How to Run Google Ads on a Small Budget (EXACT Settings for Success)

Google Ads is hard and when you have a small budget, it's actually even harder. Why are you making this so difficult? However, I've audited over a thousand accounts. I've worked with hundreds of businesses, one on one throughout my ten plus years of being in the Google Ads industry. I have seen and I have ran many wildly successful, profitable Google Ads accounts with small budgets. There are a few steps and strategies though that you have to do, you must do in order to for your small budget, not to get wasted and just go into Google's pockets. So in this video I'm going to break down the exact strategies and settings that you must have in your Google Ads account to make sure you don't waste money and you make money with Google Ads on a small budget. Let's dive in. Okay, few things before we start. One, if you are an E commerce business, I will have a video specific to E commerce with small budgets. This video will be mainly about search campaigns. So this is more for lead generation, local service based businesses, maybe even SaaS. That video, if it is live at the time you're watching, this will be in the description below. So again, if you're E commerce, go check that specific video out. Now let me define small budget, right? Because that could mean different things to different people. If you've heard or watched any of my other videos, you'll hear me talk about you have to have a realistic budget in order for Google Ads to work. And usually what I talk about is you have to be able to generate at least 10 clicks per day in order to get enough volume to even have breathing room to work with to start optimizing. Because conversion volume is very important to Google Ads today. I do not believe if, if you're just starting with Google Ads and you have less than $1,000 in budget, I truly believe you should reconsider Google Ads. It's just really hard, especially today. Now with that said, I know many businesses. I've ran several where we have made less than $1000 per month. Budgets work and they're profitable. It is rare. It's, it's very hard to pull off. So if you have less than a thousand, I, you know, proceed with caution. A small budget to me would be within that one to $3,000 range. Usually when you're above 3,000, depending on the industry you're in, you've got enough cash, you got enough volume of data coming in to start being able to optimize and scale your Google Ads account. That though depends again on the industry. If you're a personal injury lawyer, 3K isn't going to do anything for you. However, if you're in a, you know, cheaper local service sort of industrial industry and you're just targeting your city, you could absolutely get a lot of data and volume for the 3K. So I'm going to show you what to do on the campaign setups. I'm going to show you the settings and I'm going to show you then what you should focus and target if you have a budget within that 3K or under range. Now this also could help you. Even if you're spending maybe 5k or under 10k, what I'm telling you is still going to help. But once you're above those numbers in budget, you have a little more room to be a little more aggressive. So most of my other videos like how to set up a search campaign, how to optimize a search campaign, all of this, the other videos that I usually do that are on my YouTube channel, those will be very relevant to you. So you have the ability to be a little more aggressive with a standard setup. This setup that I'm going to talk about is going to be very specific to like you. You just have to have all of these settings in place because you can't waste $1 when you have less than 3,000 to spend in a month. Because you know we're talking a hundred dollars or less per day and spend that can get eaten up very quickly if you have the wrong settings. So just a heads up on all of that, let's get into actual campaigns inside of a Google Ads account. First you're going to need rock solid conversion tracking set up. Thankfully I have videos on conversion tracking for most of you it's going to be form fills. I have a video step by step tutorial on how to set up form fill conversion tracking that will be in the description below. A lot of you calls will be important too. So set up call tracking. If calls are important to you but you have to have conversion tracking and it's got to work and be rock solid before you want to spend $1 on Google Ads the second piece then you must have a high converting landing page or website. I yield to landing pages. We have videos on landing pages that will be in the description below. If you have a junkie website, don't spend any money on Google Ads. It just won't work. You have to have a solid offer, good conversion tracking, high converting pages in order for all of this to work. So go check out the landing page video. If you don't have that. I would absolutely invest in a good page. You can do this yourself if you have, you know, if you created your website on something simple or you have a developer or your nephew or niece or whatever. We have instructions on how to do all of that in the step by step tutorial. But I'm telling you, if your website's not very good, the chances of your small budget working with ads is that much greater of failing than the person or company who comes to the Google Ads with a smaller budget that has a very dialed in high converting landing page. And we give you all that information for free. So just go watch those videos but really look at your website. Go look at your competitor's website. Look at your website. If you know your website's really not that great, don't throw a bunch of money at it with ads. It doesn't just work like that. So you have to have a good page. It's crucial. Conversion, tracking, high converting page are very, very crucial. That's like the foundation to all of this working. So I know I'm stressing that a lot, but make sure you have that set up before you spend $1. Do not give Google any money if you don't have the foundation set up. I'm in an account, I am in the keyword planner. So you go to tools planning keyword planner. I have a full video on keyword research by that will be in the description below. But I want to show you. So we're going to do tree service and then I'm going to do palm tree service. You need smart, smart targeting here, right? For you have someone with a big budget, they can go in, they can really blast a bunch of stuff. Really figure out what works by essentially just buying data. Right? You with a smaller budget have to be very, very wise with the keyword selection from the jump. So I want to show you why keyword research is going to be absolutely crucial to the setup of your campaign. So I'm targeting Miami and then I've got tree service and then palm tree service. Right. So this is just hypothetical tree service company. Let's look at the difference though in our costs. Tree service can get up to $40 per click. So we have this top of page bid low range. This is going to be, you know, below usually the organic listings and then top of page high range. This is usually the ads. Whether it's 2 ads, 3 ads or 4 ads depending on how Google wants to show, this is going to be above the organic listings. Normally in my keyword research and My other courses and training, I say, hey, take the mean of these two numbers. That gives you a competitive bid. Now here, these are, this is obviously a very competitive industry in Miami, Florida. So these keywords are really high. And it's because tree service is a very expensive industry. So if I just look at palm trees, check this out. We have Palm Tree Trimming, $3 top of page, click bottom, $0.70 Palm Tree Pruning, same thing. So, and then palmetto tree trimming, et cetera. So here if we really went and just focused on these specific, especially palm trees, plenty of those in Miami, Florida. You're now paying like 10x less per click than generic tree trimming services. Now the generic stuff is going to have a lot of the volume and that's why the other players in the marketplace in Miami are, are bidding on that because that's where most of the volume really is. But you'll be able based off of the setup I'm showing you, hopefully hyper target palm tree trimming. Another thing here, stump out, very cheap, $2. This is probably a service most tree companies have too. So here we have very affordable long tail terms that we can go after that are within the tree trimming service. So this is why keyword research is very important. Find those long tails that are cheaper and hyper target those in your setup versus someone who comes in and tries to. I'm a tree service business, but I only have, you know, $1,000 a month to spend. Well, $40 per click. You're not going to get anything from that because you're, you're, you're going to get no data. $1,000 will be eaten up very quickly from $40 clicks. You're going to have more bang for your buck. Just hyper targeting palm tree trimming. You're going to get more clicks, you're going to get more action and hopefully profitability then from your ads. Okay, I'm going to start building a campaign. So in the account level I'm at the campaigns, hit this blue icon, hit new campaign. Right now you're going to have all of these different options. You have sales and leads and website traffic and apps and all this stuff for you watching. More than likely it's going to be leads. However, you don't need to do any of that. You can hit create a campaign without goal guidance. Why? Because I'm giving you the guidance. What this does is basically if I hit leads already kind of like chooses the settings. If you hit this, you choose the settings. So just follow along. I'm gonna give you the guidance. So you don't need any of this. Just hit create a campaign without goal guidance. Then we're going to hit search campaign from the campaign types. We do not want performance, max demand, gen display or any video or apps. Right now search for you with a small budget in the beginning is where you want to focus your money. And so we're going to hit search. Now you're going to have your conversion tracking. So for us it's going to be submit lead form for this tree service. Also probably call tracking in this account. This is just a setup account. I don't have the call tracking set up but. But make sure you have call tracking set up too if calls are important to you. So we're going to hit continue and then this is like select results you want from this campaign. You don't have to do anything there. So I'm just going to hit continue again. We're going to name this. I like having S for search campaign. And then we're going to do tree service and then Miami. Okay, now bidding. What do you want to focus on? I'm going to show you what to do here. When you're in the setup phase, they actually don't give you every option, which drives me insane. But for now we're just going to keep it at conversions. If you're E commerce, usually it's conversion value. If it's legion, usually you want conversions. If you get enough data you can get into like target, CPA bidding and all this. I have an entire masterclass on bidding. I'll have that in the description below. If you really want to learn more about all the bidding options, when to use different bidding strategies, etc. For now, just have it set to conversions. We're going to change this. You do not want this on right now from the start so we will change this. But Google is sneaky and they won't allow you to even change it right away. So we're going to have that set to conversions. Then you have this customer acquisition piece. Do you want to optimize campaign for acquiring new customers? Do not even worry about this setting right now. This is just. This is later down the road. Right now you just want to get some data coming in. You want to get some customer acquisition going, hopefully some good quality leads from your Google Ads campaigns. So don't even worry about this piece. It means nothing to us at the moment. So we're going to hit next. Okay, this is very important. Network with the campaign settings. You do not want Google search partners on. We're Going to click that off and you do not want Google display network why we want to hyperfocus on the Google Ads search page. If you're searching someone's searching for palm tree trimming services in Miami. We want our focus just on the Google search page. Partners network can work but it's later on down the path once you have a optimized campaign and you're looking for volume increases. Display network. You never want to run display and Google search together. So networks have both those clicked off. Now. Location settings. We're obviously in Miami so I'm going to search for Miami. I'm going to hit include very important piece here. Location options. We want presence people in or regularly in your included locations. If we have interest in this would make sense if you're like a hotel or a resort in Miami or something like that. For us we want people who are in Miami, not what Google claims. Oh they're interested in Miami. So we want this setting on again presence people in a regularly in your included locations language English or whatever language you're going after. Audience segments. You don't need anything here right now. Don't even worry about this piece at the moment. Then there's this broad match keyword piece Google is going to auto select on. You want this absolutely off. So we're going to hit off here. And if you want to learn more about keyword match types and how they behave, guess what, I have a full video on that. I'll be in the description below. For now, don't think too much about it. It have this turned off then we've got automatically created assets. This is allowing Google to like take control and create your ads and whatnot. You want this off? Thankfully Google has this auto default to off in this setting. Now we have ad rotation. You want optimize prefer performing ads ad schedule. I do recommend with a small budget you want to run just whatever your operating hours are. That doesn't mean people aren't looking for tree trimming services at nighttime when they get home from work or whatever. But there's probably enough volume during your business operating hours. And again every dollar really matters when you have a small budget. So here I would go. Let's say you're open from like 8am till 5pm Monday through Friday or whatever this is. Well we'll have. I would set it to that. That way you can capture any form fills or phone calls during your business hours and leads. The quicker you get to that lead the higher the chance of closing it. And that's why something that Comes in through the middle of the night that where you're not working. The chances of you closing that are way less than someone who submits a lead or calls you and you're you're able to get in front of them, get them on a call right away and sell them. So go with your business hours that you're operating. Then we have these other settings like ad rotation. I already Talked about campaign URLs, yada yada, you don't need any of that. Now there is something called brands here and this is called brand exclusion if you have a well known brand. So I'm just going to make one up. Tom's Tree Trimming Services Miami. Then you could add your brand as an exclusion here. That way your brand terms do not show. Now thankfully, the way I'm going to show you to build your campaign, you don't really have to worry too much about this. But I do usually recommend you don't want your brand terms inside of what I what we're building as a non brand campaign. It skews the data. So you want to exclude your brand. So watch, I'm just going to show you quickly. I'm going to hit new brand list and like Nike will be on here, right? So so if I'm Nike I can exclude like Google knows me, right? So they know Nike related brand terms. Then I don't have to go and add a bunch of brand negative keywords. Now Tom's Tree Service Miami probably not indexed right? It's not. So then you have to hit request a brand. It takes several weeks but you can do that. So you can add a brand exclusion if your brand's already indexed. If it's not, you can try to request one. This is not crucial though. So if you don't want to mess with that right now, don't even worry about it. Now we're going to hit next. Okay. Google has this keyword and asset generation. This is using basically their some of their AI really. So here you could put the URL of your website in and it's going to give you a list of recommended keywords and also like assets for like ad headlines, et cetera. I just walked you through how you should be doing your keyword research. We want to hyper target long tail cheaper CPCS in your industry. So I honestly wouldn't even worry about this. Hit skip. All right, now we're in actual creation of an ad group. So the first one I'm doing is palm trees. And remember there were the palm tree trimming and PRUNING and I'm going to enter my keywords here. Now I brought this up to you earlier. There is a keyword match type type video I did. It explains match types and explains how they behave. I'm not going to go super in depth on that in this video. What I'm going to tell you though is in the beginning you're going to want to really focus on Exact Match keywords, right? So I'm adding palm tree trimming and palm tree pruning Exact Match right now. And if I had all the other variations, which there are more variations of these that I can add exactly for this video, I didn't want to go too crazy. So I'm just going to add these two. You want to start with Exact Match because you want full control of the search terms your ads are going to show for. This gives you the most control. So I'm starting with Exact Match later on down the road. If I'm not getting enough volume from Exact Match, I would add phrase match then like that. But I don't want to start there. I'm going to start with Exact Match. If I can get enough volume with my budget from Exact Match in the beginning, then going to stick with Exact Match. Then we've got ad creation. I'm not going to create an ad for the sake of time Here I have videos on how to create responsive search ads and I talk a lot about like optimizing them too. I have full videos on that as well. That will be in the description below. Ad creation is very simple, but I've got a lot of really good stuff on it and it requires a whole video. So if you want to learn more about like creating ads and like how to create really high click through ads, et cetera, high converting ads, that video or videos will be in the description below as well. So for now I'm going to skip the ad creation process. With that said, there is a section called site links. Okay. These are your ad assets, right? And this is so you see these more asset types. Believe it or not, I have a video on every single ad asset, what they are and what you should be including. So you do need to add as many ad assets that are relevant to your business. There's promotions, prices, calls, call out, structured snippet, lead forms, avoid lead forms for now, apps, etc. Go through that video and add every single ad asset that makes sense to your business. It helps with click through rate. I talk about that in that video. Again, I'm not going to do that in this video. But just make sure go through all of that. Okay, now we're at budget. Google's going to recommend a budget saying $50 a day. Let's say I do have. Well, let's just do 50, right? Let's say I have $50 a day. So we're going to do 50 and then I'm going to hit next. Okay, got the budget in. Now I'm at the stage of publishing the campaign, so I'm just going to hit publish. And it's giving me an error because I remember I didn't put ads in. But that's fine. So we're going to hit publish. Okay, very important. My campaign is now published. There are several settings we need to go back into though in order to prevent wasted ad spend with our small budget. So number one, I'm going to go into the campaign settings. If you hover near the campaign, this icon will pop up. This will take you to campaign settings. Otherwise if you click inside the campaign, you can find the settings here as well or even in this top section. So I'm going to go into campaign settings. Why is this important? Number one, we talked about it bidding. We do not want to start with maximize conversions. Some people in the comment section might argue this. Whatever. If you're a brand new account and you've never converted, you have zero conversions. Maximize conversions makes no sense. And I have tested this on so many accounts I still start with usually manual CPC or maximize clicks in your case because you have a limited budget. I'm really yielding to manual CPC in the beginning because that gives me four more control. If I had more budget, maximize clicks is usually what I'd go with. Now again I have that on the bidding masterclass. If you are already running ads, I don't know why you'd be watching this video. But if you're already running ads and you're just building a new campaign out, the max conversion from the jump is fine because your account has conversion data. But if your account does not have conversion data and you have a very small budget, then stick to a manual CPC bid strategy. So what we do is hit change bid strategy and then I go to. You have to go down to select a bid strategy directly and the Google's going to say not recommended, ignore them. And then you're going to go all the way down here to manual bid strategies. Manual CPC and I hit save. Boom. So now I'm on manual CPC and I'll show you. We'll go back to keywords here in a bit. Okay, now I'm going to click into my ad group palm trees, right? My max CPC that I just did, it automatically put me at a penny here. I'm going to change the bid. That way I can actually start bidding competitively on these keywords. Now I'm doing $3. Remember in the keyword research it was like up to three bucks. So I'm just going to go top because I'm. I'm hyper targeting basically exact match palm tree keywords. So here, add whatever max CPC makes sense for you based off of the keyword research. Okay. A few other settings you absolutely want. We're going to go to insights and reports. We're going to go to when and where ads shown and then we're going to go to devices. 100% exclude tablets. We want no tablet traffic. Why? Tablets has the least volume generally and usually converts the worst. So just exclude it. Take the variable out of your success from the beginning. With a small budget, get rid of tablets mobile. If calls aren't super important to you, this is something I may decrease from the beginning by like 25%. Otherwise I just leave it as is and then let the data come in and I'll optimize my bid. If I'm still on manual CPC at that time, I'll do a bit adjustments on mobile depending on how it performs. In the beginning though, I'm actually okay with just both running baseline and then as data comes in, then I review and adjust. Okay, next. And this is huge. You want to build and compile a negative keyword list. I have an entire video on negative keywords. Why is that important? Because again, every dollar matters and we want to avoid irrelevant traffic from the beginning. Now you're going to get irrelevant traffic no matter what. That's just how Google Ads is always. That's the game of it. You're always trying to weed the junk out. But from the beginning, you can save yourself a ton of money by doing negative keyword research. So you're going to go to search keywords and then you go up here to this negative search keyword area here. You're going to start adding then. And you, you usually want to use lists again, I talk about this in the negative keyword video. You want to build list out. Huge, huge recommendation. Literally go add every competitor in your industry in your city. Go add their name or names as a negative keyword. A lot of times people search a competitor name and then end up accidentally calling you. They didn't even know they were calling you. Is there a play for competitor names in the Future. Yes, but it is not the play when you're just starting with a small budget you it's like a matured account trying to expand advanced strategy play. This one recommendation is going to save you an insane amount of money. Go add every competitor name or name and add a make it a competitor negative keyword list. And so if you know Bob's tree service was actually you would just add Bob's. Go add that for local service based businesses, jobs, apprentice or internships, things like that. Those are huge. To add negatives from out of area. If you're in a big city sometimes you'll get out of area stuff. So someone like tree service, even though you're targeting Miami, it could be tree service like you know, New York tree service, Atlanta, whatever. Add out of areas that you can. So add as many negative keywords as possible. Again I have a full video on that but you want to add as many as you can from the beginning when you're running a brand new account, brand new campaign on that small budget. Okay, you've got proper tracking, you've got a high converting landing page, you have hyper targeted exact match and maybe later if you don't have the volume phrase match keywords that have lower CPCs in your industry based off of the keyword research you did, you have tablets excluded, you have search partner network off, you have displayed display off. You have a robust negative keyword list especially all of your competitor names added to the campaign. You have the correct geo targeting of the area that you're trying to target. For me it's Miami right now, right. So I have Miami targeted and I have that presence in setting set up. You have high converting ads created, you have manual CPC bidding on. You are ready to start making some money from Google Ads with your small budget. So hopefully you got great value from this video. You're going to now you're in the stage of collecting the data and starting to optimize on that. Make sure you subscribe. I have an insane amount of value. I plan to continue to add to this YouTube channel throughout this year. A lot of big plans there. So once you get into the optimization stage, I have videos there and I'm going to continue to provide more videos. We have a paid community that's coming out. If it's already out that the link to that community will be in the description below. Lots of support, lots of ongoing training there. So if you're interested in more trainings from me and my team, all of that will be available again at some point. If it's not during the time of this video. Make sure to check that out again. Hope you got great value. I will see you on the next video.