What Google Advertising Actually Costs

CAQ spends about $1.65 a day on Google advertising. Over a typical week, that's about $12. Roughly the cost of a burger.

These funds pay for banner ads on the Google Display Network. Not search results. Display ads are the visual banners sitting on the edge of other people's websites and apps, while you're reading something else entirely.

The ads appear on sites people already read and visit. Recent placements include yahoo.com, nine.com.au, 7news.com.au, theguardian.com, smh.com.au, and foxsports.com.au. They also turn up in mobile apps such as Wordscapes and a game called BlockSaga.

The goal is to keep CAQ and its news stories visible to the public. It isn't designed to find new players or get them to a Come & Try session. That job belongs to a separate system: Facebook ads directed to comeandtrycroquet.com.au.

There's a second audience: CAQ's own members. Visit news.croquetqld.org and Google remembers you were there, which is what lets these ads follow readers back to the sites they already use. So when a member sees croquet turn up on yahoo.com or theguardian.com, it's their own club or a match result they might already know about, sitting somewhere respectable. That matters as much as reaching a stranger.

Each banner is built from a real news story already published in Hoopla. CAQ composes every ad itself, using the story's own photo, a short headline, and the official branding.

The process is automated. A script turns the top three current news stories into ads three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday and Friday. As a new story goes up, the oldest one retires. No manual step.

A separate automatic check runs every week to remove junk placements, sites and apps that are technically showing the ad but delivering nothing worth having. One example: a website that earned 231 impressions for one cent. Not worth the space.

To understand the cost, it helps to compare this digital reach to traditional print. A standard Australia Post addressed letter costs $1.70 to post.

Printing 1,000 A5 flyers, colour both sides, costs around $266. That's about 27 cents each, before you've paid anyone to deliver them.

Use a distribution service for printing and letterboxing together, and the all-in cost usually runs between 20 and 40 cents a flyer. These are general market rates, not from one specific supplier.

The difference in scale becomes clear at a larger budget. CAQ once held a grant of $20,000 over three months for Facebook and Google advertising.

With that same $20,000, you could send about 11,700 addressed letters. Or, at 20 to 40 cents a flyer, somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 letterboxed flyers.

CAQ chose the digital route to protect volunteer energy. Wade, speaking in a recorded conversation with the interim president, put it plainly: "We don't worry about putting out flyers. The people who walk around wanting to put out flyers, we're better off having them turn up and show people how to hit a ball on Come & Try days."

The reasoning: the association should outsource the job of finding people to Google and Facebook. Volunteer time is limited. It's better spent with people who actually show up at the club.

Your energy goes into the game and the players. Not paper.

For a club committee weighing a future flyer run against a steady digital spend, the choice comes down to this. One takes manual labour and a per-unit printing cost. The other runs in the background, for the price of a weekly burger.