Running Google Ads on a Limited Budget

Transcript

My name is Rachel Burgard Kelly. I am the paid search specialist at flyte new media and today I’m going to talk to you about cooking with a limited Google Ads budget, how to work smarter, not harder. And prepare for some cooking analogies.

So running Google Ads on a small budget is like cooking in a tiny kitchen. You don’t have unlimited ingredients, endless prep space, or room for waste. The key is intentionality. So every ingredient matters, every decision matters, and focus matters more than volume. And I’ll explain that a little bit more coming up.

So is it possible to run Google Ads on a small budget? The short answer is yes, but the key is that limited budgets require precision, and like I said before, intentionality and strategy. Things that you don’t necessarily need to worry as much about when you have an abundance of budgets.

Now why do small budgets struggle? This may seem obvious, but a smaller budget tends to mean fewer clicks, just based on the nature of pay-per-click advertising. You pay for every click that you receive, and so naturally, the smaller your budget is, the fewer clicks that you receive. And when you receive fewer clicks, generally conversion data is slower, and then ultimately that means there’s a little less room for testing. And so I’m going to keep saying intentionality. You have to be super intentional when your budget is small. Because meanwhile, your competitors probably have and they do have more data, bigger budgets, and faster optimization cycles.

We have retail clients, e-com clients that are up against Amazon, Walmart, Dick’s Sporting Goods, any of these huge corporations, and it might seem like it would be impossible to rank higher than those companies. And it is true. You’re never going to rank higher than Amazon 100% of the time. It’s just not possible. And so the key is ranking above them when you are ranking. So when you’re there, maximizing your position on Google rather than trying to always be the one to show up.

And we do have clients who are very small who are extremely successful and, like I said, going up against Amazon and Walmart with their products. So it is possible. With limited spend, you can’t do everything at once. Focus becomes critical. Simplicity usually performs better. Think of your budget, and I’m going to come back to this. I’m going to come back to this analogy a lot, so I apologize. You want to think of your budget like a dollop of peanut butter and your campaigns are your bread. It makes a lot more sense to use that peanut butter on one slice of bread. You’re going to have a better experience than if you try and spread that peanut butter across an entire loaf of bread. The experience isn’t going to be quite as worth it. You might as well not even really be eating peanut butter at that point.

And the biggest mistake that so many people make is spreading that budget, that small budget, across too many campaigns. The biggest mistake that we see when we take on new clients who are already running ads is that they are trying to advertise everything all at once. And this makes sense. This is an understandable impulse. You really believe in your business. You believe in all the services that you that you have, but we need to focus. That’s the key: focus, intentionality, strategy.

So while you may offer all these wonderful things, you want to focus on just one. And there isn’t an exact recipe to choose one of those things. That is more of a case-by-case basis. But the better approach is to do one thing exceptionally well first rather than try to promote everything all at once. And in the wise words of Ron Swanson, “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.”

Limited budgets need a narrow focus. So you want to choose one service, one offer, one conversion goal. So if you offer several different services, what is one that you want to start with? One conversion goal. Say that you equally prioritize phone calls, form fills, and purchases. Depending on what your business is, you want to pick one of those things. Basically, we want to make it as easy as possible for users to do what we want them to do once they reach our page. So pick form fills and have that be the focus on that page. And we’re going to talk about landing page a little bit later, but one thing. Choose one thing for now.

And people have different strategies for how they pick this. The most common is that you choose a product or service that’s already your most successful so that you know that there’s demand for it. But other people will choose a product or service that they don’t sell much of, and they use their ads as a place to push that service. We tend to go with the former, going with something that’s already successful just because when you have a limited budget, really you want to just capitalize on what works. But we have seen success with the latter as well.

So keywords are your ingredients. These are the specific words or phrases that advertisers bid on so that their ads appear when users type those terms into Google. Keywords are basically the kind of the crux of your entire campaign. This is what we tell Google that we want to show up for on search. It’s what we say we want to match up with people for when they’re searching. And so if you’re choosing the wrong keywords, that really throws everything off. You can have everything set up perfectly, have this great ad copy, but if you’re choosing the wrong keywords it’s basically a non-starter.

So you want to choose things like, for flyte, digital marketing agencies near me, Google Ad services in Portland, SEO experts near me. Less is more. You do not need hundreds of keywords. You do need relevant keywords, high intent searches. This is another huge mistake that we see often when we inherit client accounts is hundreds of keywords. And I understand the thinking behind that is casting a wide net feels like it’s more likely to catch customers, right? But when you’re thinking of keywords as ingredients, you want to think of things like crème brûlée that have four ingredients, egg yolks, cream, sugar, vanilla. I guess depending on the recipe, but it can be a little different. But those are four ingredients. And crème brûlée is served all the time in fine dining restaurants when it’s really super simple.

So it’s not about casting a wide net, it’s about casting a really intentional net, a really focused net. And so high intent searches are things like digital marketing agencies near me, the examples that we gave before. These phrases indicate to us that these users are looking to move forward with a purchase. They’re very intentional searches. We can tell that those people are looking for an agency to hire right now, most likely. That’s what we want to focus on. We want people at the bottom of the funnel who are ready to move forward. And that’s not always the case.

When you have more budget, there’s more room for catching people at the top or middle of the funnel, but this is for small budgets. We want to go high intent users who are ready to meet us. Low intent keywords can waste your budget fast. So low intent keywords are the opposite of high intent keywords. They are not necessarily looking to move forward with a purchase right now. They might be in the research phase. They’re just not quite ready to move forward. So you want to avoid traffic searching for free tools, things like free guitar lessons, online DIY solutions, how to unclog your own drain, definitions like what is a fiduciary advisor, and people looking for jobs, so XY jobs near me.

And these are all actual searches that we have filtered out of our clients’ accounts. These things are indicating to us that these users are not necessarily ready to move forward with a purchase. They are doing research, they’re looking to solve problems on their own, or they’re looking for careers.

Careers is a really tricky one because oftentimes, this has happened to us with several clients, oftentimes what people are searching for when they’re looking for a specific job in a specific industry, is the same thing that the user would be searching for when they’re looking to hire someone for a product or for a service.

So you know, if someone’s looking to work at a digital marketing agency in Portland, they’ll often search for digital marketing agencies in Portland, just like somebody would be who’s looking to hire the marketing agency. So keywords can be a little tricky in that way. And you just have to do your best to make sure things stay clean. And I will explain how to do that.

High-intent keywords help preserve your budget. Things like book private guitar lessons. These are alternatives to the initial low-intent searches. Book private guitar lessons, emergency drain cleaning service, fiduciary financial advisor near me, schedule a child therapy evaluation. Again, these all indicate to us that these people are looking for something. Maybe someone looking for emergency drain cleaning services, maybe they’re pre-planning for the future. There is a chance of that. But more than likely, they are in an emergency, and that’s why they’re searching. Someone who’s searching book private guitar lessons, they’re looking to move forward and book the lesson. Near me is always a huge indicator that someone is looking for something now. They’re looking for something local.

Monitor search terms regularly. So what are search terms? And this is a little confusing, the difference between search terms and keywords, or it can be. Search terms are the exact words or phrases that users are actually typing into Google to bring up your ads. Keywords are the terms on the back end that we’re actually bidding on, and oftentimes the keywords will exactly match the searches. But the keywords are the signal that we’re giving to Google of what we want to show up for. Search terms are what users are typing in that matches that search with our keywords. Hopefully that makes sense the way I said that.

How can you monitor your search terms? There is actually a search term report within the Google Ads platform. I would have navigated to it and showed you how to access it, but all accounts are in different setup modes right now. There’s different setups in beta. Everyone’s account looks a little bit different, so it wouldn’t necessarily be helpful to show where to get it for the accounts on my end. But when you do find that report, it gives you a list of the terms that users are searching, that they’re typing in. Not all of them, because Google doesn’t ever usually give us the full scope, but we get to see the majority. We get to see if these are terms that we’ve already added to our account, and if they are or just whether they are or not which campaign and ad groups those searches matched with and then the metrics for each of those searches. So how often they’re being clicked, how much they cost, what their cost per click is.

I tend to sort by clicks or cost because, you want to see what’s using the most budget. Because, if something’s getting one click a month, it’s less urgent than something at the top of this list that isn’t relevant that you’re spending, $80, $90, $100 on. So this is key, and you want to be looking at this report ideally twice a week. Once a week is still good. Every other week is pushing it. But basically, as often as you can because this is really where budget often gets wasted and people are not utilizing this report as well as they should. This is a huge money-saving technique. This is just a way to make sure that your budget is all being spent exactly where you want it to be, basically.

Negative keywords help prevent wasted spend. So negative keywords are the opposite of keywords. Keywords tell Google what we want to show up for what searches we want to match. Whereas negative keywords tell Google what we don’t want to show up for and what we want to filter out. They stop your ads from showing up for searches that are irrelevant, low intent, or a poor fit for your business. And so let me go back here.

The way that you add those is when you see a term that you don’t like or that you don’t want to show up for, you select the checkbox, and then there’ll be an option to add that as a negative keyword. You can add it as is, or I tend to use just one word from it, usually the word that is the term that ultimately you don’t want to show up for.

For digital marketing agencies in Portland, if someone’s searching for cheap marketing agencies in Portland, I just want to filter out the word cheap. I don’t necessarily want to signal that entire search isn’t something I want to show up for. Cheap is really the issue there. And when it’s one word that you’re adding as a negative keyword rather than a phrase, it will get a little bit more longevity, right? Adding just cheap will prevent you from showing up from any search that has cheap in it.

So cheap Google Ad services, cheap SEO services, things like that, versus when you just add cheap marketing services services near me. That phrase will be a negative, but other phrases that contain cheap might still show up, if that makes sense.

Your geographic targeting matters. This is one that gets a little overlooked by a lot of people. Smaller geography equals more concentrated learning for Google. Starting smaller, just like with your keywords or anything else, it helps to improve your efficiency, gather cleaner data, and maximize your spend.

Think of that peanut butter again. The peanut butter is your budget, and the bread are your geographic areas. It makes a lot more sense to fully butter one slice of bread than buttering three, four, five slices of bread. We just get more concentrated data in that one area. And it’s always possible to move out and expand. It’s more difficult to start wide and then narrow down, because you don’t really know what is successful, right? If you’re advertising to every state in the country and you have enough budget for 20 clicks a day, we’re not going to be able to target the entire country in a day. And so it might take months for you to really see which of those locations is the most successful if you’re getting one click in each state versus you focus on just New England and then after a few weeks we see, okay, we’re getting more clicks in New Hampshire than Massachusetts. Maybe we focus on New Hampshire.

Or maybe we find that we have budget left over and we want to expand. But starting small generally in every area of your Google Ads is going to be easier to scale rather than starting big and then narrowing. Because where do you narrow things down to if you don’t have clean enough data to really understand what’s working? So you want to look at where your best customers already are, which regions already convert best, and where your cost per clicks are lower.

The first two are more for before you’re running ads, information that you hopefully already have about your business where you’re most successful. You’re usually going to see where the cost per clicks are lowest once you’ve already been running ads, or if you use the keyword planner.

And I realize I should have put the keyword planner in here, but this is a super helpful tool, again, that’s within the Google Ads platform, where you can do keyword research ahead of time. You type in some ideas for keywords that you want to use. Google will suggest more, and then you select your location area, and it will show you what the forecasted cost per clicks are, high end and low end.

And these kind of can fluctuate. It’s not an exact science, but it gives you a pretty good idea. And so if you see that in the particular location that you’re looking to advertise that those cost per clicks are$10, $15 a click, and your budget is $30 a day, might not be the best keyword choice. So that is a huge resource that I wish I had put in here. When we send out these slides, I will add a slide that features where you can find that because that’s crucial. I use it constantly when we’re already running ads, but always before we start running ads, because it really helps us map out what to expect and which keywords to choose, which really influences how your entire campaign performs.

Landing pages matter. Don’t promise filet mignon and serve beef jerky. Your ad sets expectations. Your landing page must deliver on them. The click is only half the job. So you can choose the perfect keywords, you can have super engaging ad copy, the super well-built account, and if your landing page is not user-friendly or if it’s unclear or if it loads really slowly, it doesn’t matter how well the ads were set up or how compelling the ad copy was. Ultimately, the landing page is where people make decisions. And so if the landing page feels disconnected, creates confusion, or doesn’t match your ad, then your performance will drop quickly.

Google crawls your landing pages to see how relevant they are to the keywords that you’ve chosen and the copy that you’ve chosen in your ads. And so you want to make sure that those keywords that you’re using and even your ad copy are featured. You don’t want to stuff them to the point where it doesn’t make sense, but you want to make sure that they’re throughout the landing page so that Google understands that what users are looking for is what you have on your page.

But we’ve all been to those pages where it’s not optimized for a mobile device, and so you have to scroll to the left or right to read everything, to zoom it out to read it, you have to zoom it way in. The pages load super slowly, or you clicked on an ad for a certain service, but it took you to the homepage and you have to navigate to the service yourself, things like that. We want to make it as simple as possible for people to do what we need them to do.

So what makes a strong landing page? Users should instantly understand that they’re in the right place, what they need to do next, and why they should trust you. These are especially important if you’re removing navigation from your landing page, which is a big strategy that people use to keep users on that page. You unlink all your navigation or even your logo so that users are forced to stay on that page, and that can be really successful. But especially if someone’s going to be spending a lot of money or it’s a product that requires discretion or confidentiality, legal documents, things like that, financial advisor services, things that are really big decisions that people are going to make, they need to know that they can trust you.

And especially if they can’t navigate to the rest of your site, you need to make sure that you have a lot of trust-building content on your site. So badges that show who you’re affiliated with or who you’ve worked with before, a little history about your company, things like that. Good landing pages match user’s intent, reinforce the ad message, and they make their next steps obvious.

So how do we achieve those things? We match user intent. We answer the user’s specific search. So if they’re looking for digital marketing services near us, we lead them to our service page that lists what we do and why we’re a good fit for them. Reinforce your ad’s message. Align your keywords, your ads, and your page copy. Make next steps obvious. Use clear CTAs and make it easy to convert. So put things above the fold, generally. So you want to put your CTA or the actual action, like a form that you want someone to fill out, you want to put that so that they see it as soon as the page loads. They don’t need to scroll. Even if it’s just starting, if you have a form fill, as long as they can see it, the start of it, on that first when the page first loads, that is good. Or the CTA buttons that we have that say book now, schedule now,book a free consultation, things like that. We just want it to be super obvious, super fast what we need people to do.

Okay, takeaways. Small budgets require precision. Winning strategies usually mean fewer campaigns, fewer keywords, narrower targeting, cleaner data, and frequent optimization Small budgets can absolutely work. I’ve seen them work many times. And once a campaign becomes profitable, you can expand it gradually, you can add campaigns carefully, and you can scale strategically. You want to start focused and then you grow rather than vice versa.