What Google Ads actually costs in pet care
Nobody publishes real numbers for this industry, so owners get quoted a budget with no way to sanity check it. Here is what Google itself reports advertisers are bidding, pulled straight from the Keyword Planner API.
The numbers
Every figure below is the top-of-page bid range Google reports for that search term in the United States, alongside its average monthly search volume. This is what it costs to compete for the top of the page, not what you will necessarily pay.
| Search term | Searches/mo | Competition | Low bid | High bid |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| dog grooming near me | 450,000 | Medium | $0.95 | $4.01 |
| groomers near me | 246,000 | Medium | $0.95 | $4.23 |
| dog boarding near me | 201,000 | Medium | $2.24 | $9.00 |
| dog training near me | 110,000 | High | $1.67 | $9.46 |
| dog boarding | 110,000 | Medium | $2.38 | $8.95 |
| animal daycare near me | 90,500 | Medium | $1.49 | $6.17 |
| dog daycare near me | 74,000 | Medium | $1.64 | $6.54 |
Across 3,762 pet-care search terms with bid data, the average low bid was $1.49 and the average high bid $6.37.
What this tells you
Boarding costs roughly twice what grooming costs. A boarding click runs $2.24 to $9.00 while grooming runs $0.95 to $4.01. That makes sense once you look at the value of the booking. A grooming appointment is $60 to $90. A week of boarding is several hundred. Advertisers bid up to what the job is worth.
Training is the most expensive click in pet care, up to $9.46, and the only category Google flags as High competition. Board-and-train programmes sell for thousands, so the bidding is fierce.
Grooming has the most search volume by a wide margin, 450,000 a month for "dog grooming near me" against 201,000 for boarding. If you offer grooming and are not advertising it, you are ignoring the largest pool of demand you have access to.
What a budget actually buys
Take a $4.50 blended click, roughly the midpoint across pet care, and a 5 to 10% enquiry rate, which is a normal range for a local service page that loads quickly and has an obvious way to get in touch.
| Monthly spend | Clicks | Enquiries | Assumption |
|---|---|---|---|
| $500 | ~110 | ~5 to 11 | at a $4.50 blended click and a 5 to 10% enquiry rate |
| $1,000 | ~220 | ~11 to 22 | the range most single-location facilities land in |
| $2,500 | ~555 | ~28 to 55 | usually needs more than one service line to absorb |
Work out what an enquiry is worth to you before you set a budget. If a boarding client stays four times a year at $300, that first enquiry is worth well over a thousand dollars in lifetime terms, and a $60 cost per enquiry is cheap. If you are buying one-off grooming appointments at $70, it is not.
Three things that waste this money
Sending clicks to a homepage. Someone searching "dog boarding near me" should land on a page about boarding, with prices or at least a price range, and a way to book. Not a homepage carousel.
No negative keywords. Without them you pay for "dog boarding jobs", "how to start a dog boarding business", "free dog boarding" and every student writing a business plan. This is the single most common leak we see.
No call tracking. Most pet care enquiries are phone calls. If you are not tracking which calls came from ads you are judging the campaign on form fills alone and will almost certainly conclude it does not work.
Method
Figures were pulled from the Google Ads Keyword Planner API in August 2026, targeting the United States in English, Google Search network only. We seeded ten consumer-side pet care terms and collected 5,406 related keywords with their average monthly search volume, competition rating and top-of-page bid range.
Read these numbers carefully
- Bid ranges are what Google reports advertisers bidding for top-of-page placement. They are not your cost per click, which depends on quality score, competition in your specific area, and how you bid.
- Search volumes are national. Your local market is a fraction of these totals.
- Keyword Planner rounds volumes into buckets, so treat them as scale rather than precision.
- The "competition" rating is advertiser competition for paid clicks. It says nothing about how hard a term is to rank for organically.
- The click and enquiry maths uses illustrative rates. Your own numbers will differ, and you should replace them as soon as you have real ones.
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