How much should a tattoo shop spend on Google Ads?

The honest answer is that your budget is set by two numbers you already know and one you can measure in a month. Nothing else should drive it.

The two numbers you know

The first is what a booked session is worth to you. Not the price of the tattoo - the margin you keep, after the artist’s cut, supplies, and the chair time it consumed.

The second is how many of the people who contact you actually book. If ten enquiries produce four bookings, your close rate is 40%. Write it down; most shops overestimate it substantially.

The number you have to measure

Cost per click is what the market charges for attention on your terms, and it varies enormously between a major city and a smaller market. You cannot know it in advance. You can only buy a small sample and read it, which is why the first month of any campaign is research, not performance.

Doing the arithmetic

Suppose a session is worth $300 to you and you close 40% of enquiries. Each enquiry is worth $120 in expectation. If your ads convert one enquiry per eight clicks, a click is worth $15 to you. At that point you can say something concrete: as long as clicks cost less than about $15, the campaign is working, and you set the budget by deciding how many booked sessions a month you actually want.

Want four more sessions a month from ads? You need ten enquiries, which is roughly eighty clicks, which is whatever eighty clicks cost in your city. That is your media budget. The management fee sits on top of it and does not change with the number.

Why the percentage-of-spend model is a problem

If an agency bills 20% of your ad spend, their revenue rises when your spend rises, whether or not the money is producing booked chairs. It also makes “increase the budget” the answer to almost every question, which is a very convenient recommendation when you are paid a share of the budget.

We charge a flat fee and you hold the ad account, because it lets us say “spend less” without taking a pay cut.

A realistic starting point

Start smaller than you want to. A budget that buys roughly ten to twenty clicks a day on your highest-intent terms, held for a full month before you judge it, will tell you more than a large budget held for a week. Judge it on booked sessions, not on clicks, impressions, or the agency’s dashboard.

One thing to fix first

If your site cannot take a deposit or answer a basic question without a phone call, do not buy traffic to it yet. Advertising amplifies whatever your conversion path already does. If it leaks, you will simply pay to leak faster.