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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. 👀
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Okay this one's a bit more advanced but stick with me because it's genuinely one of the most underused settings in Google Ads, and almost nobody talks about it.
It's called "new customers, high value" bidding, and once you understand it, it kind of changes how you think about your whole account.
Here's the problem it solves: Google's default behavior is to bid equally on everyone; new leads and existing customers you've already sold to. And Google actually LOVES spending your budget on warm audiences, because they're cheap and easy conversions. It's great for your short-term numbers, terrible for actually growing your business. If you're not bringing in new customers, you're not growing, you're just squeezing the same pool of people over and over.
So Google gives you a setting to fix this. You can literally tell it "I know a new customer costs more to acquire than an existing one, but I'm willing to pay extra for it", because you're thinking long-term, not just this week's ROAS.
But here's the interesting part: new customers, high value.
Think about your own customers for a second. Some are probably worth $200 to your business. Others are worth $2,000. You'd happily pay way more to acquire that second person, right? The problem is, Google can't automatically tell the difference, UNLESS you teach it.
So how do you teach it? You upload two lists:
All of your existing customers
Just your high-value ones (the ones worth significantly more, could be 3x average, could be 10x, depends on your business)
Google analyzes that high-value list and starts finding patterns, age range, location, interests, whatever's common among your best customers, and then goes and finds more people like them. You just tell Google how much extra you're willing to pay to land one of those higher-value people, and it optimizes toward that.
A few things worth knowing before you try this:
→ You need at least 1,000 people per list for Google to actually analyze it properly, so don't make your "high value" list so tiny it can't work.
→ You need an actual value assigned to every customer in your CRM, Google can't sort what it can't measure.
→ This works especially well because acquiring a customer worth 10x more usually doesn't cost you 10x as much in ad spend. Sometimes it's only 2-3x the cost for way more value. That's a genuinely great trade.
The mindset shift here is simple: not all conversions are created equal, and if you're bidding like they are, you're leaving money on the table. This setting lets you tell Google exactly who you actually want more of.
It takes a bit of setup (exporting lists, uploading, defining segments) but once it's live, it just runs in the background making your account smarter.
Follow for more of these, this definitely won't be the last one. 👀
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. 👀
Today I audited a Google Ads account spending over £1500/month.
The owner thought the problem was the budget.
It wasn't.
Their campaigns were showing on devices that had never generated a conversion.
One small change could stop wasted spend immediately.
That's why I never touch the budget before looking at the data.
Most accounts don't need more money.
They need better decisions.
#GoogleAds #PPC#Marketing