Are Google Ads Worth It?
Yes in the long term, but it won’t always feel like it in the short term.
Note: I am not affiliated with Google in any way. There are no affiliate links in this post.
Since becoming a full time tutor, I’ve dabbled with Google Ads. I’ll be honest: it’s not the first growth lever I go to when lead flow has slowed down. But I do think Google Ads can be valuable as long as you’re aware of some of the challenges going in:
Google Ads aren’t cheap for keywords that include the words “tutor” or “tutoring”
Take a look at the image below, taken from Google’s Keyword Planner tool, that shows the # of monthly searches and the $ range you can expect to bid for various tutoring keywords:
A couple things to note:
A bid is the maximum amount you’re willing to pay per click.
Google reports these numbers in terms of the $ bid range that it takes for your ad to display at the top of the page of Google search results. For example, a math tutor should expect to bid between $3.27 and $13.74 to show up as one of the 3-4 ads that display above the first organic (unpaid) search result. So can you bid less and have your ad display at the bottom of the page? Yes, but you’ll get way fewer views and clicks on your ad.
Test prep tutors can expect to pay considerably more than subject tutors. Whereas an English tutor can bid $2 - $5 for a click, ACT and SAT tutors will often need to pay over $10 per click.
It takes time and money to be able to tell whether your ads are working or not
One of the most common mistakes people make when starting out in Google Ads is they give up too early. They get a few expensive clicks on their ads, panic because they haven’t picked up any new students yet, and abandon Google Ads entirely.
You’re not going to convert every click into a student. In fact, the vast majority of clicks will not turn into students. But don’t give up too early on what might be a great ad!
The good news is, Google has an ongoing promotion for new Google Ads users where they’ll match the first $150 you spend. So I recommend if you’re going to open a new Google Ads account, commit to spending at least $150 for $300 worth of clicks.
Google also doesn’t charge you as soon as one of your ads is clicked. If it did, it would have to run tons of small transactions, racking up credit card fees in the process. Instead, they start you off with a $350 threshold, and only charge you monthly unless you hit that threshold:
So assuming you’re using a credit card to pay Google, you actually have more like 60+ days to recoup the $150 you spend on your first batch of clicks.
Google rewards advertisers who create ads relevant to the keywords people are searching
Google knows that showing ads at the top of the page is an obstacle for their users who are trying to get to the organic search results. Those ads are much less annoying if they’re at least relevant to the keywords they’re searching. So Google rewards ads that have a high click-through rate (CTR) with a lower cost per click (CPC). They figure that if people are clicking on the ad, it’s more relevant and thus people won’t be as bothered by it.
Since your bid is the maximum CPC you’re willing to spend, you’ll often end up spending less than that in reality. Take for example this forecast for the keyword ‘math tutor’:
Even if you put $4 as your maximum CPC bid so that you can show up at the top of search results for ‘math tutor,’ you’ll likely spend closer to $2.62 per click as long as you have an ad that convinces searchers to click.
Note that the $7.8k is the maximum you’d be able to pay in a month for that keyword: in reality, you'd set your budget much lower than $7,000/month to limit the # of clicks you get.
Since clicks can be expensive, make sure to exclude searchers who don’t fit your target audience
Otherwise, you’ll end up quickly spending lots of $ on people who are searching for “tutoring jobs,” “tutor salary,” and "tutor openings.” Those are clearly people looking to become tutors, not searching for a tutor themselves.
To do this, set up “negative keywords,” so that if a search includes certain keywords your ads won’t display and you won’t get charged for clicks (note this list is just an example and is far from exhaustive):
All in, I’ve made far more money from students I’ve found through Google Ads than I’ve spent on the ads
And that’s in the incredibly expensive niche of LSAT tutoring where bids need to be between $7 and $30 per click 😑. So while it’s scary to invest the time and money upfront for an uncertain reward, I encourage anyone who does independent tutoring to at least experiment with Google Ads.