Can you get good results in Google Ads with a small budget?

In special episode 75 of the Inside Google Ads podcast, host Jyll Saskin Gales tackles a common question for small business owners: is it still possible to achieve good results with a limited budget in Google Ads? While it's becoming more challenging each year, Jyll maintains that it's absolutely achievable with the right strategies. Drawing from her insights shared during a webinar for Main Street ROI, Jyll outlines five crucial steps to maximize your return on a small Google Ads investment. She also offers a realistic perspective on when Google Ads might not be the best fit for your current business stage. Tune in to learn how to make every dollar count!

Key topics discussed in this episode:

• Why a solid data foundation (conversion tracking, audience lists, account linking) is essential for small budgets.
• The importance of starting with a Search campaign and ensuring sufficient budget for at least 10 clicks per day.
• How to leverage micro-conversions to provide enough data for Smart bidding algorithms.
• Utilizing audience targeting to narrow down your reach and improve ad efficiency.
• The critical role of compelling and human-centric ad creative in standing out from competitors.

You can get episode transcripts delivered to your inbox each week by signing up for free at https://free.jyll.ca/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode75 

Google Ads Coaching
Need some expert help with your Google Ads campaigns? Book a call with Jyll! Learn more at https://jyll.ca/pages/google-ads-coach?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode75 

Inside Google Ads course
Join more than 400+ Google Ads practitioners in Jyll's Inside Google Ads membership course. You'll find up-to-date Google Ads tutorials, and you can ask me your questions at an exclusive live video call every single month. Learn more at https://learn.jyll.ca/iga?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode75 

Read more about this topic on Jyll's Google Ads Blog
- Conquering Google Ads with a Low Budget: 12 Tips for Small Businesses: https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/conquering-google-ads-with-a-low-budget-12-tips-for-small-businesses?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode75 
- Should Small Businesses Use Smart Bidding in Google Ads? https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/should-small-businesses-use-smart-bidding-in-google-ads?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode75 
- What you need to know about micro-conversions in Google Ads: https://learn.jyll.ca/blog/what-you-need-to-know-about-micro-conversions-in-google-ads?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=episode75 

Find Jyll on social media
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jyllsaskingales
https://youtube.com/@the_google_pro
https://www.instagram.com/the_google_pro 
https://www.threads.net/@the_google_pro

Transcript

Is it still possible to drive big results with a small budget in Google Ads?

Yes, but it's getting harder and harder each year.

For episode 75 of Inside Google Ads, I'm sharing five things that small business owners can do to get the best possible results out of Google Ads with the tiniest bit of money.

One of my long-time Inside Google Ads course members, Riley McLaughlin, invited me to give this webinar at Main Street ROI, the agency where he works.

Whether you're a small business owner or a freelancer who works with small business owners, I think you'll learn a few new tips and tricks to get better results with Google Ads.

I'm your host, Jyll Saskin Gales. I spent six years working for big brands at Google, and now I work for you. 

This is Inside Google Ads, Special Episode 75, Big Results on a Small Budget.

So here are the five things that you need in order to drive great results on a small budget in Google Ads. 

The first thing you need to do is get your data foundation in place. Just like when you're building a house, your house is going to crumble and fall down if you don't properly build that foundation. So there are some very important, boring, unsexy things you've got to do before you start running ads.

Specifically, when you're working with a small budget, there are three things you must do before even spending a penny. 

First is set up conversion tracking, letting Google Ads know what you wanted to achieve. That will likely be a purchase if you're an e-commerce store, or that might be filling out your lead form or booking a meeting if you're a service based business. 

Second is setting up your audiences, letting Google Ads know who are those people who've been to your website before or uploading a list of your customers to let Google know what your customers look like so it can find more people like them. 

The third is account linking. Chances are, if you're running Google Ads, you also use Google Analytics. Perhaps you have a Google Business profile. I hope you have Google Search Console set up and have been working on your SEO. So you're going to want to make sure you link all those things together to Google Ads so that those systems can work together to drive the best results for you. 

Now, once you actually have that data foundation in place, then we can start building your house. And 9 times out of 10, that house is going to start with a Search campaign. That's what we think of when we think of Google, right? Typing things into Google, being able to show ads to people who are searching for exactly what you offer. 

Now, a few tips I have for you when you're starting with that Search campaign.

First is thinking about whether you want to use a standard ad group or a dynamic ad group. A standard ad group is what you normally think of with a Search campaign in Google Ads. You pick your keywords, which communicates to Google the kind of searches you want to advertise on. In a dynamic ad group, you don't pick keywords. Instead, you give Google Ads specific pages of your website that you want to drive traffic to, and Google figures out from those pages which searches you should advertise on.

So, for example, if you are an electrician and you have a page about emergency electrician and you have another page about air conditioner installation, those would be really different searches from very different people looking for those two different things. In a standard ad group, you could have one ad group with emergency electrician keywords and another ad group with air conditioner installation keywords. Or in a dynamic ad group, you could have one page about emergency electrician services, another page about air conditioner install services and let Google figure it out for you. 

If you haven't invested much in your SEO, you probably shouldn't use dynamic ad groups because it's powered by similar technologies. So I'll say when in doubt, stick with standard, and that is the default. 

Next, budgeting. How much do you need to spend on ads? I can't give you a one-size-fits-all answer for what the ad spend should be, but I can tell you, you have to have enough budget for at least 10 clicks a day. 

And the way you're going to know what that budget means for you is to use a tool like Keyword Planner in Google Ads, it's completely free. You need an account to use it, but you don't have to spend any money to use it. And then in Keyword Planner, type in your keywords and see what the expected cost per click is. For some industries, it might be $2. So as long as you can spend at least $20 a day, great, you can advertise. For other industries, it could be $10 per click, which means you would need to be prepared to spend at least $100 a day. If that's too much for you, it's better to not spend the money at all than to spend the money to only get a few clicks per day because you are not going to get good results. 

The third thing I'll mention that's especially important when running a Search campaign on a small budget is keeping a close eye on your Impression Share and your quality score. Impression Share just means of all the times you could have shown an ad, how often did you show an ad? And this is what we use to help us optimize and understand how much opportunity there really is on Google for your business. Quality score is tightly related to how much you're going to have to pay for your ads. The higher the quality of your ads, the less you have to pay per click. And I can tell you, as someone who has worked with multinational businesses, they don't spend any time focusing on quality score because they don't need to. They've got millions to throw into Google Ads. But for those of us who have tens of dollars or maybe hundreds of dollars, focusing on high quality ads means you can pay less per click, which means you can get more out of your budget. 

And then last but not least, Smart bidding. When you set up a Search campaign, you have to pick a bid strategy. And although you can use manual bidding, it's not 2015 anymore. In most circumstances, for most campaign types, Smart bidding will drive better results. Because Google's AI, it's artificially intelligent, there are some things that humans definitely still do better, but one thing AI absolutely does better is knowing what to bid for each query for each user every single time. So you should be leveraging Smart bidding. 

Now, the big challenge we often face with Smart bidding when we have a small budget is we can't get enough data to learn. It's this vicious cycle. I only have a little bit to spend, so I'm only getting a little bit of data. So my Smart bidding's not working, and I'm not getting good results. How do we get out of that vicious cycle? 

Well, that brings us to the next thing that most small businesses need when they're running Google Ads, and that is micro-conversions. Optimizing for micro-conversions. What does that mean? Well, I spoke earlier about setting up conversion tracking and saying you're probably going to want to track a purchase or a lead. But what if with your budget, you only get four or five purchases a month from Google Ads? Great for you, right? But not enough to give enough information to that smart bidding algorithm. What we do is then track a micro-conversion, something that must happen before conversion. 

So for example, what's the last thing a user does before they purchase? Well, they start the checkout process. In most ecommerce businesses, for every two people who start the checkout process, one person completes it, so 50% of people drop off, 50% of people purchase. So by tracking “begin checkouts” as your conversion action, rather than just the purchase, you get twice as much data to help your algorithm learn. 

Now I know a “begin checkout” is not a purchase, but think of it this way. Everyone who purchased had to begin checkout, right? And everyone who didn't “begin checkout” didn't purchase. So although it's going to double count in a way, ‘cause you get two begin checkouts for every purchase, even if someone “begins checkout” and doesn't purchase, that's still a very strong signal for you and for Google Ads that that was the right kind of person to target, even if the purchase didn't happen in that moment. 

And if you don't have enough data there, you can move back a step. Maybe if someone “adds to cart.” That's the signal we need. A lot of ecommerce businesses I work with, I would say the average is that 10% to 20% of people who land on the website add something to cart. That means 80% to 90% of people don't add something to cart. So at least we know they weren't the right person and those add to cart folks were the right person. Let's track that micro-conversion. 

This works for lead generation as well. Maybe you want to track engagement with your form. So even if they don't complete the form, you at least know they were interested in it. Or maybe you have a specific contact page people need to visit first before contacting you. So you could track “contact page visits” as a conversion.

The goal with all of this is to ensure that you're getting at least 30 conversions a month per campaign because that's really what you're going to need to get Smart Bidding to work, which is what you're going to need to drive the best results from Google Ads. 

All right. Next thing that so many small business owners don't know about or don't think about is audiences. When we run Search campaigns, we're so focused on picking the exact right keywords that are perfect for what the ideal customer is searching for. And that's great. We should absolutely do that. But audience targeting works as an excellent layer on top of that, or an addition to that to help us reach the kind of person who's likely to be a customer. 

Let me give you a few examples of this. Maybe you are, let's use our electrician example, right? Or some kind of home services provider. You have keywords for things people might be looking for, “broken air conditioner,” “Electrician available today,” “electrician near me,” et cetera. Not every single person searching for those things is going to be the right customer for you and audiences are a way to help you filter some of that out. 

Another example, Google knows when people on Google are a homeowner versus a renter. So maybe you decide, you know what, to try to save some budget, I'm going to exclude people who are renters and only target people who are homeowners when they're searching for me.

Let's try a different example. Perhaps you're a company that sells accounting software. There's a lot of different kinds of accounting software for tiny businesses like mine, small businesses, and large corporations. The same accounting software solution is not going to work for all of them. Google has audience targeting solutions that help you understand the size of companies someone works at. If you sell accounting software for large corporations, maybe you want to have all your accounting software keywords, but then you layer audience targeting on top to only show ads on those searches if the person searching works at a very large company. This goes on and on and on for tons of industries. 

Another example is dog food. I've heard of a few businesses before that sell various kinds of organic dog food, dog food delivery, fresh dog food, et cetera. Let's use fresh dog food as an example. Most dog owners are not going to want to spend the money on fresh dog food delivery. That is a subset of dog food buyers. So what else do we know about the person who might be willing to pay a huge premium for fresh dog food delivery? That's probably a high income household. Maybe it's the kind of person who's really interested in organic food or vegan or vegetarian food. Maybe this is a luxury shopper or a luxury traveler. So again, we can choose to advertise on keywords like dog food but only if we know that the user is someone likely to convert. 

With audience targeting, this is what we call narrowing through targeting, requiring someone to both search for something related to our keywords, but also match audience targeting requirements that suggest they're the right kind of person who's most likely to buy from us. That way we're not wasting money on clicks from people who are searching for our keywords, but are very unlikely to become a customer.

A few more ways to use audiences that many small business owners are not aware of. One thing you can do in Google Ads is upload your customer list. This is a feature called Customer Match. Now, there are some requirements in place that you can't actually target your customer list until you spend $50,000 in ads. I don't know about you, but I'm never spending $50,000 on Google Ads. That's a lot of money for me. But even so, it's still helpful to upload that customer list into Google. Why? Because even if you're not running ads at all, even if you're spending $10 and nowhere near $50,000, Google will give you insights about that customer list. Once it's been uploaded and processed for 24 hours, you can see what other audience segments people on your customer list belong to, which can give you ideas for other kinds of audience targeting you might want to use, or even insights about the right kind of personas. 

For example, I was on a coaching call with a new client earlier this week. We took a look at the insights from their customer list and they had told me that the target demographic for this travel business was empty nesters in their kind of 40s and 50s or maybe they had teenage kids, but age-wise kind of 40 to 50 year olds. However, when we looked at their customer list, we actually saw there was a strong over index for people age 65 plus, way more so than people in that 40 to 50 year old demographic. So that was great insight to see, although they may have thought when developing their customer personas that their ideal customer was 40 to 50, they actually had a much larger segment of their customers in that 65 plus range, which would inform future targeting for their ads and also inform their ad creative and the kinds of people they would want to show in their ads. 

Something else to keep in mind when using audience targeting is you can use audiences to include or you can use audiences to exclude. So the example I gave earlier about the electrician, maybe we don't want to target renters. One way to do that is to say electrician keywords only targeted to homeowners. The other way to do that is electrician keywords excluding renters. And those are not the same thing because with audience targeting, although Google knows a lot about us, Google doesn't know everything about us. So some people Google will know as homeowners, some people Google will know as renters and some people Google's not going to know. It's unknown. So if you only target homeowners, that means you're excluding renters, but you're also excluding people who Google just doesn't know their home ownership status. Whereas if you only exclude renters, that means you're still targeting homeowners and people for whom their home ownership status is unknown. So that's something to think about when you're building out a strategy of how to use audiences if you might want to only include certain audiences or you may want to exclude certain audiences. 

The last tip I'll give you for now around audience targeting, is there's a campaign type in Google ads called Demand Gen. And if you're going to expand beyond Search at all, try to put ads in front of people who are not actively searching but are likely to be your ideal customer. Don't want a Display campaign, don't want a Video views campaign and you definitely don't want a Performance Max campaign on a small budget. Demand Gen is the campaign type you're going to want to use.

All right, next. This is another place I would say many Google Ads practitioners working with all sides of budgets go wrong. And that is we will spend so much of our time, either as Google Ads experts or Google Ads newbies or something in between, focusing on our keywords and our targeting and our bidding and little time focusing on the only thing the end user actually sees, which is your ad creative. So my advice to you to get big results from a small budget is to focus at least 50% of your energy on the ad creative itself. 

For a Search ad, that means text. Because no matter what the user searched for, your ad may or may not show up on the page. It's going to be alongside ads from your competitors. Why should someone click on your ad versus someone else's? The user doesn't know what Match type you used, if it's a standard versus dynamic ad group, what bid strategy you used. They just know if your ad is going to help them answer their question or not. You want to make sure your ad creative stands out. And of course, we'll move into image ads. That becomes a bit more complicated. Video ads, more complicated. So I'm focusing right now mostly on advice for search text ads, since for most small budget accounts, you'll be most of your budget focused on Search.

And I've written at the top here, human ad creative. Generative AI tools are fabulous. I use them every day in my business and I'm sure you're testing the waters or perhaps also using these tools every day as well. Generative AI, whether it's the built-in Google Ads AI or it's Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT, Perplexity, pick your poison, okay? These are all very helpful ideation tools, but ultimately ad creative needs a human eye. So this is a place where generative AI can assist you. It can help you come up with ideas, but we are not yet, at least in a place where AI can just write your ads for you. It still needs that human touch. 

So when you're creating a Search ad in Google Ads, we have Responsive Search ads. So in a single ad, you can add up to 15 different headlines and up to 4 descriptions. When you're working on a small budget, I don't recommend using all of them. You only need about 8 to 10 different headlines and about three descriptions. Because even with that, that's going to create thousands of different combinations for Google to test to figure out which of those headlines and descriptions drive the best results for each user on each query for your business. 

There's this little trick you can do in Responsive Search ads that, I mean, it's not actually a hack. It's a feature of Google Ads. But I see a lot of people saying, this is the ultimate hack. What is the closest thing we have to hack in Google Ads? And the way this works is you can put a little piece of code into your ad that will insert the keyword that matches the user's search term. What now? 

Let's back up a step. Let's say the user searched for “emergency electrician near me,” and you have the keyword “emergency electrician.” That's the most relevant keyword you have to what the user searched for. And if you use Dynamic Insertion, you can make the ad, insert that keyword, “emergency electrician,” to show exactly what that user was searching for.

If another user comes along and searches for “air conditioning installation in Miami Florida,” and you have the keyword “air conditioner installation,” then it will insert air conditioner installation instead. So it's a way to make sure your ad is really customized to what the user is searching for without having to create all these different headline variations. And importantly, it doesn't put what the user typed into Google into the headline. You can imagine how that could run into some issues. It puts your keyword that you chose, which matched to the user's search. It's really helpful to use dynamic insertion. 

The next tip I have for you is to make it personal. Google has done research and I've backed this up with my own clients that using the words “you” or “your” in your headlines and descriptions improves your click through rate. For example, instead of saying,  “we'll fix any electrical emergency,” say “we'll fix your electrical emergency.” Instead of saying “yoga pants,” say “best yoga pants for you.” People are self centered. They like to be about themselves using the words you and your, and your ad text. Again, that human touch, that little tweak can really help.

And last thing I'll say is to try to TikTok-ify your ads. And what do I mean by that? I mean your ads need a bit of a hook. They need to be a little sexy. They need to stand out. Even if you're working in a decidedly unsexy industry, because your ads are showing up on a very crowded search engine results page along with your competitors ads. Yes, but also potentially along local services ads or shopping results, organic results, map results, image results. There's a lot going on there.

So if you want to stand out, it's not enough to just say “best electrician.” Great. You know who else is the best electrician? Every single other ad on the page. So think about what those hooks are. What are those words or pieces of information that can help you stand out from all the other ads on the page? 

An example I saw earlier this week was an image ad from a brand called Reformation. It's a clothing brand I'd never heard of until this week. And the text below it said, being naked is the most sustainable option, we're number two. And I love that, of course, mentioning being naked grabbed attention, but they were trying to get across something really important about their brand, that their brand is sustainable. So they could have just said sustainable clothing, most sustainable clothing. No, they use some really creative copywriting to grab attention, to call themselves number two, right? Which not only stopped the scroll, I then spent about half an hour browsing their website. I'm planning to go to their store in Toronto over the weekend and I'm relaying the story to you now because it's really stuck with me. 

So your goal is not to make it into some Google Ads expert’s presentation. That's not going to do anything for your business. But your goal is to make sure that in that search engine results page, you are going beyond the basics. Anyone can do the basics. Use that human touch to think about what's going to help me stand out and stop that scroll against my competitors. 

So these are the five things we must have in place if you want to drive good results from a small budget. Because you know what, after working with budgets of $10 a day, $1 million a day, and everything in between, I can tell you it's easier to run ads with $1million a day. Running ads with a small budget is like running Google Ads on hard mode. But with these five things in place, you are much more likely to be able to drive those big results you're looking for.

And so that leads me to the last thing I'll leave you with: you might just not want to run ads and that is okay. I am a Google Ads coach, an ex-Googler who is telling you that the best thing for your business may just be to not run ads to figure out if your business is likely to be successful with Google Ads. There are three things I have as a checklist. 

First is an SEO foundation. Although SEO and Google Ads both have to do with search engines and search results, they work very differently. But the things that help you do well from an SEO perspective will also help you do well from a Google Ads perspective. So if you have not spent any time or money on SEO, you're not ranking organically at all yet, you don't have the basics in place, you're unlikely to be successful with ads. Especially if you're a new business owner, I will recommend that you hire help with SEO before dipping your toes into Google Ads. 

Next is the budget. I mentioned earlier that my rule of thumb is you want to ensure you have enough to spend, you can spend enough to get at least 10 clicks per day. What this usually shakes out to for more small businesses is you're going to need an ads budget of at least $1,000 a month, and you have to be willing to spend that for at least three months and potentially see no return. So if the idea of spending $1,000 a month on ads for potentially three months and potentially not seeing a positive ROI on that would drown your business, then don't even spend $1. Better than not spending it all. 

The third thing I look at to see if the business is likely to be successful with ads is something I call the rule of two. And the way this works is you want to multiply your conversion rate times your average order value and you want that to equal at least two. Why? Your conversion rate means of all the people who visit your website, what percentage do the thing you want them to do. Purchase, become a lead, etc. And the higher your conversion rate, the more conversions you're going to get per user, the lower the average order value, the value of each conversion can be. Whereas if you sell a very high ticket item, your conversion rate might be lower which is okay if they net out to at least two. So in practice, this would be a conversion rate of 1%, average order value of $200, for example. That would get you to the rule of two. Conversion rate of 2%, average order value can be $100. These things work in relation to each other. But ultimately, what I have found with the thousands of the ads accounts I looked at, if this doesn't shake out to at least two, you're probably not ready to run ads.

Let's recap how we are going to drive big results with a small budget in Google Ads. 

First, make sure you get your data foundation in place. A house with no foundation will crumble. That's conversion tracking, that's audience lists, and that's account linking. 

Next, 9 times out of 10, start with a Search campaign. Ensure you have a sufficient budget. Really focus on having high quality Search ads so you can get more bang for your buck. 

Next, optimize for micro-conversions to ensure you have enough data to feed that Smart bidding algorithm and get that AI working for your business. 

Fourth, don't forget about audiences. Really great way to sculpt your traffic and get really specific on the kind of users you're trying to reach. 

Five, focus at least 50% of your energy on your ad creative. Using AI tools to help, sure, but making it really personal, very authentic and standing out on that search engine results page.

And if you don't have these fundamentals in place, then don't run ads. That is okay. There are plenty of other marketing initiatives you can focus on to drive results for your business.

Thanks for tuning in to this special episode of Inside Google Ads. If you like what you heard today, please give a five-star rating, a thumbs up, a review, wherever you're watching or listening. 

I'm Jyll Saskin Gales and I'll see you next time Inside Google Ads.