The usual answer is a percentage of revenue, somewhere between five and fifteen per cent. It is a rule of thumb from a different market and a different decade, and applying it to a Dubai business with high cost per click and a long consideration period will either starve the campaign or waste the money.
Here is how to work it out from your own numbers instead. You need three figures and you probably already have two of them.
The three numbers
- What a customer is worth to you. Not the first invoice, the whole relationship. A client who stays two years on a retainer is worth many times a one-off project.
- How many enquiries it takes to win one. Count the last twenty enquiries and how many closed. If it is four, your rate is one in five.
- What you can afford to pay for one customer. A sensible starting point is a quarter of what a customer is worth, which leaves the rest for delivery and margin.
The arithmetic, with made-up numbers
These figures are an illustration rather than a claim about your business or mine. Substitute your own.
| Example | |
|---|---|
| A customer is worth | AED 40,000 |
| You can afford to pay for one | AED 10,000 |
| Enquiries needed per customer | 5 |
| So you can pay per enquiry | AED 2,000 |
| You want 4 customers a month | 20 enquiries |
| Monthly ad budget | AED 40,000 |
That last number is often a shock, and it is the honest one. Working backwards from what a customer is worth produces a budget you can defend. Working forwards from a percentage produces a number you will quietly cut in month three.
The floor, below which paid ads do not work here
Dubai is an expensive market to advertise in. Cost per click on commercial terms runs well above international averages, because the audience is small, wealthy and heavily competed for. That creates a practical floor.
Below roughly AED 5,000 a month in ad spend, a Google or Meta campaign does not gather enough data to optimise. The platform needs conversions to learn from, and a campaign producing three enquiries a month will spend its life in the learning phase. You are paying for the privilege of not finding out whether it works.
If that is your budget, do not run ads. Spend it on the website, the tracking and the content instead, and come back to paid when the number is bigger. That advice costs me work and it is still the right advice.
Splitting the budget
A reasonable starting split for a Dubai business with no existing demand:
| Where | Share | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Paid advertising | 50% | Buys attention immediately, stops the day you stop paying |
| Search and content | 25% | Slow, compounds, still there when the ads stop |
| Email and WhatsApp | 10% | Cheapest channel you own, routinely ignored |
| Creative and production | 10% | Ad fatigue is real and new creative is the fix |
| Tools and tracking | 5% | Without this you cannot tell which of the above worked |
Shift it as you learn. A business whose enquiries all come from search should not be spending half its budget on ads, and a business with no content and no email list should not be starting with either.
What is not in the budget and should be
- The landing page. Driving paid traffic to a page that was not built for it is the most common way money disappears here.
- Tracking, set up before the spend starts. Afterwards you are reconstructing what happened from memory.
- Someone to answer the enquiries. A lead that waits four days is a lead you paid for and lost.
- Arabic, if your audience needs it. It is a meaningful percentage of a build, not a line item.
Agency, freelancer or in-house for the management
Management fees sit on top of ad spend, not inside it, and a quote that blurs the two is worth questioning. My own published rates are project work from AED 31,500 and retainers from AED 16,000 a month, with ad spend separate in both cases. Those are my prices rather than a market average.
The rough test: if your management fee is a large fraction of your ad spend, something is wrong. Either the budget is too small for managed campaigns or the fee is too high for the work.
Frequently asked questions
What is a realistic first budget for a small Dubai business?
If you are testing whether paid works at all, around AED 15,000 to 20,000 a month total including management is the point where the answer becomes trustworthy. Below that you will get an answer, it just will not be reliable enough to act on.
How long before I know whether it is working?
For paid, four to six weeks for a signal and three months for a trustworthy one. For search and content, six months minimum and often longer. Anyone promising faster on the second is selling you something.
Should I spend more in Ramadan or over the summer?
Both are real seasonal shifts in this market and both move by sector, so the honest answer is to look at your own last two years rather than a general rule. Where there is no history, start flat and let the data tell you.
Is it better to do one channel properly than three badly?
Almost always yes, and this is the most common budget mistake. A business spending AED 8,000 across Google, Meta and LinkedIn has three underfunded campaigns and no usable data. The same money on one channel produces an answer.
Published 6 October 2026. The example figures are an illustration; the AED rates are my own published prices.