What PPC costs in Prague in 2026 — and how to work out your own ceiling

The question "what does PPC cost" has two halves, and most answers online blend them into one. The first half is the media budget — money that goes straight to Google, Seznam or Meta. The second is the management fee — money for whoever builds and watches the campaigns. Added together they produce a number you cannot work with.

Let us take them apart. And at the end, the formula for your own ceiling, because that is the only figure that matters.

Cost per click in Czechia

An honest caveat first: no neutral source publishes an average cost per click in Czech koruna for this market. Google does not release country-level data, and international benchmarks are largely American and unrealistic once converted. The figures below come from public breakdowns by Czech PPC specialists — treat them as orientation, not fact.

The spread is tenfold, and that is the point of the table: cost per click is a property of your industry, not of Google Ads. In Prague it runs higher than in the rest of the country simply because more companies sit in the auction.

What to budget monthly

Publicly available guidance for the Czech market looks roughly like this:

• Testing phase: 5,000–8,000 CZK per month
• A budget you can actually optimise on: 10,000–15,000 CZK
• E-shops: from 20,000 CZK
• A local business with one location: 5,000–12,000 CZK

Why starting below five thousand makes no sense: at 25 CZK per click, that budget buys two hundred clicks a month. Those might produce five enquiries. Five enquiries cannot be evaluated — that is statistical noise, not data. A campaign without data has nothing to learn from, and the algorithm stays dumb all month.

How agencies charge

Two common models:

A fixed monthly fee. From public overviews: a freelancer from 10,000 CZK, a senior specialist or small agency 15,000–30,000 CZK, a large agency 25,000–70,000 CZK and up.

A percentage of spend, typically 10–20%. It looks fair but carries a built-in conflict of interest: the more you spend, the more the agency earns. Nobody on this model will ever tell you to switch a channel off.

A third option worth discussing on small budgets: a fixed fee plus a performance component tied to an agreed metric. The base covers the work; the bonus you pay only for results.

A practical rule: if management costs more than the media budget, something is wrong. Either the budget is too small for the advertising to pay off, or you are paying for work that a budget this size does not require.

The formula that beats every benchmark

Every figure above belongs to someone else. Yours is calculated like this:

1. Average order value. What one new customer brings you on average. Not the best deal of the year — the average.
2. Margin. What is left after costs.
3. Enquiry-to-sale conversion. Out of ten people who write or call, how many buy.
4. The share of margin you will give to marketing. Usually 10–30%.

Then: maximum cost per lead = (margin × marketing share) × conversion rate.

An example. Order value 20,000 CZK, margin 40% — that is 8,000 CZK. You give marketing 20%, so 1,600 CZK per deal. You close three enquiries out of ten, a 30% conversion. The maximum cost per lead comes to 480 CZK.

Now work backwards: at 25 CZK per click and a 3% website conversion rate, one enquiry costs about 830 CZK. That is above your ceiling — which means the problem is not the click price but the website. Lifting conversion from 3% to 6% is cheaper and faster than hunting for cheaper clicks.

This is exactly why we never set the budget as the first step. First we calculate the ceiling, then we look for a channel that fits inside it.

What to ask a supplier

• What is my maximum cost per lead, and how did you arrive at it?
• How much of the budget goes to testing, and how long will the testing phase run?
• Whose name will the ad accounts be in?
• What exactly happens if we do not reach the target cost per lead within three months?

The last question is the important one. "We will optimise" is not an answer.

In short: cost per click is a property of the industry, not the agency. A budget under 5,000 CZK a month buys clicks but not data. And the one number you need before anybody else's price list is your own maximum cost per lead.

Sources: Martin Kovalčík · Skillminers · jakmy.cz