What does local advertising cost in New Zealand?

Local advertising in New Zealand costs anywhere from nothing to a few thousand dollars a month, and the useful answer is not the range but what each dollar buys at each price. This guide puts numbers against every common option so you can compare them on one page. Where a figure is ours, it is exact. Where it is somebody else's, it is a typical range and you should get a quote.

The short table

What "cost" means, and the two questions behind it

A price only means something next to two other numbers.

What is one customer worth to you? A cafe gains a few dollars a visit and needs a customer to come back many times. A builder gains thousands on one job. The same $200 advertisement is expensive for the first and trivial for the second, which is why the "right" channel is different for each.

How many of the people it reaches could actually buy from you? A radio spot reaches a whole region; most listeners are not in your suburb. A counter card in a real estate office reaches a few hundred people a week; nearly all of them are buying, selling or moving house. Reach is the number channels advertise. Fit is the number that pays.

Online advertising costs

Google Ads. You pay per click. In New Zealand a click for a trade or a professional service often costs several dollars, sometimes well over ten for competitive categories like lawyers or plumbers in Auckland. A budget of $600 a month therefore buys somewhere between fifty and two hundred visits to your site, of which a handful become enquiries. Add a management fee if an agency runs it, commonly a few hundred a month on top. It is measurable, which is its great strength, and it is the channel most small businesses stop because they never measured it.

Facebook and Instagram. A boosted post costs what you tell it to, from about $5 a day. Reaching a thousand people in a suburb costs a few dollars; getting one of them to do something costs a lot more. Good for a picture of your work, a sale, an event. Poor at catching somebody who needs a plumber this afternoon.

Print and broadcast costs

Community newspapers. A modest display advertisement in a local paper commonly costs in the low hundreds per insertion, more for a larger space or a front section, and papers discount a run of several weeks. Readership skews older and very local, which is exactly right for some businesses and wrong for others.

Radio. Local station packages tend to start around the mid hundreds a month for a modest schedule and rise quickly. Radio is a long game: nobody hears a spot and drives to you, but after three months of hearing your name they recognise it when they need you.

Flyers. Printing a thousand costs a couple of hundred dollars; delivery to letterboxes costs about the same again or more. Response is a fraction of one percent, so it only adds up when one job is worth a great deal.

Billboards. A small site in a provincial town rents for well over a thousand dollars a month and a main road site in a city for several times that, plus production. Out of reach for most small businesses, and there is no way to know who saw it.

In-store and on-premises advertising costs

This is what we sell, so here are our numbers rather than a range.

A listing on Pritty Ghood shows one price, and that is what you pay. Our fee and the card processing cost are already inside it, and nothing is added at checkout. Listings live today run from $55 a week for a counter display or a small window poster, through $90 to $140 a week for a street facing window at a busier shop, to around $210 a week for a screen in a waiting room. Club sponsorships are priced by the season, typically from a few hundred dollars for a junior grade.

Two things make the arithmetic different from the channels above. Campaigns run from two weeks, so you can test a placement for about the price of one newspaper insertion. And every campaign gets a QR code we count scans on, so at the end of it you know how many people acted rather than how many might have walked past.

The honest caveat: it only works where there is a listing whose customers are your customers. We are adding hosts area by area, and the browse page says which listings are real.

Sponsorship costs

Clubs, schools and event organisers in New Zealand sell sponsorship at every level.

• Junior grade or a single team: commonly a few hundred dollars for a season.
• A hole at a golf day, a prize, a named award: from around $150 to a few hundred.
• Senior team, shirt front: from around a thousand, more at larger clubs.
• Naming rights to a tournament or a season: low thousands upward.

What you get varies more than the price does, so ask exactly: shirt, fence sign, team sheet, prizegiving mention, social media, tickets. A sign on the fence at the home ground for a whole season is seen by the same families twenty Saturdays in a row, which is a lot of impressions for the money. We wrote a separate guide to sponsoring a local club, including what a package should contain.

A worked example: $500 a month

A hypothetical physio in a town of twenty thousand people, with $500 a month to spend.

• Google Business Profile, complete, with photos and reviews: $0.
• A counter card at the gym across the road, $55 a week listed: about $240 a month.
• Under 15s sponsorship at the local rugby club, $450 a season: about $40 a month spread across the year.
• A boosted Facebook post once a month showing a client back on the field: about $60.
• Left over: about $160, held back until one of the three above proves itself and deserves more.

That is four channels, three of them measurable, all of them in front of people who live within ten minutes of the clinic. It is not exciting. It is how local businesses actually grow.