How to Run Google Ads on a Small Budget (eCommerce)

If you are an E commerce business, you might be wondering can I make Google Ads work with a small budget? I am here to tell you yes you can. However, there are several must have strategies in order for it to work. If you try to follow just generic advice, you're more likely to fail. So I have done over a thousand audits in my career. For those who don't know me, my name is Austin LeClaire, I am co founder of of Google Ads agency called Grow my ads the channel you're on. Throughout that time I have worked with extremely small spenders in E commerce and lead generation SaaS etc. All the way up to multibillion dollar companies. So I've seen it all. We currently manage millions in ad spend per month and within that portfolio, although we normally don't work with too small of advertisers, I have seen consulted or built very successful profitable Google Ads accounts that have small budgets. Now first let me define what a small budget is. A small budget is going to be anything below $3,000 per month. Usually if you're higher than $3,000 per month, you have enough ad spend there. You can build out and be a little more aggressive with standard practices that I teach in several of my other videos that you can find here on the YouTube channel. Now when you're 3,000 or under, you've got to be really careful because you don't have a whole lot of spend per month and every dollar truly counts. One thing you'll hear me say in my other videos, and I'll say this in this video as well, if you have a budget less than $1,000 per month, I normally suggest to those people maybe hold off on Google Ads for now. Now that doesn't mean you can't make $1,000 work, however, I think it's just it makes the game that much harder. And usually people give up after a month or two of spending a thousand dollars and not getting much for it. It's because you just don't get enough data. You do not get enough data or heat like I like to call it, and get that momentum you really want in the beginning. Momentum. It's going to make you feel confident that you can get this to work because usually the first few months aren't very profitable. And then once you get data, once you get momentum, you'll. You're off to the races, right? Everyone who's running ads today had to start from the beginning. So when you have a small budget, it just makes it that much harder. Now don't Be discouraged if you're below a thousand, you can still follow my suggestions and more than likely for many of you, you could still make it work. I am just giving a heads up because I don't want people just taking YouTube advice that I'm giving and waste their money. So if you have very limited budget, I'm talking tiny, tiny budgets below $1,000 per month, just be extra, extra cautious if you're in that one to $3,000 range or even one to five, that's what I would consider small budget. What I'm about to tell you and give you strategically for shopping campaign build outs and everything else. These are the strategies that you must deploy in order to have that high chance of success. I've seen it in consultations and I've seen it from actually building and starting up accounts. So I'm going to dive in to a real account and give you the exact strategy I would if I were e commerce with a small budget. Again, small budget being with one to three thousand dollars per month. Let's dive in. Before I give you the strategy and build the campaigns, you're going to need a few things. One, you're going to need a merchant center account. So if you don't have that, go set up a merchant center account and you, you're going to need then a product feed. I have videos on how to optimize and have like extremely well optimized product feeds. That video will be in the description below. Then you need proper rock solid conversion tracking. You absolutely need to make sure that is working before you start spending money. If you're on Shopify, which many of you will be, I have a video on how to set up Google Ads conversion tracking for Shopify. That video will be step by step. By the way, that video is in the description below. If you're not on Shopify, then there's many resources resources online. But make sure you have correct conversion tracking that is working before you spend too much money on the actual ad side of things. Okay, we're now going to start building now a shopping campaign and I'm going to give you the strategy for the small spenders that I recommend. Okay, so I'm in an actual account. Some of these campaigns will be all blurred out. I'm just doing this because this is an actual E commerce company so I can, I can build a standard shopping campaign out which is where I recommend you start. So I did another video on, on Google Ads for small budgets that was geared towards search campaigns and I go through how you would set that up and the exact sort of keyword types and keyword research you should be using. Bid strategies, et cetera. That is for legion, local service based businesses, SaaS, et cetera. That's for non e commerce businesses. For E Commerce Small budgets, 100% of your budget in the beginning should go to shopping ads. I seen advice out there like oh, split 50% shopping and then search and have some on YouTube, yada yada. Forget it, forget about it. 80% plus of revenue from Google Ads for e commerce businesses is generated through shopping ads. Whether that's done through performance max campaigns or just standard shopping campaigns. So it makes the most sense. Get shopping ads to work first, get momentum there first, get data there first, then scale the account from there. It doesn't make sense to take a small budget and disperse it amongst a bunch of campaign types you want to start with with just a standard shopping campaign which I'm going to show you how to build step by step in the exact settings that you need in order to maximize your small budget. Now what I'm going to recommend actually is two campaigns. They're both going to be standard shopping, but there will be two. And why is that? Because the strategy, especially for your small budget is to utilize as much of that budget as you can on your top sellers. Top sellers could be individual products, top sellers could be brands, top sellers could be product categories. It really depends on your website. I'm going to show you a real example for a furniture company, but I would be looking at what are our top sellers right now. If you're not running ads currently, I hope you have a business that's actually generating some revenue. If you do, you're going to know where the money's flowing. So it's either going to be usually categories, brands or actually, you know, hey, we've got 10 products that generate, you know, the majority of our revenue. 10, 20, whatever. It depends on your SKU count. Right? So find that top percent what you would label if I told you go label products. Top sellers like the actual cream of the crop. We want those segmented and maximized and then the rest we're going to uniquely manage. So I'm going to show you this exact setup and build it in an account. Okay. So in this account again everything's blurred out and again I've got proper conversion tracking set up and everything else and I've got merchant center and we're all hooked up. I am going to go to new campaign, that blue button there and then it's going to give me like what's your objective? All of this. You technically just can hit sales, but I always hit create a campaign without goals guidance. I am your guidance today. So you don't really need that. Well, if you click one of these, what it does is just like limits the options you get for the campaigns because it kind of silos you into what the goal would be. It really has no other influence other than that. So just hit create a campaign without goals guidance. Just follow along with me. Then we're going to hit shopping campaign. Now we've got the purchase tag, so this is all good. And then it says add products to the campaign. Again, this is coming from your merchant center account which is linked to your Google Ads account. So I'm going to hit select account. This might be blurred out some of this stuff. Now Google loves to do this. It's going to say select a campaign subtype. What it's trying to do is push you into performance max campaign. Remember I hit, I chose shopping and not performance max and now it's trying to push me into performance max. That's a money grab right now by Google. I do not and I have a full course in performance max campaigns. I do not believe you should start with performance max in most cases, especially with a small budget. I believe start with standard, have a lot of control there. Then if you get momentum, you get conversion volume, you get that dialed in, then you can start experimenting with performance max campaigns later. So I still believe start with standard shopping campaign. So I'm going to hit standard shopping. Then we're going to hit continue. Okay, now we're just going to name it. So here I'm going to do sh for shopping and I'm just putting top sellers, additional settings. A lot of this you really don't need. So we don't need to worry too much about that bidding. Right now I actually am going to use manual CPC bidding and then I'll show you how to like go like look at what your bids should be at least to start out budget. Obviously budget's going to be what you can afford right now. For this I'm going to do 50. Now I'll share because again we're going to do a two campaign approach here. So this is the budget I really want to try to maximize. But let's say my full budget is $100 per day. So I'm actually going to set this to 80 because I have $100 per day budget but I'm going to have two campaigns. So this is the top sellers and I'm Going to show you what to do with another campaign after I build this then we've got this customer acquisition setting. Do not worry about this right now. This will come later in advanced optimizations. For now you do not need to worry about this as you're getting going with a small budget campaign priority. You can just keep this at low for now as well. No need to even change that then networks you want to get rid of search partners. We just want to be on shopping like on the actual Google page. So we do not want search partners on. That is an advanced sort of optimization piece that could come later once you have dialed in campaigns. So again don't need to worry about that. Devices you can't actually do anything here. I'll show you what to do later after we set up then locations. I'm targeting the U.S. one thing I always do this include which is under location options. We're going to want to hit present so people in are regularly in your included location. So going to hit that good to go and then start. You don't want to add an end date because you you'll control that with budget or enabled or paused. So don't need to worry about that. Ad group name I'm just going to do top sellers for now and then original bid. I'm just going to put a dollar but I'm going to share with you on how to actually start with your original bids. Now I'm going to hit create campaign. Okay so now I have my campaign bill. It's in the account. I'm going to hop into the campaign by just clicking into it few things. I want to set up one top sellers. I need to actually segment this out by top sellers. So right now it just says all products. So this is firing my entire feed. I need to actually subdivide this. So I'm going to hit this plus sign and then I actually have a custom label here for this called top performer. Now this is a feed attribute that we set up for you. If you don't have that yet, don't worry. Again I have a full like feed optimization masterclass video on our YouTube channel that will be in the description below. But for now for you you can go by individual item IDs which would be your actual SKUs or you could go by brands or product types. Again wherever you're getting money currently on your website, just start there. And so for me I did label our top performers so I've got that under a custom label. Now it wants to also show everything else. Well I don't want everything else. I just want this to be my top perform former. So I'm going to hit exclude. So that has now been excluded out. And again my max CPC right now is currently set to a dollar because that's what I set it to when I was building the campaign. How would I go about actually setting a bid for this campaign? Well, let me show you real quick. So I'm going to go to tools, I'm going to go to planning and keyword planner. Then I am going to hit discover new keywords. Now we sell sectional sofas for this. So I'm going to just hit sectional sofas. You don't have to go too crazy with keyword research on this because what I'm going to share with you is very simple. So sectional sofas. This is search. Okay. This is not shopping but for search, high end bids $2.66 and my like low end bid is 75 cents. Low of or sorry, Top of page, low range means below organic listings. Top of page, high range means above organic listings. Normally I say take the mean of these two numbers to give yourself a competitive bid within your market. But remember, this is search. Search is generally more expensive than shopping. So search is going to be the text ads, shopping is going to be the product ads. Right? So in this case, looking at this data, I see top of page bids are around over $2 for me to start. I would actually be comfortable with a $1 bid. And so the bid that I actually set up is fine now for you. I don't know, you're gonna have to do some just quick keyword research, look at what search bids kind of are and then take about like half of that. So if, if the mean is around $2 based off what you're seeing on search, then just start with a $1 bid and you can even go, you know, a little lower, a little higher it goes. The beginning doesn't matter as much. Once you start getting data, you're going to know then what you need to start bidding at. You can do that through something called benchmark. So inside of I'm inside my product group again you go to this column, you go to modify column and then you go to competitive metrics. Right here there's this benchmark max cpc this Google will eventually populate. Once you start getting data, this is going to kind of tell you what other advertisers are bidding. So this will tell you what you really kind of need to be bidding in order to be competitive. And that's this metric right here. Helps know, like, let's say you're not getting a lot of volume. Sometimes I've consulted with people, I'm like, well, look at the benchmark. You're like, you know, way off from the bench. Benchmark's 2 and you're bidding like 10 cents. You're not going to get any volume because you're not entering any auctions. So this will be a guide for you. But we have to just start somewhere, get some data, and this is how I set at least a competitive bid to begin with. Start getting some click action. Then after a few days or a week, I review the benchmark, max CPC and adjust as needed. Now, a few other little changes or at least one other change. You want to go to Insights and report. You want to go when and where ads showed and then you want to go to devices. Here. We want to take out tablets. Tablets is the least volume, least converting, even for well established optimized shopping campaigns. So I like to take it out as a variable. In the beginning, I'm trying to just get success right, take tablets out. So we're going to hit decrease by 100%. If you know your mobile experience is really bad, you might want to come in here and immediately adjust this down by anywhere from 25 to 50%. If not, leave it as a baseline and then you can adjust this later once you get data. So I'm going to leave these blank for now and then just hack out tablets. Then the other thing is negative keywords. So if I go down to this audience keywords and content and go to search keywords, there's this negative keyword area here. Now, for shopping, there are no keyword targeting, right? I'm not adding keywords like you do for search. However, you can negate terms that aren't relevant to you. So here I would do some negative keyword research before you start spending money. That way you don't potentially waste any money on those clicks. I have an entire video on negative keywords, how to do negative keyword research. That video will be in the description below as well. So we would add our negative keyword here. Usually I use list. So I'm going to go find a list real quick. All right, so we've got my list here. I already have a list. It's an old one. I'm just going to add this here. Boom, saved. Now we're good. Okay, so double checking. I got most of my budget to my top sellers. I've got my top sellers segmented out. I got everything else excluded. I've Got a competitive max CPC bid to begin with. I have tablets excluded and I have negative keywords added. So we're all good. Now what do you do? All right, now I go and build another campaign for standard shopping. So I'm going to do this real quick. Okay. This isn't published yet. I just want to share. I've named this campaign sh all and then I've got manual CPC 20 budget. Remember $100 per day in this scenario I gave 80 to top sellers and 20 to this then campaign priority. Just keep it as low as well. That's fine. You don't have to worry too much about that right now. Get search partners off United States presence in and then ad group name. I just called it all excluding top sellers bid. Remember based off of my research, $1 seemed to be fine to competitively start. I am and I started my top sellers at 1. I'm doing 80 cents here because we're actually not going to be advertising top sellers. We're going to advertise everything else. And so here I actually just want to be a little more conservative. So I've notched it down from that $1 bid to about 80 cents. Listen, there is no perfect math here. I like to work in usually increments of like 20%. So if I'm at, you know, anywhere from 10 to 20% but if I'm at a dollar bid on my top sellers to start, I'm going to be at least 20% lower, 10 to 20% lower on my everything else campaign. So here I'm going to hit create campaign. Okay, again this loaded me up. I'm in my ad groups here. It wants to do all products again, right? We don't want that. Here's what we actually do want. Now I need to actually exclude top performers. So I'm going to hit continue save. Now top performers would be doing what I just did there through this division like dividing it out or subdividing it out. It wants to keep it enabled. So what you do is actually come here next to top performer and I hit exclude. So now I'm excluding top performers and I'm advertising everything else and I have a more conservative bid on these. Then I have to go do what I did to my top sellers campaign as well. I need to go add negative keywords. So I'm going to go add that same negative keyword list. By the way, if you forget that those keywords then would funnel to this campaign since they would be negated from the other. And then remember I want to get Rid of tablets. So I'm going to come into tablets 100. So we're good there. Right. Okay. So now I've got my s, my shopping all and then I have the top performers. Why do I run both? Because I want to be able to maximize my top sellers first and that's why I just segment them out. Then I build another campaign all. And again, you could actually, you could. Let's say you've got different categories so your ad groups could be themed out. Let's say you sell office equipment. So you may have a ad group for keyboards, you may have an ad group for like monitors. You may have an ad group for, for, you know, accessories. Like, like a mouse, ergonomic mouse. I love these things. So you could have those split out if you want or if you're lazy and you don't even want to do that right now, you could just put, you have your small bid on everything else. So what you're doing is at least you've got 80% of your budget right now going to the top sellers and you've got a nice hyper focus on them because you've, you've got them segmented out into their own campaign and labeled. Then you've got this other shopping campaign that is like casting a wide net, right? So your, your top seller campaign is like the sniper rifle campaign. You've got the top sellers and you're really snipered in, you're really laser targeted. Then the, the other campaign is like, I don't know what I'm going, going to get from that. These products are like onesie twosies on the back end of my sales. They may work on, on Google Ads or they may not. We've got to get data, right? So there you've got that segmented individually, you've got your top sellers excluded from it and you're casting this wide net with conservative bids. But you'll start getting data, believe it or not. You're going to be surprised over time you're going to find, wow, this product's actually selling and doing really well. You would have had no idea. But you've got to let the data tell you that now you have a top sellers and then you have this catch. All right, that is where most all of your spend should be going to. What happens though if your top sellers could spend all of your budget? What do I recommend? I honestly recommend maximizing that. If you're starting to get conversion volume from it, maximize it. If I could, I would spend all my money there right now. You could still if you want to give the catch all campaign a little love still, then just go down to like the smallest budget you could where you still get enough clicks. So if bids are a buck a click, usually in your industry, usually they'll be lower. You could get clicks lower than that, but then maybe give it a $10 per day budget. But you want to maximize those top sellers. That is where your conversion volume is going to come from. Once you've got this set up, you'll be able to start spending money. You'll be able to hopefully start getting conversions. You then after time will be going now into scaling and optimizing. Make sure you subscribe because I have further videos then on how to optimize e commerce accounts. What to do. Plenty of videos already on our channel on that but this for a small budget to get going. This is the exact strategy I would deploy today, the exact strategy I've deployed in the past, and the exact strategy I've seen work countless other times for other e commerce businesses. Starting with a small budget on Google Ads. There you go. You now know how to take a small budget for your e commerce business with Google Ads and start printing money with the strategy I just gave you. I hope you got great value from this. Make sure again subscribe got a lot of great content once you start getting the data and need to optimize and lots of more content coming this year and hopefully for the foreseeable future. I will see you on the next video.