TLDR: Google Ads still delivers some of the highest-intent traffic in digital marketing, but it’s no longer the guaranteed win it was five or ten years ago. Costs have risen, branding is harder to achieve, and DIY campaigns tend to underperform without the right expertise behind them.
Are Google Ads worth it for brands and agencies in 2026? The short answer is yes, but with caveats. Search intent is still unmatched. When someone types “dance schools near me” or “black loafers”, they’re already looking to buy or book, and that’s something no other channel replicates in quite the same way. The longer answer is that Google Ads has changed.
The Pros and Cons of Google Ads
The pros
High intent, every time
Google Ads lets you bid on keywords tied directly to what someone is actively searching for. If someone’s looking for your product or service right now, you can be the ad they see. That level of intent is hard to match on other platforms.
Access to every stage of the funnel
Performance Max campaigns mean you’re no longer limited to bottom-of-funnel keyword bidding. Brands with smaller budgets can now reach people on YouTube, YouTube Shorts and display placements, all from within the same campaign structure that used to require separate budgets entirely.
Smarter bidding, real-time
Machine learning has transformed how Google Ads bids. Overlay the right audiences, age brackets and locations, and the platform will bid in real time for the users most likely to convert or drive revenue, rather than spreading budget evenly across everyone who searches.
Shopping listings that do the selling for you
For ecommerce brands, Google Shopping is a genuine advantage. Product images, pricing, promotions and delivery information all show up before a click even happens, which shortens the path to purchase.
The cons
It’s more expensive than it used to be
Google increases CPCs year on year as competition grows, and that’s before you factor in how competitive your specific market is. Getting a click is one thing; making that click worthwhile is another.
Branding is harder to achieve
Google Ads is built for direct response, not storytelling. If you’re an aesthetic-led brand selling fashion or homeware, platforms like Meta and TikTok let you show your product in context, tell a brand story and lean on visuals and reviews in a way that Google Ads simply isn’t built for. On Google, you’re largely relying on ad copy: your offer, your price, your delivery terms.
Even bidding on your own brand name costs more now
It’s rare to run an auction insights report and find nobody else bidding on your brand term. That competition inflates cost, even for the traffic that should, in theory, be the cheapest you’ll ever buy.
Your landing page has to do its job
High-intent traffic still needs somewhere good to land. A form with too many steps, a product page showing only one option when the shopper wants to compare, or a landing page that doesn’t match the ad copy will all push people to bounce, and you’ve already paid for that click. CRO and landing page relevance aren’t optional extras, they’re part of what makes Google Ads work.
How much do Google Ads cost?
Cost per click depends on several factors working together:
- Competition in your market. A fashion brand will typically face far higher competition, and therefore higher CPCs, than a niche service like waste management.
- How much you’re willing to bid. Your target ROAS and product margins determine how aggressively you can afford to bid, and Google rewards advertisers who are willing to pay more for the clicks they want.
- Quality Score. If your ad copy or landing page isn’t relevant to the search term, Google effectively penalises you with a lower Quality Score, and you’ll pay more per click as a result. Relevant, well-matched ads and landing pages are rewarded with lower costs.
- Keyword type. Brand keywords are usually the cheapest, since your ad copy and website already align closely with the search term. That said, brand CPCs that used to sit below 10p are now considerably higher, simply because competitors are increasingly willing to bid on your brand name too.
- Audience signals. The more likely a user is to convert based on the audience data Google holds on them, the more Google will charge to win that click. Two people searching for near-identical terms can generate very different CPCs depending on how likely each one is to buy.
Without historical account data, forecasting an exact figure is genuinely difficult. Benchmarking tools such as WordStream, alongside Google’s own Keyword Planner, are a useful starting point for estimating first-page bids and industry averages, but treat them as a guide rather than a guarantee.
Can you do Google Ads yourself?
Technically, yes. Google makes it easy to set up a campaign in minutes. Whether that campaign performs well is a different question entirely.
The most common issues we see when someone runs Google Ads without agency expertise behind them include:
- Broad targeting by default. Without knowing how to set location parameters properly, campaigns often end up targeting an entire country instead of the specific area that matters.
- No conversion tracking. Selecting “sales” as a campaign objective without a tracking pixel in place means there’s no way to really measure what’s working.
- Over-reliance on broad match keywords. Without close monitoring of search query reports, broad match keywords can pull in irrelevant, paid-for traffic that has nothing to do with the product or service on offer.
- No ad testing. Running with a single ad, rather than testing multiple variations, leaves performance improvements on the table.
- Accepting Google’s recommendations by default. Google’s in-platform recommendations aren’t always in your best interest. Many are designed to increase spend rather than improve results and accepting them without scrutiny can quietly inflate a budget without improving performance.
- Ad groups that lose relevance over time. Keywords can end up sitting in the wrong ad group entirely, which further muddies targeting and wastes spend.
None of this means Google Ads is out of reach without an agency. Basic campaigns, once you understand the fundamentals, are relatively straightforward to manage; Modo25 offers training for exactly this reason. But running Google Ads well tends to require the kind of day-to-day, hands-on experience that comes from managing accounts through multiple algorithm changes, bidding strategy updates and shifting best practices, something that’s hard to build alongside running the rest of a business.
So, are Google Ads worth it?
Yes, with the right expectations. Google Ads still captures some of the highest-intent traffic available anywhere in digital marketing, and tools like Performance Max mean even smaller budgets can now reach people across the funnel, not just at the bottom. But it isn’t the guaranteed, low-cost win it was a decade ago.
If you’ve got the budget, the landing page experience to match, and either the in-house expertise or the right agency partner to manage it properly, Google Ads earns its place in the marketing mix.
Want a second opinion on whether Google Ads is working as hard as it should be for your budget? Get in touch with our paid media team and we’ll show you where the gaps are.
