Small Budget Strategies for Google Ads

The main reason for why I love Google Ads is because it allows small businesses to successfully and profitably take on much larger companies who are their competitors in the same business niche. And I know this because this is what happened when I launched my first campaign. All the way back to 2010, when I didn't have as much gray in my beard and I had a little bit more hair. At that time, I launched our very first business and it was a tourism business. And because we're in that niche, we're going up against some absolute titans in that industry. So TripAdvisor, booking.com, marriott Hotels, and also the family of these two sisters. And in the early days of running that campaign, I always joked that these companies would have a daily coffee budget that would be much higher than our total marketing budget each month. But despite that challenge and having a much smaller budget, we were able to create a successful, successful Google Ads campaign that allowed our business to become profitable and grow every single year. So right now, what I want to share with you in today's video is I want to share with you the top three small budget Google Ads strategies for success. And just in case we haven't met yet, my name is Aaron young, I'm from Define Digital Academy and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. And the very first strategy that you need to undertake in order for success with Google Ads is if you've got a small budget, is that you need to make sure that you set your budget at a high enough level that you're going to be getting enough data and volume through your Google Ads campaign. Now the reason for why this is so important is because you need to make sure that you're getting a baseline level of data and volume. And by that I mean a baseline level of impressions and clicks. And this is important because if you're not getting enough data going through, you don't have enough data to be able to view your data and also then make some extra optimizations. But also as well, Google is not able to get enough data to be able to run its baseline split tests and optimizations so that it can automatically start filtering out the best traffic for your campaigns. And I know you're asking right now, how much data do you need? Well, as a good rule of thumb, these are the metrics that you should be achieving with the absolute minimum goal the that you need to be getting at least 10 clicks a day. Now if we were to roll that out, if you're running a search campaign with a baseline click through ratio of 5%. So you're getting five clicks out of every 100 impressions. That means that you need to be getting 200 impressions a day. So when you take it out to a month, you'd be looking at getting 300 clicks a month from 6,000 impressions. Now, if you're running performance max, that click through ratio comes down to about 1% as an initial benchmark. So for those 300 clicks, you'd be needing to get 10,000 impressions a month. And that is going to give you enough data, as I said, so that you're not in this endless learning loop where you're just not seeing enough data. Because if you're only getting one or two clicks a day, you don't have enough data because by the end of the day that would only give you sort of 50 or 60 clicks. And Google wouldn't have enough impressions because a good benchmark is that Google needs for search campaigns at least 5,5000 impressions in a 30 day period. Now, there is some data to say that that is now down to about 2000, but I still prefer to err on the side of caution and give Google more data. So that's why I'm still recommending to hit that baseline of 5,000 impressions in 30 days for a search campaign. So if you roll that all down, a simple way of setting your daily budget would be to find your cost per click. So the average cost per click for the initial product or keyword that you're going to be focusing and and then times that by 10. So let me show you what I mean. So to find this, when you're in Google Ads, if you go into your tools and settings, then go over to your keyword planner and then we want to go into discover new keywords. Let's just say that you're wanting to do a campaign for iPhone 12 cases. So we type that in here. You can also add in your URL here. Then you click get results. So from here we can see there's a keyword for iPhone12 cases and we can see here that the top of page bid for the low range, so those positions three and four is 40 cents where the top the page bid for high range is $1.40. So you'd be looking at there I'd be wanting to take this number here and timing it by 10. So you'd be looking at that you'd want a daily budget of $14 as a minimum in order to get those 10 clicks. So that's the real simple process and formula you can use to get your Initial starting budget is go through and do that keyword research. Find one keyword that you're wanting to focus on, so an individual product or an individual search term, and then times that average CPC by 10. So in the example I showed you, the average CPC was $1.39 and we times that by 10. And that's why we'd be recommending a daily starting budget of $14. Now, one thing I do want to stress with that is to also make sure that you're reviewing the data correctly and also making those correct optimization decisions. I want to give you free access to my Google Ads Optimization checklist. And this is a checklist which will let you know exactly what optimizations you need to be completing and how often you need to complete them. So whether they need to be done every 72 hours, every week, every month, or every 90 days. And if you want to get your free copy right now, all you need to do is to follow that link in description below. And now that brings us to the second strategy that you need to be using. If you only have a small budget for Google Ads, and that is, is that when you start, you only want to focus on one individual keyword theme, one product or one service. So if you have three different services that you're targeting, say for example, you are an electrician and you want to target air conditioning installations, you also want to target general electrical maintenance, or you also want to target little handyman jobs, I would just be choosing one of those things, say for example, air conditioning and forgetting about those other services initially when it comes to marketing on Google. And to also help you choose which service or product that you should be focusing on first, I would also say that you're better off to focus on your most popular or your highest selling product. And the reason for that. So the reason why you only focus on one product while also focusing on your most popular product is that it's increasing your chances for success so much more. So firstly, the reason for why you'd want to only focus on one product or service or keyword theme is you've already got a small budget, so you don't want to be spreading that budget any thinner by trying to target multiple products or multiple keywords or multiple services. Just focus on one core product that you know will sell well. And then on top of that, the reason for you want to focus on one of your most popular or your best selling services or products is because you know that they convert. You do know that people like your products or those particular services. So what you're wanting to doing is you're wanting to increase the amount of sales or revenue that that popular service already gets so that you can then reinvest that and then start marketing those other products or services. So going back to that example of the electrician, let's just say you started with your air conditioning services and then after a couple of months you got some more air conditioning jobs, which is bringing more money into your business. You are then able to reinvest some of that revenue and then go about and market your General Electrician jobs. So with this strategy, it's all about focusing on your strengths first, increasing the revenue coming in so that you've then got more money to reinvest into buying, marketing your business with Google Ads. And then that brings us to the third and final strategy. And that is that you need to be super aggressive with your ad copy. And the reason for this is that remember with Google Ads is that you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. So by having super aggressive ad copy, it's better off for someone to see your ad and not click on it. Because what a worse scenario would be is that if they then see your ad click on it, you're then charged for that click for them to only go to your website and then bounce off in a couple of seconds because it's not exactly what they were looking for. So what you're wanting to do here is that you're wanting to put as much specific information as possible in your ad copy so that you can filter out some of those clicks which you know are just going to be a waste of time. And some great examples of this is firstly put a clear price in your headline. So let's just say you're running a service and your services start from $199. Now there may be some of your competitor that are willing to offer that service for $149 or $99. But by putting your price right there in the ad copy, you're then going to be filtering out those people who are happy to pay $99 or $149 for a product or service which doesn't have the same level of quality. So a great way of helping to limit that spend is by putting in a clear price market in your ad copy. And then the second way, and this may sound counterintuitive, but to put in some clear limitations about your products, because remembering here that what you're wanting to do is you're only wanting to get that click for people who you know are going to have a Better chance of buying your product. So an example of this is, remember how I said at the start of this video that the first campaign that we ran was for our own tourism business and in that campaign we were marketing our one bedroom villas. So what we did is that we made it very, very clear that our accommodation was only for couples because we had one bedroom villas that only had a king size bed in it. We didn't want to attract that family market or people traveling in groups. So we made it very, very clear that our villas were very much for couples. So we also added in there that they're perfect for honeymoons or perfect for couples traveling without kids. And what this did was that it stopped us getting a lot of wasted clicks for people who are wanting to look for family holidays or as I said, people traveling in larger groups. So that one may sound counterintuitive, but I hope you understand what we were achieving there because for us we found it a very, very successful strategy. So if you're running Google Ads and you need to see success with a small budget, remember those three important strategies. Firstly, make sure you have that baseline data running through your account. Secondly, just focus on one product or service to start with and then finally make sure that you're putting in really aggressive ad copy to filter out those people have a less chance of going through and buying your product or ordering your service. Once again, thank you for joining me. My name is Aaron Young from Define Digital Academy and I'm your 15,000 hour Google Ads master. And another important point that I need to point out that if you're running a small budget in Google Ads, you really, really need to make sure that you've set up your accounts in the correct way. Because if you make a couple of mistakes with how you're setting up your account, you it can cost you a lot of money. So if you're setting up a search campaign, I want you to go through and watch this step by step process in how to correctly set up your search campaigns. Or if you're running a performance max campaign, go through and watch this step by step process in how to set up your performance max campaigns in2023. Thank you again for joining me. See you next time.