Transcription
When I first started my Google Ads agency, I ran successful ad campaigns for clients with tiny budgets, as little as $100 per month—that's just over $3 per day. Now, the good news is you can absolutely succeed with Google Ads with a small budget, and in this video, I'm going to show you how.
Okay, so let's start by defining what a small budget actually is when we're talking about Google Ads. Now, I would define a small budget as anything less than $3,000 per month, so anything less than $100 per day. A tiny budget is anything less than $600 per month, so $20 per day or less.
Now, like I've already said, you can absolutely succeed with a small Google Ads budget. You can succeed with a tiny Google Ads budget; that is possible. And actually, I do recommend that a lot of businesses start with a small budget because initially, when you first start running ad campaigns on the platform, you might not know what works; you might not have the skill to make it profitable from day one. So it makes a lot of sense to start small, and if you lose a little bit of money early on, it's not the end of the world. Then, once you do develop the skills, once you know what you're doing, once you've been able to work out which combination of keywords and ads work for your business and you know that it's profitable, you can then always scale from there. I think that's quite a smart way of doing things.
However, when you are operating with a small budget, there are changes that you need to make to Google Ad campaigns. You do need to do things a little bit differently, and those are some of the things I want to run through in this video. So let's get started.
So the first point I want to make is around campaign types. Okay, so when you create a new Google Ad campaign, you'll very quickly be presented with what I've got on the screen in front of me right now, where you need to select a campaign type. So the first thing I'll say is I think it's really important to just pick the one campaign type if you are operating with a small Google Ads budget. You don't want to have a search campaign and a display campaign and a shopping campaign and all these various different options because that will spread your budget too thinly across different campaigns, and that's going to make it much more difficult and take a lot longer for you to work out what's working and what's not working—both you as the advertiser, but also Google with this optimization process. We know how important that is to getting us the best possible results. Google needs data to be able to optimize our campaign and be able to make adjustments, and that can really help improve our results. If you've got a little bit of budget spent over here, you've got a conversion via here the other day, and you got one of these three days ago, and then there was a few clicks this morning, it's like there's just not enough information being gathered fast enough for you to be able to optimize a campaign. So I would recommend you stick with one campaign type, and I think if you're operating with a small budget, where I'd put that is in search.
Search is the most obvious, intuitive part of Google Ads; it's what we all think of when we think Google Ads, particularly beginners. You think, "I'm going to go on Google search for something, and I'm going to see ads that are related to my search pop up." It's easy to understand, this often why I recommend beginners start with search alongside businesses to operate with small budgets. I appreciate some small-budget businesses will be beginners; some won't, but I think search is a good place to be.
Performance Max—I absolutely love it. You might be thinking, "Well, if you're going to go with one campaign type, why would you not just use Performance Max?" Because if you're not familiar, Performance Max effectively incorporates all the other campaign types into it, and it's kind of like a one-stop shop for Google advertising, and it's brilliant, and I really like Performance Max. But I wouldn't recommend you use Performance Max if you're operating with a small budget, for firstly the same reason I just mentioned. Performance Max incorporates all these various different things, and if you've got a little bit of budget being spent on a YouTube ad and a little bit of budget spent in Search and a little bit of budget spent in display and all over the place, it's going to be difficult for both you and Google to optimize. But also, Performance Max, because it is a campaign type where you are handing over much more control as an advertiser to Google, it relies on data even more than the other campaign types. So we typically see Performance Max campaigns perform much better in ad accounts that have a lot more conversion history because Google can see, "This type of person converts on this type of day via this network, via this," you know, they have all the data to be able to get you the right results—the best results possible. If you don't have much data in your ad account, and if it's brand new or very new, that's going to be the case. But also, if you're spending a small budget, you are just going to most likely be generating less conversions than businesses that operate with larger budgets. Then Performance Max is not the way to go, in my opinion.
Now that might absolutely change. So once you've got your search campaign working with a small budget, and then you're looking to scale, you've got some conversion history in your ad account, absolutely you could look to incorporate Performance Max, and that's something we do with clients all the time. But I think whilst you're in that small-budget phase, better stick with search.
I have seen—I should quickly mention that for e-commerce businesses operating with a small budget, just using a shopping campaign instead of search can work well; might be something that you want to test. If I was to give like a broad recommendation even to e-commerce businesses, I would still stick with search. But if, let's say you're operating with a small budget and you're an e-commerce business and you've tried a search campaign, it didn't work, then maybe look to explore shopping. Obviously, all other types of businesses—anything lean, service-based, etc., etc.—search is going to be the way to go.
On that point number two is to only focus on one offer. Now, you most likely have a range of different products and services that you sell and could sell to people via Google Ads, but I would like you, if you're only operating with a small budget, to just stick to the one to start with. One of the reasons for that is exactly what we just described in the previous point: it's consolidating data. You're advertising lots of different services, lots of different products; you're going to generate a conversion here, a lead there, or a click—it's all going to be too spread thin; you're not going to be able to optimize, either you or Google. Whereas if you focus things down onto the one offer, you get much better data.
So that then leads to the question of which product or service should you offer? So what I'd recommend you start with is your best performer to date, assuming you have some data. So if you've been running Google Ads already, let's say you've been advertising multiple products, but you are operating with a small budget, you want to consolidate down to just the one; well, just take a look at which one has performed best from a return on ad spend standpoint and go ahead and use that one. If you're advertising multiple different services, take a look at which one does best in terms of a cost-per-lead basis, assuming you know your services are roughly equal in value. If there some that are much more valuable but the leads cost more, you know, you can go with those; that's fine. There's just a bit of common sense there I wanted to quickly mention. But yeah, go with your best performers. If you've been advertising elsewhere and you still have data from other marketing channels, other advertising platforms that let you know which ones are the best performers, then again, go with those. What is sold best elsewhere is a good chance that will sell best in Google Ads as well, so you can absolutely use that.
If you don't have either of those things—you haven't been advertising, you're brand new, you haven't been marketing, but you have a range of products and services to sell—I would focus in on the ones that have a higher value because it's easier with Google Ads, with all advertising, to be profitable if you are advertising something that has a higher value. I'll give you an example: let's say you're selling a $50 product via Google Ad campaigns. Now it might cost you $20 in terms of Google Ad cost, so cost per conversion to get that sale. Now, if instead of selling a $50 product you sell a $500 product—that's 10 times as much in terms of the revenue you bring in when you make that sale—but it probably won't cost you 10 times as much in terms of the Google Ad spend. So instead of it being $20 to generate that conversion, it's unlikely to go up all the way to $200; it might go from $20 to $80, let's say. It's going to be more because you're selling a more expensive thing that's more difficult to do, but it's not proportional. So it's just easier to generate a profit if you're selling things with a higher value. So that's something that I would recommend you think about if you don't have data on what's your best sellers and what performs best.
And one of the reasons why we do this, why we want to go with our best performer and why we want to consolidate down, is because we want this budget that you've got that's small at the moment to be as profitable as possible. You want it to go as far as possible because if that works and is nicely profitable, that's going to allow you to scale within that offer, focusing on that offer, but also it's going to allow you to then incorporate other products and services, and you think, "Oh, great, we've got—when this is working really well, nicely profitable here, we can reinvest some of that into other Google Ad campaigns for other products and services that we sell and look to expand and see if we can get those profitable and grow the business that way."
Number three is to focus on smaller locations where possible. So I've just gone a little bit further on from where we were at the campaign type to another part of when you're creating a new Google Ad campaign, and I'm in the location section now. This campaign is set up, by default, to be United Kingdom, and let's assume that we're advertising a chain of gyms in the UK. So we could advertise to the whole of the UK because perhaps we, you know, we serve lots of different markets; there's lots of different gyms around the country. But in that sort of scenario, what I think is best when operating with a small budget is to get more specific. So we can click on "enter another location," and then "advance search," and then, you know, we've got a chain of gyms, but perhaps ours is one of a new facility, one of our most impressive facilities, and there's lots of capacity, so we want to particularly advertise that right. So we could go ahead and enter in Oxford as a city; you could look to include that in here, and then you can see the area in the map, just targeting that. We could always, in that sort of business, switch to a radius targeting instead if we feel like people are willing to travel a little bit further. I mean, 20 miles is probably a little bit far for a gym, but we could add in, say, 10 miles, and we could look to do something like that instead. You know, you're going to have to decide what's the best approach depending on your business and how far either you're willing to travel to people or they're willing to travel to you, depending on how you're set up. But focusing in on a core, specific location is not something I'd recommend businesses do with larger budgets because you are going to miss out on potential conversions, leads, sales if you can actually serve nationally, internationally, or in larger geographical areas if you can actually serve those people. But with smaller budgets, I think it makes sense when you go more location-specific. As well, you can then tailor your campaigns to that location. So coming back to the example of advertising a gym within Oxford, we would want to make sure that the place name is obviously in the keywords that we're targeting, but it's also in all the ad copy; it's in all the ad assets to make that ad stand out much more and resonate much more with people searching for a gym in that location. That'll make it much more likely that people will click; that'll make it much more likely that people will convert, and the campaign will then be more profitable, which, as we mentioned in the previous point, allows you to then scale it and reinvest and go from a small Google Ads budget to hopefully a large one that is producing fantastic results. So this is not strictly necessary if you're like, "I've got a small budget, but I still want to advertise, you know, in a broad area or nationally." Absolutely fine; that is okay. But just something to think about if you're thinking of ways of, like, "I just feel like our campaign is spread too thinly; we're not getting the data we need." You can try bringing it in, making it more tightly organized from a geographic standpoint, and then tailor that campaign more specifically to that location, and you'll likely see better results.
Point number four is to target less expensive keywords. Now, this is not something that I would usually recommend; I'll explain a bit more about that in a second. But just to show you exactly what it is that I'm talking about here, I'll run through a quick example for you. So I'm back in our example Google Ad account; I'm just going to come up here and search for the Keyword Planner, and then we'll jump into the Keyword Planner. I'm going to go ahead and click on "discover new keywords." I'm going to use a different example this time. Let's assume that I'm running a campaign for a business that offers gardening services. Now, what we're looking for here is obviously Google has given us a number of keyword ideas that are related to our sort of core broad term that describes what this business offers, and then what I want you to do is go ahead and check out this column here where it says "top of page bid high range." So to be at the top of the page most of the time for these keywords, this is most likely what you're going to end up paying in terms of a cost-per-click, right? And then when we take a look at these, we will see that some of these keywords are going to be more or less expensive; there's going to be variations. So, for example, "landscaping near me" is £391; "gardener near me" is £246. So what I would do is I would have a scroll through these and have a look and see if you can find ones on the less expensive side. So, for example, if "gardening services" is a broad term that accurately describes the services offered for this business, "gardener near me" actually seems like quite a good option, and it's on the cheaper end of things; it's £246 in comparison to a bunch of the others. And then you can go through these and you can start to pick out, you know, another one there: "garden maintenance near me"—well, that sounds pretty dead on, and that's cheaper at £215. And you can see that there are going to be quite a lot of variation; some keywords are going to be twice as expensive as others. You might want to avoid the ones, in this scenario, that are well into the £300s and go with the ones that are closer to the £200s. "Yard cleaning services"—that may or may not be applicable depending on the services that you offer—but you can come through and think, "Okay, 'landscaping company near me,' when I've got a small budget, at £455, probably isn't the way to go." "Weed treatment for lawn," at just over a pound, is significantly less; maybe that's something you offer; maybe that's something you don't.
Now, when you're going through these, you do need to obviously not just look at the top of page bid high range; you also need to keep in mind the keyword and make sure that, for example, this one here, "weed treatment for lawn," is nice and inexpensive, but if that's not actually something you do, other types of gardening services obviously don't therefore go ahead and target that keyword. But you can find various options in here, and you can go with the ones that are less expensive. I think when you've got a smaller budget, you want to make sure you've got a decent click volume, and that's going to help you and Google optimize the campaigns, and targeting keywords that cost half as much or less than some of the more expensive ones that you could be bidding on is a bit of a no-brainer.
Now, this isn't perfect, and the reason why I said this isn't something I'd usually recommend is that the keywords that are less expensive to target are usually less expensive to target for a reason: it's because either they typically don't convert as well, or they do convert, but the value of the customer is less. So I imagine that's kind of what's going on here, right? So "weed treatment for lawn" is significantly less expensive at just over a pound than "landscaping company near me," and I imagine part of what's going on there is that landscaping company near me, the people that click on, become a lead, and go on and use services; they probably spend a lot more than people that just want a simple weed treatment. Landscaping services might be—landscaping company might be something a lot more significant and therefore higher value. So it isn't just always go with the least expensive keywords; that's going to get you the best return on ad spend, most profitable campaigns, because that quality factor, either from a value or a conversion rate, is factored in. So as you look to spend more and you scale, adding in some of the more expensive keywords that might produce higher-value customers is absolutely fine. But what we're doing at the beginning is we're trying to get you results with your small budget that are profitable, that will allow you to scale. And if, with a small budget, let's say you're spending $1,000 a month, okay, and you've got—so what's that, $30 a day—if you're going to be spending targeting keywords that cost $5, $6, $7 a click, you're only looking at like six clicks a day, and it's going to be so difficult for you and Google to be able to optimize those campaigns and learn and work out what works. Whereas if you're targeting something that's closer to $2 a click, you're going to get 15 clicks a day; you're going to get that much more data, that much more likely to work out what works and be able to optimize those campaigns. So it is not something I recommend with large budgets, but with small budgets, I think it's a good way to go.
Now, there are a couple of other points that I want to make around using small budgets when it comes to your Google Ad campaigns. Before I do that, just want to very quickly let you know about our done-for-you Google Ad services. So my agency can create, manage, and optimize your Google Ad campaigns for you. We can take all the workload off your hands; we can help you get better results than what you're currently getting—almost certainly. We've probably worked with a business just like yours in the past. And if you are ready to take that step from a small Google Ads budget and really scale and take your Google Ads next level and have them do that much more for your business, we can absolutely help you with that. So there is a link in the video description below; you can click on that and go ahead and book in a free call with one of our team members—completely no obligation—where you can just find out more about what it is that we do and how we might be able to help. So if you're interested, go ahead and book that free call, and hopefully we get a chance to work together.
So point number five is to pre-qualify with your ad copy. Now, the way Google Ads works is that you only pay Google if someone actually clicks on your ad. If they don't click, then you haven't paid anything; you haven't used up any of your small Google Ad budget. So you can put certain things in your ad copy, certain words—and I'll get some examples in a second—that will put off people that aren't suitable; they'll think, "Oh, this isn't for me," and they don't click. Now, those people were unlikely to convert anyway. So if you don't put them off, they'll probably click; you'll end up paying for it, and then they won't convert, and that will be a waste of budget. Whereas if you do put in things to really pre-qualify people, that can help. This is so important with a small budget because we need every click to go as far as it possibly can. Larger businesses with larger budgets are normally more willing to get more sort of market penetration, and they're happy to potentially not convert a quite high percentage of clicks to actual customers because they want those people going to the website; they know they're going to retarget them; there's a bit more of a brand exposure play going on there. But with smaller budgets, we need every click to count as much as we can, and we can pre-qualify. So let's have a look at an example.
Okay, so to demonstrate this, I'm back in our example Google Ad account. I'm in that new Google Ad campaign creation process; I've just skipped ahead a little bit to where you create the ads themselves, and we're in the headline section. So if we go back and use the previous example that we used when I was going through the keywords—that is a gardening services business—and I believe one of the keywords that we identified that was relatively inexpensive was garden maintenance near me or something along those lines. If we had a business like that, we could add in—you know, obviously we could add in garden maintenance CU; that's one of the most important things in the service—but as one of the headlines, we could add in something like "starting from $500 per month," and you can see how that would do such a good job of putting off people that are looking for a gardening maintenance, gardening service that's way less expensive than that—perhaps people with smaller gardens. You're only after people with much larger gardens, and then those people therefore aren't going to click on the ad, and that means it's not going to cost you money as a Google advertiser, and you can only pay for clicks from people that are like, "Yeah, sure, I was expecting my gardening to be $2,000 a month 'cause I've got this massive great big yard and it needs a lot of work and all that sort of thing." So that's absolutely fine, and that allows your budget to go further.
Now, one thing I will quickly mention about this as well is if we added some others in—just so I can demonstrate—you know, let's say we add in "excellent customer service" and "family-run business"—I mean, there's going to be all sorts of things you could add in here, right, that are going to sell your products and services. What we can do here is we can guarantee that this particular headline always shows up in our ad by pinning it. So if we click on this little pin, we can say, "Look, I always want this to show up in position one," so no matter what combination of headlines you use, it's always going to be position one—"starting $500 a month," in this case. That might be a little bit too aggressive, but you can do that if it's really important to you and you just find that you're getting clicks from people that aren't what you aren't in a position to be able to purchase your products and services and you don't want to waste money advertising to them, then this can be a great way to go—to add in something like this.
Now, I should say that when you do this strategy, when you use this method, you are going to reduce your click rate naturally because lots of people are going to see that and go, “This isn’t for me.” Now, that’s the point, because you’re hoping to improve your conversion rate from click to eventual customer. Um, but it doesn’t mean that less people are going to click. That can affect your quality score, which can make your cost per click overall more expensive. I think with a lot of businesses with small budgets, something along this line is still a good idea because you just need to make every click count. You don’t want to have lots of clicks, uh, not converting; you need them to convert at as high a percentage as possible.
There are also ways you could make this; you could still do this but make it a little bit less aggressive. So, you know, instead of having a monetary amount, we could use other criteria. So, um, this wouldn’t apply to this type of business, but if I just delete out the examples we’ve got in, uh, there are many different ways that you can pre-qualify. So you could have something like, “Perfect for 65 Plus,” if that’s your target audience. And anyone that clicks through who’s not 65 Plus or not buying this as a gift or whatever for someone who is 65 Plus, um, is a waste of your small Google ad budget. Then you can add something like this in and go, “Great, you lot don’t click. I want only people that are in, that are obviously this age range or buying for someone in this age range to click, because those are the only people that we could serve.” Or you could do it location based. Um, we mentioned in, in a previous example in this video, talking about Oxford as a city here in the UK, um, you know, we could put in something along these lines like, “Local to Oxford,” um, as a headline and pin that and get that in there, and that could help put off people that aren’t local to Oxford. I mean, some of that’s going to be taken up with the location targeting criteria, but we could get more specific. We could be like, “West Oxford” or “East Oxford” or whatever, and you can get really, um, quite detailed in there. So, different ways to, to do this depending on your business. Are there a big chunk of your target market that might be searching, that might be clicking that you just want to put off? Or think about how do you categorize those people? Is it based on budget? Is it based on an age range? Is it based on a location? These are some of the most obvious examples, and there could be other things as well. It could be based on what profession they work in; all sorts of different ways that you can do this. But it can be a good way to avoid wasting money on clicks that will not convert or are very unlikely to convert and therefore make your small Google ad budget go that much further.
Number six is to optimize aggressively and early. And this is quite different when you’re operating with a small budget versus a larger budget, is that we will look to, to turn off underperforming elements, things like keywords, uh, and other elements within our Google ad campaign early. We will do so before we’ve reached statistical significance. If we get a sense that an element, a keyword, is not performing as well as other elements, we will go ahead and turn that off. And I think for a lot of the reasons we talked about, you don’t have any budget to waste. We don’t want to waste any budget on, in this example, keywords that don’t produce as good a return on ad spend as other keywords. They could still be nicely profitable if we had a larger budget; we’d still probably target it, but we want, need our budget to go as far as possible, so it’s as profitable as possible, so that we can scale and so that we can reinvest in other campaigns and other products and, and, and all that sort of stuff. So here I’ve got, um, an ad account up, one of our client ad accounts actually. We’ve had to, uh, blur out the, the keywords, um, so you can’t see, see that, but I wanted to show you this. Based on data, and the most important thing here being conversion value, uh, divided by cost, right? So we can see here that the average for these keywords is 3.28; that’s the number at the bottom. But obviously within this there are some that are performing significantly better than others. You know, we’ve got one here at, at a 6.1 as an example, although that hasn’t generated a huge amount of clicks in comparison to, um, well, particularly this, this top option. But when we’re going through this, we might look at say the 2.76 and the 2.75 and go, “They need to be turned off.” If we’re operating with a small budget, we’ve got these on, and that’s absolutely fine with a larger budget because those are still nicely profitable, right? Two point, almost a 3X, is still nicely profitable; we’re happy to run those, we’re happy to take advantage of the traffic that is searching for that. But if you’ve only got so much budget to spend, why not spend more of it on a keyword that can deliver a 4X conversion value to cost ratio or a 3 plus X, um, in terms of this one, which is they’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting in, in this particular campaign. So I think I’m a big fan, and I talk about this a lot in my content, of waiting for statistical significance. A lot of advertisers turn things off too early; they’re a little bit too trigger happy. With a small budget, we will be like that; we will be aggressive, we’ll be trigger happy, and I think it’s better to go early than it is to go late. So if you’ve got a small Google Ads budget, that probably means you’re relatively new to Google Ads. If that’s the case, I’d strongly recommend you check out this video. In this video, I walk you through the entire Google ad campaign creation process from scratch. It’s probably the most valuable video that I’ve ever created on the topic of Google Ads, a full beginners tutorial that walks you through everything, make sure you get every single setting, every element right, to get the best possible results. So if you haven’t already, go ahead and check it out.