PPC vs cold email: cost, speed and lead quality compared for B2B

PPC vs cold email is a choice between paying to be found and writing first. PPC (pay-per-click) is advertising you pay for each time someone clicks your ad, most often on Google Ads. Cold email is a short, personal email to a business contact who has not heard of you, about a problem their job involves. Both can fill a B2B calendar, but they reach different people, at a different speed, with a very different cost structure.

I run cold email campaigns for clients, so I will say where I stand from the start: for B2B, cold email is the channel I would build first. PPC still wins in some situations, and this comparison shows which ones, with the three things that decide it: what a lead costs, how fast the first one comes and how good it is.

It belongs to my guide on how to get more clients, which covers the other channels. If you are weighing ads against rankings instead, my SEO vs PPC comparison answers that question.

PPC vs cold email at a glance

On the points that decide most B2B choices, the two channels compare like this.

What each channel costs

PPC: you pay for every click

On a search campaign, Google Ads bills you per click, at a price set by an auction between the advertisers bidding on the same search. So the price changes with the keyword, the area and the competition.

You control the total with an average daily budget. Google can spend up to twice that budget on a busy day, but over a month it never charges more than 30.4 times it (the average number of days in a month) and credits back anything delivered beyond that, as Google Ads Help explains. With an average daily budget of £20, Google can spend £40 on a given day, and the month’s bill stops at £608.

To see what a click will cost before you spend anything, open Keyword Planner, free inside a Google Ads account, and read the Top of page bid (low range) and Top of page bid (high range) columns for your keywords and area. Google describes them as roughly the 20th and 80th percentiles of recent bids that put an ad at the top of the page: an estimate, not a price list. My guide to Google Ads for small business covers the rest of that research.

Then turn the click price into the cost of an enquiry, because that is what you are really buying:

cost per enquiry = cost per click ÷ share of visitors who enquire
example:           £3 a click ÷ 3% = £100 per enquiry

These are round numbers to show the arithmetic, not a benchmark. Use your own.

Cold email: you pay for the set-up

Cold email has no auction. Its costs sit in the set-up, and most of them stay the same each month, however much you send within your plan’s limits.

The tool price is Instantly’s Growth plan at the time of writing (October 2026), billed in US dollars, so the pound figure moves with the exchange rate. It covers up to 5,000 emails a month, and Instantly’s pricing page lists the bigger plans and their limits.

The data is the cheap part. By my figures, Outscraper costs about €0.003 per lead, which works out at about €0.006 per lead that passes verification: under a penny either way. It only finds businesses that have a Google listing, though, so if your buyers have none, you will need another source. My Google Maps scraper tutorial shows how I build a list with it.

What sets cold email apart is the shape of the cost. Once the domains, mailboxes and tool are paid for, writing to 500 more businesses costs a few pounds of verified data by my figures, as long as you stay within your plan’s sending limits, while 500 more clicks cost 500 times the click price. Divide what the whole set-up costs in a month by the replies and calls it brought, and you have a cost per conversation to set against the cost per enquiry above.

How fast each one brings the first lead

From a standing start, PPC is faster. Once your account, ads and landing page are ready, Google reviews most ads within one business day, according to its page on the ad review process. An approved ad shows as Eligible and can appear the same day. The first enquiry then depends on your budget, the click price and how well your page turns visitors into calls or forms.

Cold email needs a run-up. Buying the domains and creating the mailboxes takes an afternoon, but new mailboxes have no reputation, so they warm up for weeks before they send at full volume: Instantly’s own guides range from two weeks to a month or more. MLK Leadhunters’ article on warm-up explains what happens in that time and how to tell that it worked.

Once the mailboxes are ready, things move fast. On my campaigns, the first result comes within the first 36 hours of sending. Then it improves rather than getting dearer: I A/B test the emails, and as I learn which copy works and which does not, the responses usually grow.

So if you need enquiries this month and have nothing set up, PPC wins the month. Start the cold email set-up a few weeks before you need it, and speed stops being the deciding factor.

Lead quality: people searching vs people you chose

PPC buys intent. A search ad answers someone who has just typed their problem, which is the warmest moment there is. The catch is that you pay for every click, whoever clicks: a student doing research, a competitor checking your ad, a buyer outside your area, a job too small to be worth a visit. Negative keywords and location settings filter some of them, never all. And in a narrow B2B niche, there may be too few searches to fill a calendar at all.

Cold email buys fit. You choose every recipient: their trade, their area, the size of their projects. They were not looking, so the email has to earn its place in three lines. When it does, the conversation starts with someone you wanted to work with.

The campaigns I run for Pilotech, an air conditioning installer near Paris, show what that looks like. They targeted three audiences: Paris restaurants, Paris offices and shops, and architects, who were the main focus. Most of those architects worked alone on big projects, such as a hotel with 16 air conditioning units to install; others ran architecture firms. Over a year, the campaigns brought Pilotech 15 new clients.

Many prospects picked up the phone instead of replying, and the architects called most. My explanation: a call is quicker than writing back, it does not sink under the other emails, and people like talking to a real person. Every email, in plain text, carried the phone number and an invitation to look at the catalogue on the website, with no link. The whole story is in my cold email case study, and the project is on the Pilotech Teknopoint page.

The rules: ad policies vs cold email law

PPC’s rules are Google’s advertising policies. Every ad is reviewed before it runs, and an ad that breaks a policy is marked Disapproved and does not show. The page it sends people to must follow the policies too.

Cold email’s rules come from the law, and the first objection I hear is that cold emailing is illegal. For B2B, it is not, under conditions:

• In the UK, PECR (the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations) lets you send marketing emails to limited companies, LLPs and other corporate bodies without prior consent. Sole traders and partnerships outside Scotland count as individuals, so the consumer rule below applies to them, and when an address does not show which kind of business it belongs to, the ICO says to treat it as an individual’s. Every email must say who it comes from and give a valid address to opt out, and UK GDPR still applies to a named work address. The ICO’s guidance on business-to-business marketing has the detail.
• In France, the CNIL allows email prospecting of professionals without prior consent when the message relates to their job, as long as they were told their address could be used this way and can object simply and for free. Every email names the sender and offers a simple way to unsubscribe.
• Consumers are off limits in both countries unless they have agreed, or are existing customers buying something similar. That is why cold email is a B2B channel, and why PPC stays the tool for selling to the public.

MLK Leadhunters’ article on whether cold email is legal walks through the conditions. It is general information, not legal advice, and so is this section.

When PPC is the better choice

I prefer cold email for B2B, but there are businesses for which I would start with ads:

• People already search for what you sell, in words you can predict and in your area: “office cleaning quote”, “commercial boiler repair”. The demand exists; you only need to be in front of it.
• You sell to consumers (or, in the UK, to sole traders), whom cold email cannot reach without consent.
• You cannot name your buyers in advance, because anyone could need you tomorrow.
• You need enquiries this month and have no warmed-up mailboxes.

Google Ads is not that tricky. It mainly asks for a bit of research into your target and what they search, so that you know where to be seen and your pages convert better.

For B2B, LinkedIn Ads is the PPC option closest to a cold email list, since it targets job titles, seniority and company size. It burns cash fast, but done right, the deals it brings are bigger. My LinkedIn Ads tutorial shows how to run a first campaign and keep the budget under control.

When cold email is the better choice

• You sell to businesses you can list: architects, restaurants, offices, property managers in one area. If you can describe them, you can find them.
• Your best buyers do not search for you, because they do not know your solution exists or they reuse the supplier they already know. An ad on a results page never reaches someone who never types the search.
• A few clients pay for the year. When one signed client is worth a lot, a channel that brings a steady handful is worth building.
• Clicks in your niche are expensive, or searches are rare. Keyword Planner shows you both before you spend.

It is one of my firmest beliefs about marketing: for a business that sells to other businesses, cold emailing is the one thing that will bring you to the moon. Your competitors will do it anyway. The only question is whether they write to your future clients before you do.

It is not for everyone, though. You need a list you can build, and someone who answers calls and replies quickly: as MLK Leadhunters puts it in its guide to handling replies, the campaign is won or lost after the reply.

Running PPC and cold email together

The two channels can feed each other, and ad data is useful even if you never buy an ad.

• Ad data shows which searches are worth winning. In Semrush, I look at the keywords advertisers pay for and what each click costs, which shows the searches that work best. Then I double down on those with SEO rather than ads.
• Search terms give you your buyers’ words. The search terms report in Google Ads shows which searches triggered your ads, and the phrases that bring enquiries make good first lines for a cold email.
• One website serves both. Ads need a page that answers the search. Cold email prospects can check your website before they call: my emails invite them to see the catalogue there, without a link.

Add the second channel only when the first runs without you. There is a lot of noise in marketing (that is rather the point of it), and small teams fall into the shiny-object trap easily: a channel you only half run tells you nothing.

How to choose before you spend

1. Describe your best client in one sentence: trade, area, size. If they are businesses you could list, cold email is open to you.
2. Open Keyword Planner and check the monthly searches and top-of-page bids for what you sell, in your area.
3. Work out what one client is worth to you, and so how much you can pay to win one.
4. Pick one channel: PPC if the searches exist at a price that fits, cold email if your buyers can be listed and each one is worth the set-up.
5. Set a test period and a stop rule before the first pound goes out, and judge on cost per client.

You do not need anyone to run a small Google Ads test, and two mailboxes writing to 20 businesses a day are within reach on your own: my guide to B2B cold emailing shows how. A full campaign is a different job, with domains, warm-up, lists, copy tests and follow-ups. When I run one, the client tells me which clients they want, I find the leads, write and send everything, and only the replies go to them; they have nothing to provide. If you would rather hand that over, it is what MLK Leadhunters does.