The Incredible Cost of a Click in WNY

Some house painting keywords in Buffalo New York now exceed $75 per click! Many local service businesses use Google ads as a way to buy their way to the top of the search results for consideration by potential clients. Over the last 5 years, the cost to be at the top has become increasingly expensive for many.

Source: Google Ads
March 2026

This post is about my personal experience of the increasing cost to advertise Carrigan Painting on Google Ads.

How do Google Ads work?
Companies, use keywords and will set daily budget limits to bid on these keywords in a very complex auction, which is as transparent as a bathroom window. Suffice to say we can set some controls on how much we are willing to spend, on a specific click tied to a specific keyword tied to a specific location at a specific time to a specific audience.

What is a keyword?
Keywords are short phrases people use to find information on search engines. Examples of a keyword is; interior painting, drywall repair near me, exterior painting Buffalo NY, and any word or phrase with ‘near me’. Adding “near me” to the end, can double or triple the cost of a particular keyword. Water related keywords, like water damage repair near me, can be exceptionally expensive.

Observed Keyword Costs in Western New York

I have seen costs exceeding $100.00 per click. Not per lead, not per phone call, but just the click! That can get stupid expensive incredibly fast. At $100 per click, 20 clicks is $2,000, before a single call. That’s not per lead cost. That’s just website traffic.

Source: Google Keyword Planner
March 2026

What is a branded keyword?
A branded keyword is a search term that includes a specific company’s name or brand. For example, Carrigan Painting, Home Depot, or Behr would all be considered branded keywords. These are different from general keywords like interior painting or drywall repair, because they indicate the user is specifically searching for a particular company rather than the service itself.

What is a click?
When you tap or click an advertisement on the Google search results page, each time you click on an ad, that advertiser is being charged real money. The list of blue links further down the page, are free to click on. Organic results are free, ads are not.

What Drives the Cost of Clicks?
The more businesses advertising on Google, the more it costs. There are ways to help limit the cost per click(CPC), such as search intent, bounce rate, click through rate, “phrase match”, [exact match] ect. At the end of the day, the more companies bidding on a particular keyword, the higher the cost. Also, some companies decide they’re willing to pay $20, $40, $60+ for a click, and therefore drive the price through the roof.

How to Lower the Cost of a Click?
There are ways to lower the individual’s cost per click, like how closely does the landing page of that ad match, search intent, bounce rate, click through rate, phrase match, quality score, ect. But at the end of the day, Google sets a minimum bid threshold based on hundreds of metrics, which effectively acts as a floor price.

Third Party Management

Most marketing companies, offer PPC services (Pay Per Click) where they will manage your ad campaigns for you, for varying degrees of cost. Companies can expect to pay fees anywhere from $300 per month to thousands, plus the cost of the ads, the sky is the limit. Google ads, can be quite intimidating for the novice.

The Google Ads dashboard, on desktop, they never make it easier for the end user, they purposely make it more difficult to navigate the interface. Even the Reps don’t like the new format. They do that because contrary to popular belief, Google is not end user friendly on the back end.

The Gap Between Perception and Reality

Below are some examples of what Google is reporting as the cost per click for the following keywords. These prices are insane.

Source: Google Ads
March 2026

Now granted, the more people bidding on the keyword, the higher the cost of a click, but $50? That is just the click! If you decide to try a different contractor, or you mistakenly clicked the wrong one, that company is still on the hook for that $50! WOW! Ouch! No thank you! Hard Pass!

Google Ad Reps

When you spend thousands of dollars on Google Ads, you then begin getting pestered by 3rd party companies out of India, which Google contracts with to “help” you. The help they offer- you have to be careful, at the end of the day, their goal is to get you to spend more money. Helping your business grow, and do better is a distant second.

Every quarter you get a new Rep. The claim that they will only take 10-15 minutes of your time, is a lie. I have yet to spend only 15 minutes on the phone with them, in the last 6 years. My average call, is over an hour. Also, English, is not their first language, so there can be somewhat of a language barrier. For people new to G-Ads, they can be helpful, especially when it comes to the Google Tags, which can be incredibly difficult to get to work.

100+ painting companies in WNY

There are more than 100 painting companies in Western New York. There simply isn’t enough paint work to support that many painting contractors. That’s why most established companies specialize in something other than basic painting. As far as I know, we’re the only company in WNY focusing on drywall, plaster, and ceiling repair. Everyone else seems to pivot elsewhere: flooring (how do you go from painting to flooring?!), cabinet refinishing, roof painting, epoxy coatings, countertops… and some companies jump straight into big-ticket work like remodeling and additions.

Google Keyword Planner
Match 2025 – February 2026

Becoming a painter isn’t always a choice, it’s often a fallback. Many mistakenly assume running a legitimate painting business in New York is easy. It’s not. The real cost of operating a professional painting company goes far beyond brushes and paint. While it may “just be painting” on the surface, the nuances, overhead, and skill involved are substantial. Do your homework before you hire a company.

Personal Experience

Early in my Google Ads experience, I hired a freelancer off Fiverr who, without my knowledge, targeted a competitor. That competitor called me, suffice to say he wasn’t too happy. I felt about two inches tall. Lesson learned: hands-on oversight is non-negotiable.

Since then, I’ve handled all of our advertising personally. Because of this, I regularly monitor search demand for painting-related services across Western New York. These search trends provide a useful indicator of overall market activity.

Branded keyword search demand in WNY decreased by 36% from November 2025 – January 2026
Source: Google Keyword Planner

But because we all still have bills to pay, many painters, pivoted into our subsection- ceiling repair, drywall repair and plaster repair. When the painting dries up, everyone becomes an expert at ceiling repair!

We saw our costs for our keywords, more than double in the last 4 months due to all the new competition from other painting companies looking for work. Spoiler alert: Most painters know how to patch drywall with varying degrees of success. Very few contractors still repair plaster using traditional methods. As far as I know, we are the only painting company specializing in ceiling repair in WNY, and we provide the documentation to back it up.

The Impact of Competitor Bidding

When demand for painting slows down, sometimes companies move beyond bidding on service keywords and start bidding on competitor names. That changes the equation. A search for a specific company, can trigger multiple competitor ads above the organic business listing. The outcome of that search depends on which result gets clicked.

We’ve tracked this directly in our own data through Google. Historically, our branded keyword averaged around $0.89 per click. In early 2026, that number exceeded $14. The variable that changed wasn’t our business. It was the number of competitors bidding on our branded keyword.

Source: Google Ads
January 2026

Not all competitors appear in this report, some run separate campaigns or target different auctions. This is typical in competitive branded keyword bidding.

When a competitor bids on branded keywords, their ad shows up above the intended organic result, and because most people click the first result, instead of landing on the intended company website, they end up on a 3rd party website. In a branded search, the user intent is typically navigational, meaning they are trying to reach a specific company. After all your searching by name.

There is really nothing we can do, except to ask nicely for them to stop. Doesn’t always work. This strategy depends on top-of-page placement, where a significant portion of users click the first available result without distinguishing between paid and organic listings.

Since November 2025, I have been asked a few times by perspective clients if Carrigan Painting had merged with another local painting company. No, we did not. This confusion appears to stem from sponsored results appearing above our organic listing when clients search for our name.

Examples:

Google Search
March 2026

Fact Check: Is This Intentional?
I asked AI to verify whether competitors could appear for my exact branded search [Carrigan Painting] if they were only targeting generic painting keywords. Here’s the response:

“Any advertiser appearing above your organic listing in that search is intentionally bidding on your branded keyword. Broad match or generic keywords cannot trigger this exact-match display.”

Our focus is on clients actively searching for our services.

It should be noted that bidding on branded names in Google Ads is not against the Terms of Service with Google. There are legitimate reasons to bid on branded names. For instance Behr might bid on Home Depot so their products show up for associated searches. Happens every day all over the world. Its just a market observation we have made this year, that we haven’t had to deal with in the past.

Conclusion

Who knew the WNY painting market was so competitive or expensive to operate in! With the introduction of AI, and the ever changing ground under which online advertising is built, its hard to get a foot hold with out spending thousands of dollars or thousands of hours.

As difficult as it is to hire a contractor to work on your home, its equally difficult, if not more so, to find a marketing company to work with, after all this is our livelihood. Dealing with Google Ads over the years has certainly been a learning experience!

Practical Considerations

When searching online, always make sure that the link your clicking/tapping on, is the one you want. As you can see, just because you search for a company by name, even with search modifiers- ” ” (phrase match) or [ ] (exact match), doesn’t necessarily mean, that company will be the first result!

At the end of the day, the only real clear winner here is Google, who makes their money on the click.

Disclaimer: This article shares our direct experiences with Google Ads in the Western New York house painting market as of April 2026. Branded keyword bidding is a common industry practice permitted by Google. Costs and results vary. The views and screenshots are for educational purposes and reflect our observations only. This is not intended as legal, financial, or professional advice.