Google Ads spend benchmarks — should you raise your budget?

Jakub Pytlik | September 23, 2026 | 5 min read

What the new report shows

In September 2026, Google Ads started showing the Spend benchmarks report in the account overview. It contains two numbers: how much you spend on ads per week and how many clicks you get — and next to them, the same numbers for businesses Google considers similar to yours.

In an example described by the industry site Search Engine Roundtable, an account spent €284 in a week with 912 clicks, while “similar businesses” spent €268 with 765 clicks. Google says it picks the comparison group based on your industry and the locations where you advertise. What it doesn't say is how many businesses are in that group or what exactly “similar” means.

The report is rolling out gradually, so you may not see it in your account yet.

Source: Search Engine Roundtable, September 16, 2026.

What the report can't see

Two businesses in the same industry can be in completely different situations. A store with a 60% margin and a store with a 15% margin can spend the same amount — and one will be making money on it while the other is losing money. The report can't tell them apart, because it doesn't know:

• your margin, meaning how much you keep from each sale.
• how many clicks end in a purchase or an inquiry.
• your average order value.
• your strategy — maybe you spend less on purpose because you have limited production capacity or a small warehouse.

You also don't know whether this spending pays off for the “similar businesses.” Higher spending by competitors could just as well mean someone is wasting their budget. And one more thing: the report is prepared by Google, the company that makes money from your ad spend. A comparison with others is easy to read as a signal that says “you're spending too little.”

What the report is actually useful for

Still, I wouldn't write it off. It's mainly useful when something changes and you want to know whether it's just your account or the whole market. The report shows the current week, so to see a change, check it regularly and compare one week with the next. It'll also show you whether you're overpaying for clicks.

• Your clicks dropped, and so did the clicks of “similar businesses” — that's more likely seasonality or a market shift than a mistake in your campaign.
• Your clicks dropped, but the group's didn't — that's a signal to look into your account: budgets, bidding strategies, disapproved ads, how your website is working.
• You pay noticeably more per click than the group (just divide spend by the number of clicks) — it's worth checking whether you're paying for sensible search terms and what your Quality Score is. I wrote about it in my article on Quality Score.

If you want to know how much a click and a new customer usually cost in your industry, take a look at the overview of average CPC and CPA in Google Ads. It's a better starting point than comparing spend alone.

4 questions before you raise your budget

Instead of looking at how much others spend, answer four questions about your own account:

1. Does your account track sales or inquiries correctly? If not, every budget decision is based on bad data. I explain how to check this in my article on conversions.
2. Are your ads already paying off? Calculate the most you can pay for one sale and still break even. For an online store, the easiest way to check this is return on ad spend (ROAS): your minimum ROAS is 1 divided by your margin — with a 25% margin, every 1 PLN you spend on ads has to bring in at least 4 PLN in revenue. More here: what ROAS is and how to calculate it. For services, you calculate it differently: how much you can pay for one inquiry from a customer, given that only some inquiries turn into paid jobs — I covered this in my article on how many clicks it takes to get a customer.
3. Is your campaign limited by budget? Google shows this in the interface next to the campaign. If it isn't, a bigger budget won't change much, because right now you aren't spending your whole budget anyway.
4. What share of impressions are you losing because your budget is too small? This complements the previous question: the status only says “yes or no,” while the column for impression share lost due to budget shows what percentage of possible impressions you missed because the money ran out. A high value means people are still searching for what you offer and you're not reaching them.

If all four answers check out — your account tracks sales correctly, your ads pay off, your campaign is short on budget and you're losing impressions because of it — raising your budget makes sense. I explain how to do it safely, step by step, in my article on when to increase your Google Ads budget.

About the sources: The report was described by Search Engine Roundtable (September 16, 2026), and it was also covered by Search Engine Watch and Relevant Audience. Google hasn't yet published a separate help page about this report, so my description of how the comparison group is chosen follows these sources, which cite the report's own text. The ROAS break-even formula is a standard margin calculation.