Paid search cost
You are already buying this. The only honest question is what a layer on top costs.
You cannot fund a paid searchcampaign here today. No buying rail has reached spend-tested or report-verified on the platform’s own evidence ledger, so live spend runs inside a design-partner engagement rather than from a self-serve top-up. Everything on this page is what a plan would carry, and the whole loop runs in a sandbox that needs no credentials. All 25 rails, graded.
What we enforce, and what the market asks
They measure different things and both apply. One stops a pointless line surviving into a plan; the other stops a pointless campaign reaching air.
Enforced when the plan is built. A line that cannot clear this is dropped and its budget redistributed across the lines that can, with a note saying so. Manual plans are validated against the same number.
No media minimum. Agency management from £500 to £1,000 a month minimum.
What other sellers ask for. Not a commitment by anyone, dated because these move, and sourced at the foot of this page.
How this channel is actually priced
Cost per click, set at auction against everyone else bidding on the same query. What moves it: how commercially valuable the query is, how relevant your landing page is judged to be, and how many competitors want the same click.
The smallest buy worth making
Enough to accumulate clicks in a fortnight, which in a competitive B2B category might be £2,000 and in a niche one £300. The floor here is £100 because a search line inside a multi-channel plan can be genuinely small and still useful as a demand-capture layer under a brand campaign.
What else leaves your account
Everyone publishes a cost per click. Almost nobody publishes the management fee, the landing-page work and the data uplift that sit beside it, which is where a search budget actually goes wrong.
Management
Whatever you pay someone to run it. The comparison above is the point of this page: a 10% platform fee against a 15% to 20% agency fee with a £500 to £1,000 minimum.
Landing pages
The largest hidden cost in search, and not one anybody invoices you for. A campaign pointed at a page that does not convert is spend rather than marketing.
That the layer is usually not worth paying for on search alone. This page exists to say so: the argument for AdBuyMCP is deduplicating search against six other channels, not running search better than you already do.
Below about £10,000 a month in total media, this is the wrong product. A 10% fee on £2,000 is £200 against the buyer who needs the most support from us, and a multi-channel plan at that budget is too thin to pace on any line and far too thin to power a causal test. Buy search and social directly, and come back when there is a second channel worth funding.
What the rest of the plan costs
- CTV£140 per week
- Addressable TV£1,000 per line
- Audio£250 per line
- DOOH£100 per line
- Cinema£500 per week
- Paid social£250 per line
Where the market figures come from
Desk research dated 3 August 2026. Rates move.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live. Bring a real budget and watch it split across seven channels against these floors — including the lines it cannot carry, which get dropped in front of you.
Talk it throughBring a budget. We will tell you if it is too small.
45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live.
Book a working session45 minutes. Bring a real brief and we compile it live.
Questions about paid search cost
Should I pay a platform fee on search at all?
If search is your only channel, no. Google and Microsoft both provide free management interfaces and a percentage on top buys you nothing you cannot do yourself. The case for paying a layer starts when search is one of three or more channels and you need the audience deduplicated across them, the fee waterfall in one place, and a causal test that spans all of it rather than per-channel attribution that double-counts.