estate | $3.22 | 7.61% | 3.70% | $102.51 |
| Sports and Recreation | $2.77 | 8.75% | 7.69% | $44.26 |
| Automotive For Sale | $2.27 | 8.28% | 6.01% | $44.26 |
| Travel | $2.14 | 9.32% | 5.83% | $44.70 |
| Restaurants and Food | $2.05 | 6.83% | 8.05% | $30.57 |
| Arts and Entertainment | $1.63 | 12.75% | 5.91% | $26.84 |
Source: WordStream by LocaliQ, 2026 Search Advertising Benchmarks, published 19 May 2026. More than 13,000 US search campaigns across 23 industries, April 2025 through March 2026, reported as medians to limit the effect of outliers. These are planning references, not a forecast of your results. Your own numbers depend on service area, competition, account maturity and what you count as a conversion.
How much budget do you actually need?
Work backwards from a booked job rather than forwards from a number that sounded round. Set a monthly media budget and your own close rate, and this uses the 2026 benchmark for your industry to estimate what that buys.
Cost per click and cost per lead come from the industry you selected above, so change the industry there and this updates with it.
- Clicks 960
- Leads 77
- Customers 19
- Cost per customer $414
An estimate for sizing a conversation, not a forecast. It assumes benchmark performance from day one, which a new account will not deliver in month one, and it ignores seasonality, capacity and the fact that your close rate on paid leads usually differs from your close rate overall. If the cost per customer here is higher than a job is worth to you, that is useful information before you spend anything.
What paid search services does Prager manage?
Google Search, Performance Max, Shopping and feeds, Display and YouTube, Google Local Services Ads, and Microsoft Advertising. All of it is built and run in-house, in accounts you own, with conversion tracking we implement rather than inherit.
The core. Query-level control, match types that still mean something, negatives maintained weekly, and ad copy written against the landing page rather than at it.
Useful where the feed and the signals are strong, dangerous where they are not. We run it with asset group discipline and brand exclusions, not as a place to hide spend.
The feed is the campaign. Titles, attributes and availability decide what you show for, so feed work is usually where the first real gain is found.
For remarketing and for demand that has not reached search yet. Held to a different standard than Search, and never used to flatter a blended cost per lead.
Pay per lead, above every other result, for licensed trades. It has its own verification, disputes and 2026 migration, so it has its own page: Local Services Ads management.
Smaller audience, often cheaper clicks, frequently older and higher income. Worth running once Google is working, rarely worth running instead.
Who should hire a paid search agency?
Our largest vertical, and one of the most expensive: $8.33 a click and $90.92 a lead in 2026. Waste is costly and discipline pays quickly.
Seasonal peaks, emergency intent and after-hours calls. The account has to be built around when your phone is actually answered.
High ticket, high intent, and easy to waste on DIY and parts queries. Negatives matter more here than bids do.
Cheapest clicks in our set at $2.14 and the highest click-through at 9.32%, with remarketing that has to respect seasonality.
How does Prager run a paid search account?
Six stages. Strategy, keyword research, ads and landing pages, tracking, weekly optimization, then reporting. The weekly work is where accounts are won or lost. Strategy set once and left alone is how a good account quietly becomes an expensive one.
- 1StrategyWeeks 1–2
- 2Keyword researchWeeks 1–3
- 3Ads and landing pagesWeeks 2–4
- 4TrackingBefore launch
- 5Optimize and reportWeekly, ongoing
How do you set a paid search strategy?
We start from what a booked job is worth and work backwards. That single number sets the allowable cost per lead, which sets the bidding, which sets which keywords are even worth entering. A program aimed at a $400 service call and one aimed at a $40,000 installation should not share a structure.
Then service area, hours, capacity and seasonality, because an account that generates calls when nobody answers is not a marketing success.
How does keyword research work in paid search?
We map the queries people type when they are ready to hire, the queries that look relevant and burn money, and the queries competitors are buying. Match types, negatives and service-area modifiers do more work than a longer keyword list ever will.
Negative keywords are maintained weekly, not built once. Search terms drift, Google’s matching loosens over time, and an unattended account slowly starts paying for jobs you do not do.
How should ads and landing pages work together?
The ad makes a promise and the page has to keep it in the first screen. A click that lands on a generic homepage is a click you paid for and then wasted. Where the page is the constraint rather than the account, we build it, because development sits in the same building.
How do you track paid search results?
Conversion tracking is implemented, not inherited. Calls, forms, chat and booked appointments, each defined and each verified before launch rather than assumed. Where your data allows it we report cost per booked job, not just cost per lead, through our own analytics stack.
Most underperforming accounts we audit are counting the wrong things. A form view recorded as a conversion will flatter a report and starve the campaigns that actually produce work.
How often do you optimize campaigns?
Weekly at minimum, and daily during a launch or a seasonal peak. Search terms, negatives, bids, budget pacing, ad testing and landing page behavior. This is the part clients cannot see and the part that decides the result.
What does reporting include?
Spend, clicks, cost per click, leads, cost per lead, and where the data supports it, cost per booked job. Plus what changed in the account and why. Reporting is available any day rather than arriving as a PDF once a month, and when a number moves the wrong way it appears with an explanation rather than a smoothing of the axis.
How does Quality Score lower what you pay?
Quality Score is Google’s 1 to 10 estimate of how relevant your ad, keyword and landing page are to a search. Google states plainly that higher quality can lead to lower prices and better ad positions, because Ad Rank combines your bid with quality rather than taking the bid alone. Relevance is a discount you earn rather than a bid you place.
The practical consequence is that two advertisers bidding identically on the same keyword do not pay the same. The one whose ad matches the query and whose landing page delivers what the ad promised will generally pay less per click and sit higher. That is the whole argument for building ads and pages together rather than buying traffic and pointing it at a homepage.
The three components Google names are expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. All three are things you change in the account and on the site, which is precisely why an agency without development access is working with one hand tied.
Whether people are likely to click your ad for this query. Improved by tighter query-to-ad matching, not by louder copy.
How closely the ad matches the intent behind the search. This is where a bloated, unsegmented keyword list quietly costs money.
Relevance, clarity and speed of the page people arrive on. The one component most agencies cannot fix because they do not build the site.
You will find charts online claiming an exact cost-per-click discount for each Quality Score point. Those multipliers come from third-party analyses of account samples, not from Google, and Google has never published a conversion table. We work to improve all three components because the relationship is real and documented. We will not put a number on the discount that we cannot source.
Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising?
Google first, almost always, then Microsoft once Google is working. Google carries the overwhelming majority of search volume. Microsoft reaches a smaller audience at often lower cost, which makes it incremental volume at a discount rather than a substitute.
| Google Ads | Microsoft Advertising | |
|---|---|---|
| Reach | The large majority of US search | A meaningful minority, concentrated on Windows and Edge |
| Typical click cost | Higher, more competitive auctions | Often lower for the same intent |
| Audience skew | Broad | Frequently older and higher income |
| Setup route | Built natively | Import from Google, then rebuild what needs native structure |
| Role in the mix | Demand capture and brand defense | Incremental leads at a discount |
| Where we start | Here, and it becomes the source of truth | After Google is stable and measured |
The mistake worth avoiding is importing from Google and walking away. An import copies structure, not judgement. Match types behave differently, some audience signals do not carry, and the negatives that matter most are frequently the ones that do not survive the transfer.
Why hire Prager over a national PPC mill, a freelancer, or DIY?
Because the account is built in your name by senior people who also build the landing page and own the tracking, from one office, since 2003. A mill gives you a junior buyer behind an account manager. A freelancer gives you one person and a single point of failure. DIY gives you the platform’s defaults, which are optimized for Google’s revenue rather than yours.
| Decision factor | DIY | Freelancer | National mill | Prager |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Who touches the account | You, between other jobs | One person | A junior buyer behind an account manager | Senior staff, in one office |
| Landing pages | Whatever exists | Usually out of scope | Referred out | Built here, same team |
| Conversion tracking | Often inherited or broken | Varies | Templated | Implemented and verified before launch |
| Optimization cadence | When you remember | When they are free | To a checklist | Weekly, daily in a peak |
| Continuity risk | None, but no depth | Single point of failure | Staff churn | A firm since 2003 |
| Who owns the account | You | Usually you | Read the contract | You, outright, with the history |
Founded 2003. We have run paid search through the death of exact match as people understood it, the arrival of Performance Max, and the shift to automated bidding. Every one of those moved money.
Google Ads and Google Analytics Partner with certified staff, and more than $20 million managed each year. Partner status requires certified people and qualifying spend, and it lapses if either stops.
A published address, a live phone number in business hours, a founder who still reviews accounts, and other agencies who hire us white-label through our partnership program.
What does Prager charge to manage paid search?
Management is scoped after a conversation rather than sold as a package, and it is separate from the media budget you pay Google directly. Three things drive it: how much you are spending, how many campaigns and platforms the account needs, and whether landing pages and tracking need building or already work.
An account spending $5,000 a month on one trade in one metro is a different job from $60,000 across four service lines, three states, Shopping and Microsoft. Pricing paid search as a flat package ignores that, and pricing it purely as a percentage of spend creates an incentive we would rather not have, because it pays us more to spend more whether or not that is the right call.
What we will do on the first call is tell you which shape of engagement you need, whether the budget you have in mind can produce a result in your market, and when the honest answer is that the money belongs in the website or in SEO before it belongs in an auction.
Where paid search pays off
- Urgent, high-intent services. Emergency trades, repairs and anything where the buyer is choosing today rather than researching for a month.
- Businesses that answer the phone. The single biggest predictor of whether an account pays, and nothing inside Google Ads can compensate for it.
- Known job value. If you can say what a booked job is worth, we can say what a lead is worth, and everything else follows.
- Capacity to fill. Leads arrive within days of launch, which is a problem if the calendar is already full.
Where we will tell you to wait
- If the budget is too small for your market, paid search will produce data rather than customers. We would rather say so than take the retainer.
- If your website cannot convert the traffic, fix that first. Buying clicks to a page that does not work is the most expensive way to discover it does not work.
- If nobody can answer calls outside business hours in an emergency trade, either change that or expect the account to underperform and blame the ads.
- No agency can guarantee a cost per lead, a position, or a return. Google controls the auction and your market controls the competition. Anyone quoting you a guaranteed CPL before seeing the account is quoting someone else’s average.
Paid search management FAQ
Direct answers, written so a person or an answer engine can quote them without hunting through marketing copy.
What is paid search management?
Paid search management is the planning, building, running and measurement of search advertising on Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising, carried out in an account the advertiser owns. The work covers keyword and audience strategy, ad and landing page structure, bidding, conversion tracking, and the weekly discipline of cutting what does not convert.
How much does paid search cost in 2026?
Across more than 13,000 US search campaigns measured between April 2025 and March 2026, the average cost per click was $5.42, the average click-through rate 6.64%, the average conversion rate 8.18%, and the average cost per lead $66.69. Home and home improvement ran considerably higher at $8.33 per click and $90.92 per lead, while travel averaged $2.14 per click. Cost per lead fell for the first time in five years.
What does Prager charge to manage paid search?
Management is scoped after a conversation rather than sold as a fixed package, and it is separate from the media budget you pay Google directly. Three things drive it: how much you are spending, how many campaigns and platforms the account needs, and whether landing pages and conversion tracking need building or already work. We price this way rather than as a straight percentage of spend, because a percentage pays us more to spend more whether or not that is the right call.
How long does it take for Google Ads to work?
Traffic arrives the day you launch, but the account does not perform on day one. Expect two to four weeks to gather enough conversion data to judge anything, and roughly 90 days before bidding, negatives and landing pages have been through enough cycles to settle. Anyone promising stable performance in week one is describing luck rather than a process.
Do I need Microsoft Advertising if I already run Google Ads?
Not first, and often yes eventually. Google carries the overwhelming majority of US search volume, so it is where an account should start and become the source of truth. Microsoft reaches a smaller audience at frequently lower cost and skews older and higher income, which makes it incremental volume at a discount rather than a substitute. Import from Google to start, then rebuild what needs native structure rather than leaving the import alone.
How does Quality Score affect what I pay?
Quality Score is Google’s 1 to 10 estimate of how relevant your ad, keyword and landing page are to a search. Google states that higher quality can lead to lower prices and better ad positions, because Ad Rank combines your bid with quality rather than using the bid alone. Its three components are expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience. Google has never published a table converting Quality Score into an exact discount, so any chart claiming a precise percentage per point comes from third-party analysis rather than from Google.
Will I own my Google Ads account?
Yes. We build and manage in your account, on your billing, with your data. The account, its history and its conversion data stay with you if the relationship ends. This is the main structural difference between an agency managing paid search and a lead reseller, where the relationship with Google belongs to them and you leave with nothing.
Can you guarantee a cost per lead or a position?
No, and we would treat any such guarantee as a warning sign. Google controls the auction and your competitors control what they bid, so neither is something an agency can promise. What we commit to is a properly structured account, conversion tracking we implement and verify, weekly optimization, and reporting that shows the numbers moving in both directions.
Should I run paid search or SEO?
Both, in most cases, for different reasons. Paid search produces leads this week and stops the day the budget stops. SEO is slower and compounds, and it is usually the cheapest qualified visit available over any horizon longer than a quarter. If you can only fund one and you need work now, paid search is the honest answer. If the phone is steady and you are planning for next year, SEO is.
What do you need from me to start?
Access to your existing Google Ads and analytics accounts if they exist, a sense of what a booked job is worth, your real service area and hours, and someone who can approve landing page changes. The job value matters most. Without it, every bidding decision is a guess dressed up as a strategy.
Do you manage Google Local Services Ads too?
Yes, and it is a separate discipline with its own verification, lead disputes and pay-per-lead billing, plus the 2026 migration into Google Ads that is underway now. Because it works differently from standard paid search, it has its own page covering screening, disputes, ranking factors and the migration timeline.
Do you work with businesses outside Pennsylvania?
Yes. The office is in Collegeville, just outside Philadelphia, and that is home base. We manage paid search accounts for clients nationally, and local clients are welcome to visit, which most agencies cannot offer without booking a coworking space.
Sources cited on this page
- WordStream by LocaliQ, 2026 Search Advertising Benchmarks, published 19 May 2026. More than 13,000 US search campaigns across 23 industries, April 2025 through March 2026, reported as medians. Cross-industry averages: $5.42 cost per click, 6.64% click-through rate, 8.18% conversion rate, $66.69 cost per lead.
- WordStream by LocaliQ, same report: highest cost per click in Attorneys and Legal Services at $9.87, lowest in Arts and Entertainment at $1.63; home and home improvement at $8.33 and $90.92; travel at $2.14 and 9.32%. Cost per lead declined year over year for the first time in five years.
- Google Ads Help, documentation on Quality Score and Ad Rank, including the three components expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience, and the statement that higher quality can lead to lower prices and better ad positions.
- Prager Microsystems operating figures: founded 2003, Collegeville, Pennsylvania; Google Ads and Google Analytics Partner; more than $20 million in paid search managed annually across Google Ads and Microsoft Advertising.
Let’s talk about the account, not a pitch deck
Give us read access and thirty minutes. We will tell you what the account is actually doing, what it would take to fix, and whether the money belongs in the auction at all this quarter.
Prager Microsystems, Inc. · 3819 Germantown Pike, Suite A, Collegeville, PA 19426 · Monday to Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Eastern
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