The $20/Day Google Ads Strategy That Gets HIGH QUALITY Leads (Case Study)

Can you actually get high-quality leads on Google Ads with just $20 a day? The answer is yes, but only if you set it up the right way. In this special 100th episode of the Inside Google Ads podcast, Google Ads Coach Jyll Saskin Gales walks you through a real case study from one of her coaching clients who is driving their entire business using just $20 per day on Google Ads.

We are going to look at the "before" numbers, where they were getting a lot of clicks but zero actual business, and compare them to the "after" numbers, where they are now generating highly profitable leads. Jyll shares the exact 12-step strategy she used to turn this account around, covering everything from keyword match types and negative keywords to the specific bid strategies that work best for small budgets.

However, a shoestring budget won't work in every industry, so Jyll will help you determine if your business is the right fit for this approach.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• The three non-negotiable requirements for a low-budget Google Ads strategy.
• Why high impression volume and low CPCs can actually be red flags.
• The 12 specific changes made to the account to increase lead quality.
• How to fix conversion tracking so you aren't optimizing for vanity metrics.
• Real performance metrics showing exactly what $20 a day can achieve.

Do you have a question for Jyll? Drop a comment on Spotify, YouTube, or any of her social media posts, and she'll answer it for you in an upcoming episode.

You can get Inside Google Ads 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=episode100
 
Google Ads Account Audit with Jyll
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Transcript

Can you actually get high quality leads on Google Ads with just $20 a day? 

The answer is yes, but only if you set it up the right way.

In this special episode, I am not just going to drop general advice on you. I'm walking you through a real case study from one of my real Google Ads coaching clients who's able to completely drive their business through just $20 a day in Google Search ads.

I'm going to show you the before and after numbers and walk you through the exact 12-step strategy we used so you can use it too.

However, I do need to be honest. This low budget approach will not work for every business. So first, we're going to walk through the three key things you need to make a low budget strategy work. Then I'm going to share the 12-step strategy we used to turn this business owner's Google Ads into a money making machine.

If you're looking to get big results out of a shoestring Google Ads budget, this is the episode for you.

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: Episode 100, The $20 a day Google Ads strategy.

Here are three things you need to know about whether or not this might work for you.

1. One of the common myths I hear is that you can only get by with Google Ads on a small budget if you live in a small town. And that's not true. 

This case study I'm sharing with you today takes place in one of the top 10 most populous cities in North America. So yes, you can spend just $20 a day in a big city and get results. 

The more important factor is competition. And I don't mean actual business competition. I mean auction competition. This business owner operates in a space where there are a ton of people who offer this service, but most of them don't advertise on Google. So because of that, CPCs are pretty low and $20 a day is more than sufficient.

2. You're going to want to check Keyword Planner in Google Ads. It's free as long as you have a Google Ads account. And check to see what kind of cost per click you might expect in your industry in your target location.

If the expected CPCs are $2 or less, then $20 a day will work for you because you can afford at least 10 clicks a day. But if the expected CPCs in your industry, in your location, are $5 per click, $10 per click, or $50 a click, then this strategy will not work for you. That is to say the $20 a day part won't work for you. The rest of the steps you should absolutely take, but I can't guarantee you'll see the same results because those higher CPCs mean that you do have a lot of auction competitors.

3. The third thing you need, and this may sound so obvious, but it's a step that so many practitioners skip, you need to be offering something people want.

This is why Google Ads often don't work for new business owners, not because your products or services aren't amazing, but because you just haven't figured out the right way to communicate what you offer in a way that's appealing to your audience, or your website has just not been tested enough and it's not optimized to convert that intent. 

This business owner I'm going to share with you, a relatively new business owner, with a website that is nothing fancy that they DIY’d themselves, but it's a high demand service.

The website does a good job of explaining why you should go with this person, and they make it really easy to convert and reach out to them. So those are just some marketing fundamentals you do need to have in place if a shoestring Google Ads budget is going to work for you.

All right, now that the caveats are out of the way, I'm going to show you the exact metrics from this Google Search campaign before I started working with this client. Then I'll share the 12-step strategy we use to turn things around. And then I'm going to show you the “after” numbers of the real results they're achieving right now in Google Ads.

I had my first Google Ads coaching call with this client in June 2025. They had experimented with Performance Max, with Search. And at this time they had one Search campaign running. Here were their stats for the last 30 days. They had 19,000 impressions, 761 clicks, which means a 4% click-through rate, which is a little lower than what I would typically expect for non-brand search. They had spent $520 in the last 30 days and their average cost per click was $0.68. 

Are you starting to see the red flags? 

Google Ads said they had 708 conversions over the last 30 days, which meant a 93% conversion rate. 

Now are you really seeing the red flags? 

That meant that their cost per conversion was supposedly $0.73 and when I asked this business owner if they had gotten 708 leads in the last 30 days they said, not even close.

Over the course of our one hour call, here are the 12 specific recommendations I made to the client and we were able to actually implement 10 of them right there on the call.

1. Search Partners. They had Search Partners turned on in their Search campaign, and that's why they had such a high volume of impressions and then such low CPCs at $0.68. So I showed them how to turn Search Partners off in their campaign settings so that we would only be advertising to people searching for their services on Google Search.

2. Bid strategy. They were using the Target ROAS bid strategy, and that made no sense for this business. Target ROAS, return on ad spend, is meant for e-commerce businesses or for lead gen businesses where you're using offline conversion tracking and importing different lead scoring or conversion values. And that was not the case here. They just wanted phone calls or form fills and that was it, so I advised them to change to Maximize Conversions. This would tell Google instead to just spend their budget, their $20 a day, in order to get them as many conversions as possible.

3. Keywords. All of the keywords are in Broad Match and I advised them to use Exact Match instead so that they could really hone their budget on the people searching for things most relevant to what they offer.

4. Using the wrong keywords. They had a lot of keywords and a lot of really generic stuff, which was further exacerbated by Broad Match. We went through Keyword Planner together and I helped them pick just 18 keywords that were really zoned in on exactly the kinds of things they'd want to advertise on. And we put those in Exact Match then paused all the old Broad Match keywords.

5. Negative keywords. As part of your keyword research, you're not just looking for the keywords you want, you also wanna look for the searches or phrases you don't want. For example, there are a few niches of service providers in their industry that offer a service they don't offer. So we added those terms as negative keywords to ensure even with Exact Match, we wouldn't be at risk of advertising on searches for things we can't offer.

6. Ad text. Now that we had just 18 Exact Match keywords, I walked my client through adding Dynamic Keyword Insertion to their Responsive Search ad. What this does is put their own keyword into the ad when it matches to the user's search. So importantly, it's not going to put the user's search into your ad. You can imagine how that could lead to some wonky things, especially if you're using Broad match or even AI Max. But with Exact Match, we know that the user search will be pretty closely related to the keyword. So Dynamic Keyword Insertion lets Google pick the keyword that matched the user search and put it into the headline, creating a highly relevant ad text and improving click-through rate.

7. Call to Action ad text. I advised them to improve their call to actions. For example, one of their headlines was “Contact Us.” Literally every single business spending money on Google Ads in the entire world could have that as a call to action. We want to be more specific.

This is a service provider where you need to book a specific date for the service. So instead we used a headline that said, “Reserve your [blank] date now.” So that they would really encourage that sense of urgency, like, come on, you’ve got to get your date now.

The next three parts of the strategy all fall under assets, those optional things you can add to your ad that really help with relevance and click-through rate as well. 

8. The business name. They had not added the business name asset, and doing so just helps your ads look a lot more legitimate when it's your business name instead of blah, blah, blah.com. 

9. Related to that, was the business logo. Rather than just having that generic gray circle, I showed them where to upload their logo so they could stand out and look a little bit more prominent in those search results. Because remember, they're not just potentially competing against other people in the auction, they're also competing against all those organic results. So you want to look legitimate and prominent at the top of that page.

10. Image assets. You can't use these in a brand new account. You need a little bit of account history first, but they had that. They'd been advertising for a while. This was one of the things I advised them to do after the call. During our call, I showed them where to upload the image assets and what orientations to use. And then they were able to use the recording I sent them the next day to go add those images by themselves, to show the kinds of customers who would work really well with this business by showing the service provider in action in different contexts. It's again a great way to just stand out in those search results.

11. Automatically created assets and auto-apply recommendations. Say that three times fast. We wanted to turn all of those off. 

To be clear, not every automatically created asset is bad, but in this case, we specifically wanted to turn off automatically created site links and automatically created callouts since we did not like the ones Google had created. 

And then with auto apply recommendations, you want to turn those off so that you don't go through all the effort of putting together this very specific strategy just to have Google Ads automatically undo it all by adding Broad Match keywords or turning on optimized targeting or changing your bid strategy without you realizing. 

So we turned off all that auto stuff to ensure that our strategy, as we implemented it together, would stay the same until we decided to change it.

12. And then last but not least, you might be shocked that I left this to step 12, is conversion tracking. There is no way we had a 93% conversion rate. What was happening here is that page views were being tracked as conversions. And unfortunately, this is so, so common.

Because setting up conversion tracking is something you either need to do on your website in Google Tag Manager in GA4, it's not typically something I cover on the Google Ads coaching call, but I was able to refer my client to a trusted specialist. They had a call with them, were able to get their proper form fill tracking set up right away and then connect that to their campaigns. So now that Maximize Conversions bid strategy would only be focusing on those form fills they wanted and not just every single page view.

And there you have it. That was our 12-step strategy to get Google Ads working on just $20 a day. And after that, I didn't hear from the client for a few weeks, which is…a good thing? Or was that a bad thing?

Next, I saw a five-star review pop up on my Google Business profile from this client, so I knew things were working. And then they actually came back to me a few months later to book a Google Ads coaching call for a completely different business they run. At the end of that call, I said, hey, do you mind if we just take a peek at that account together? 

So I'm really excited to share the actual performance metrics from this $20 a day, 12-step setup. These are numbers from November 2025:

• Impressions were 2,693 in the last 30 days
• Clicks were 359, which means we had a 13% click-through rate. Now importantly, we got 85% fewer impressions, and more than 50% fewer clicks, but that meant our click-through rate was now 13%, which is really high. That's above average of what I typically see in businesses like this for non-brand search. So we were showing way fewer ads, but only showing ads to people who were searching for what we offered and likely to be interested, leading to a 13% click-through rate, which of course means a really high quality score as well as a high quality audience.
• The last 30 days spend was $597. So just shy of spending $20 a day on average. And our average CPC was $1.66. So CPCs had gone up about one and a half times, but still pretty cheap. I said that was a key part of the strategy, that $1.66 CPCs on Google search for the exact searches we're looking for. That's part of the reason why this 12-step strategy could work for this business.
• For conversions we got 51 over the last 30 days. So again, 93% drop in conversions, but you know what? These were quality conversions. We weren't blowing money on optimizing for page views. We weren't blowing money on Search Partners. These were just people on Google Search looking for exactly what this business owner offers. So our real conversion rate here is 14%. And again, for a service provider like this, I would consider that to be above average. Generally for a form fill conversion for a service provider, especially a small independent business, not some huge multinational chain or franchise, I expect a conversion rate of around 8% to 10% for that form fill. This is 14%. So again, it shows it's not just about the ads. though of course that's important. But when those people are landing on this website, they're interested in the offer and they want to convert.
• At the end of the day, that brought us to a cost per conversion of $11.71. So that was the cost per lead here, highly profitable for this business owner. They're able to convert those leads at a really high rate and make good money off of their Google Ads investment.

There you have it. This is the exact 12-step Google Ads strategy we use to turn $20 a day into profitable leads for this client.

And because this is Episode 100 of the Inside Google Ads podcast, I wanted to leave you with a little something extra special at the end.

The key ways that I help you get better results from Google Ads, in addition to this free podcast and my free social media content, are booking a one-on-one coaching call with me, joining my courses, Google Ads for Beginners or Inside Google Ads, or getting me to audit your Google Ads account. 

So today, I am offering you 20% off a Google Ads audit of your account. All you need to do when you reach out to me is just mention Episode 100 and boom, you get 20% off.

Whether you have one campaign or a hundred campaigns, I'm going to go through your account with a fine-tooth comb, give you a scorecard of how things are going, and then list out specific actions you can take to improve performance. 

After receiving the audit, you can go ahead and implement it yourself or you can book a call with me and we'll implement it together. It’s whatever you'd like to do.

After the most recent Google Ads audit I did, the client did decide to book a coaching call with me, and here's what they said to me on the call. “I do a lot of audits on different things in my business. This was the best ever. It was so detailed and you explained everything so thoroughly. A lot of the time when I go away from an audit, I think, I don't know if it was worth the money, but this is worth every penny. I just want to say thank you so much.”

You can learn more about getting me to audit your Google Ads account at the link in the episode description. 

You'll also find information about my coaching, courses, and everything you want to know at jyll.ca. That's J-Y-L-L dot C-A. 

Just remember to mention Episode 100 to get 20% off your Google Ads account audit.

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