Several years ago, I attended a digital marketing conference and was very excited to attend the Google Ads sessions.
I distinctly remember one session in which the expert was sharing how he was getting $3 leads from Display campaigns, but the strategy he was sharing was not something that could be translated to most accounts.
When he, and most of the other experts that presented, shared numbers, they were talking about ad spends of hundreds of thousands or millions a month.
While that was impressive, I found that I couldn’t really use most of what they taught because it required massive amounts of data, features I couldn’t access with lower spend, or more campaigns than I could reasonably create in an account.
My biggest account at the time was spending $7500/mo.
Google Ads experts tend to give advice based on their current and most recent experiences.
A lot of ad managers will learn from them and will get frustrated when they don’t see the same success.
It’s important to recognize that advice from an expert may not be relevant to your situation.
If you manage accounts with smaller budgets, most experts will be giving advice that is more helpful for other experts than it is for you.
How Small Accounts Are Different
Why is the advice for bigger accounts different from advice for smaller accounts?
For one, the larger budgets mean everything happens faster. You collect data faster. More clicks means more site visitors and more chances to convert. You can run more tests because you can reach statistical significance more quickly.
This also means you can spot wasted spend faster and tell when something is underperforming faster.
I work on many accounts that get 1-3 clicks per day.
An account that small doesn’t have the luxury of rapid testing. You can’t wait for statistical significance if it takes a full quarter to reach 100 clicks and $500 without a lead means your client can’t afford to run ads anymore.
In a smaller account, you have to do more work up front to create the right conditions for success.
You have to understand your client’s business, their customers, the market’s problems, the other solutions out there, and what makes your client unique or better than their competitors.
You have to have a solid enough grasp on the 80/20 principle that you can set up the account in a way that balances efficiency with volume and then you have to know what to do to move it forward quickly without making so many changes that the algorithm doesn’t have time to learn what your customers look like.
But that’s not what most do.
I’ve taken over a lot of small accounts as a white label ad manager and as a freelancer, and I’ve seen the mistakes most ad managers make with small accounts. Some of them are made out of inexperience with Google Ads, others are made out of inexperience with small accounts.
Let’s look at a few of the mistakes and what to do instead.
How Most Agencies Build Smaller Accounts
The biggest mistake I see with small accounts is using the “spray and pray” method.
They dump a bunch of keywords into an ad group and turn on ads only to get a few dozen clicks from tire kickers or bad leads. They don’t have any rhyme or reason to the keywords added except that they are all relevant to the general business category.
This is usually a sign that the person who set up the account doesn’t know how to use Google Ads.
Another mistake I see is having a bunch of different campaigns with budgets of $1-$5 each, all running Max Clicks with a maximum CPC bid limit.
The approach with these accounts is often to get the cheapest clicks possible so you can get a few clicks a day per campaign. They have a different campaign for each service or product category and they often create new campaigns for different initiatives, promos, or other time-sensitive events.
The obvious problem here is that you have campaigns with $1/day budget and are trying to get $0.30 clicks when competitors are spending $10+/day and paying $3+ per click.
They (competitors) show for the searches that convert and they get the clicks. You get the bottom-of-the-barrel clicks that don’t convert.
While consolidation is important in big accounts, it’s doubly important in smaller accounts. Much of Google Ads is governed or influenced by machine learning. Machine learning requires as much good data as possible and much of that data is utilized at the campaign level.
Having too many campaigns or having a campaign for a short-term promotion means you don’t benefit from the machine learning. You don’t get lower CPCs for higher quality search terms and you don’t get to train Google what a customer looks like with significant conversion data.
There aren’t too many big mistakes you can make with a small budget (please don’t see that as a challenge), but there are a ton of smaller mistakes that can be made.
When they’re all boiled down, the mistakes tend to come from misplaced focus. The ad manager doesn’t focus on the core elements needed for success.
In fact, they’re often not focused at all. They’re trying to focus on too many things for their budget.
How To Win With A Small Google Ads Budget
The best way to succeed if you have a small budget, whether you’re setting up a new ad account or inheriting one from another agency, is to laser focus and simplify.
To start out on the right foot, dig into the keyword research and customer understanding.
What problem are they experiencing?
What do they need to know before they pay for a solution?
How many types of solution are there?
How are they searching for solutions (if they’re searching)?
Do they want to talk to someone on the phone, or fill out a form?
Who are the main competitors?
Why would someone pick your client over the competitors?
What is your client’s most popular product or service?
Answering questions like this and doing keyword research should help you narrow down your goals.
So figure out your client’s business and customers, then make sure conversion tracking is set up properly. That’s always a solid first step when getting a new account.
When it comes to building out the account (or cutting the fat in one you took over), here’s how you simplify.
If your client has 5 different ways they help customers, but only $500-$1000/mo to spend on ads, pick the top ONE way. Their most popular way of helping customers, not the one they want to prop up because it’s not generating as much revenue as they’d like.
It’s a lot harder and more expensive to sell something nobody wants than it is to sell something everyone already knows about and wants.
So pick what’s already proven to work and harness that success for your client.
When you do this, create one campaign with one ad group and a minimal number of keywords. Like, 10 or fewer.
One of the best-performing accounts I manage was spending $5000/mo before we added to their initial 6 keywords.
Instead of going heavy with keywords, go heavy with negative keywords. When you’re doing your research, create a list for the top few keywords you’ll target and all of the negatives you’ll add.
You can have several lists of negatives in the account for various themes (job searchers, free/cheap, general negatives, city or state names, file types, competitors, etc) and add them to new campaigns as you create them.
Then create one search ad for them. Don’t waste your time creating 15 different headlines and 4 descriptions. Make 3-5 headlines and 2 descriptions.
The client won’t get enough data to reach statistical significance on 15 headlines if you’re only getting a few thousand impressions a month.
Just take the info you got about the customer’s problem and focus on the reason they’re searching and what they want to accomplish.
Finish it off with some callout and sitelink extensions, location extensions if relevant, maybe some image assets, and definitely add call extensions.
Extensions don’t weigh down an account like keywords, ads, or headlines.
Then make a Brand campaign with the same principles in mind. Few branded keyword variants and a few headlines.
Split the budget 80/20 or 90/10 between the product/services campaign and the brand campaign (respectively) and voila. That’s your whole account.
Get in a few times in the first week to check on things, add some negative keywords you didn’t think of in the initial research, and adjust bid if you’re going eCPC.
Then leave it alone for a couple of weeks.
There’s not enough going on in the account to make changes more than biweekly or monthly and making too many changes can prevent the algorithm from learning between changes.
Summary
That’s it! Keep it small and simple.
Focus on the people who are actively searching for a solution provider, get in front of them to tell them you can help, and ruthlessly filter out everything else.
When a client doesn’t have much money to spend on advertising, you’re not helping them by trying to be fancy or by trying to promote everything they do.
Find what’s already working for them and amplify it with simple ads, then use the revenue to fund expansion into concentric areas of opportunity.
If you’re curious about how I work with agencies or if you’re frustrated with your agency’s profitability or retention of clients or employees, feel free to reach out to me and I’ll see how I can help. I never charge for the first consultation and if I can solve it in 30-minutes, there’s no reason to pay for my services and you walk away happy.
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