Okay real talk, if you're running Google Ads with a small budget, most of the "best practices" you hear online are actually written for people spending $10k/month. And trying to follow them with a $500-1000/month budget is basically why so many small businesses give up on Google Ads thinking "it just doesn't work for us."

It's not that it doesn't work. You just have to play it differently. Here's what actually works when your budget is small (and by small I mean anything under $3,000/month, tiny being under $600/month):

Pick ONE campaign type. Just one; I know Performance Max looks amazing, it's basically handles search, display, YouTube, all of it. But here's the thing: it needs data to work well, and if your budget is small, you're not generating enough conversions fast enough to feed it. Same goes for running Search + Display + Shopping all at once, you're just spreading a small budget so thin that neither you nor Google can figure out what's actually working.

Stick with Search. It's the most straightforward, easiest to understand, and gives you the clearest signal on what's converting. Once you've got some data and you're ready to scale, that's when you bring in Performance Max.

Only advertise ONE offer; I know you probably sell more than one thing. But if you're spreading a small budget across five products or services, you're getting a trickle of data on each instead of a solid signal on one. Pick your best performer (or your highest-value one if you don't have data yet) and go all in on that. Higher-value offers are also just easier to make profitable, a $500 product doesn't cost 10x more to advertise than a $50 one, so the math works in your favor.

Go hyper-local; If you can serve a smaller geographic area, do it. Instead of targeting an entire country, narrow down to a city or a radius. It means your budget isn't diluted across a huge audience, and you can actually structure your ad copy and keywords to that specific location, which means better click-through, better conversion, better results overall.

Consider cheaper keywords (with a caveat); Expensive keywords eat small budgets fast. If a keyword costs $5-7 a click, you might only get 5-6 clicks a day, not nearly enough data to optimize anything. Cheaper keywords ($2ish) get you way more volume. BUT, and this matters, cheap keywords are usually cheap for a reason (lower conversion rate or lower value customer). So this isn't "always pick the cheapest," it's "don't ignore the cheaper ones just because they seem less impressive."

Pre-qualify with your ad copy; This one's underrated. You only pay when someone clicks, so you actually want to scare off people who were never going to convert anyway. Adding something like "starting from $500/month" or "local to [city]" into your headline filters out window shoppers before they cost you a cent. Yes, your click-through rate might drop. That's fine. Your conversion rate goes up, and every click you DO pay for is more likely to count.

Be aggressive about cutting underperformers, early; With a bigger budget, you can afford to wait for statistical significance before turning off an underperforming keyword. With a small budget, you can't. If something's clearly lagging behind your other keywords, cut it early and reroute that budget to what's working. Every dollar has to pull its weight.

The overall mindset shift here: small budget doesn't mean "small chance of success." It means you have to be way more disciplined and way more focused than someone spending 10x what you are. Nail this phase, get it profitable, and THEN you scale.

Save this if you're just getting your Google Ads set up, you'll want to reference it.

Follow along, I'm not done, more ad strategy breakdowns coming. 👀

This is genuinely underused Google Ads move; targeting your competitor's customers directly. Let me walk you through it.

Inside your Google Ads account, there's a setting most people never touch: Tools → Audience Manager → Custom Segments. From there you create a custom audience, and instead of the usual interests/behaviors targeting, you go to "people who browse types of websites" and this is the key part, you plug in your competitor's website(s).

So say you're a premium brand and your competitors are more budget/mass-market. You can build a custom audience of people who've been browsing your competitor's site, and put your ads in front of them instead. You're essentially saying "hey, before you buy from them, check us out."

It's not a perfect science, it's not exactly the same as remarketing straight to their customer list, but it does guarantee a chunk of the people seeing your ad have shown interest in exactly what you sell, from a business you're actively trying to beat.

And if you want to take it further (this is the part that actually moves the needle), you get aggressive with your ad copy and creative. Directly call out the competitor. "Better than [competitor]." "Same quality, better price." "We include what they charge extra for." When you write copy like this, Google's smart enough to pick up on it and specifically show your ad to people who are already customers of, or considering that competitor. It knows exactly who to target based on what your ad is actually saying.

Now, how aggressive you want to get is up to you and depends on your industry, your relationship with competitors, and honestly your risk tolerance. But if you're comfortable with it, this works especially well inside Performance Max campaigns.

Bottom line: if your product or service genuinely is better than the competition, this is one of the most direct ways to say so, and get Google to put that message in front of exactly the people who need to hear it.

Small setup, potentially big payoff. Worth testing if you've got a genuine edge over a specific competitor.

Follow for more, this isn't the last strategy breakdown coming your way. 👀