When you’re working to a tight budget, crafting a successful Google Ads campaign can feel totally out of reach when in fact, having a more ‘modest’ budget can often help businesses to focus on what’s important, what truly works and help to eliminate unnecessary spending.
With the right strategy you can achieve great results and a healthy return on investment for your Google Ads campaign no matter what your budget.
Here’s our step-by-step guide to setting a Google Ads strategy:
Understand your business objectives
Before setting up a Google Ads campaign, clearly define your business goals. For example, are you trying to drive traffic to a new service page, increase sign–ups or drive more visits to your physical location? Your goals will be used to help guide each of the planning stages within your campaign.
Choose the right campaign type
Google Ads offers a variety of campaign types and it’s really important to choose the right one, as some are unsuitable for smaller budgets.
Below is a rundown of the three main campaign types and how they can (or can’t) be used:
- Search campaigns: Text-only ads that are often the best option for tight budgets. They show ads to users who are actively searching for terms that are relevant to your business and/or offering. To help reduce unnecessary spend if you’re using broad match keywords, utilise the negative keyword function to avoid irrelevant searches triggering your ads.
- Display campaigns: Visual ads that are served on websites and apps that belong to Google’s Display Network, including YouTube, news sites and mobile apps (over 2 million!). Display ads can be an effective tool for retargeting users who have previously interacted with your brand and are also great at capturing attention and engaging users through visual content.
- Performance Max (PMAX): This AI-driven campaign type runs across all Google channels, including Search, Display, YouTube, and Gmail through a single campaign. PMAX campaigns use automation for optimisation, which is great for saving time but reduces control over budget allocation and ad placement. This option may not be ideal for tight budgets, as it is harder to see how specific assets (such as headlines and images) perform best.
Build a targeted keyword strategy
Keywords form the foundation of any ad campaign. When on a limited budget, focus on high-intent, low-competition keywords. Google’s Keyword Planner is a great tool to use to plan your keyword strategy, as it uses historical search data to identify keywords alongside their search volumes, bid-range cost, ad impression share and competitiveness. Google Keyword Planner can also provide new keyword suggestions based on your website content and imported/existing keyword lists.
Once your campaign is running, you can also use Google’s Performance Planner to forecast how your results may be affected if you make changes to your campaign. Its forecasts and predictions use both recent and historical data such as traffic, ad competition and interactions (clicks and conversions), making it a valuable resource for planning monthly and quarterly spending. Google Performance Planner also recommends ways to improve your campaign’s performance without increasing your budget, so it’s definitely something to utilise once your campaign is underway.
Set a realistic budget
Every penny counts when you’re working with limited funds, so it’s essential to manage your budget carefully. Set a daily budget that aligns with your overall monthly spend and consider using a manual bidding strategy for more control. However, automated bidding options like Maximise Clicks or Target CPA can be beneficial if you’re less experienced, as they use existing data to optimise bids in real–time.
Refine your audience targeting
To avoid spending time and budget on the wrong audience, use Google’s targeting options effectively and refine your ads based on demographics, interests and user behaviour (if they have already interacted with your brand).
For local businesses, geotargeting can help you focus your budget on users in specific locations that are relevant to your business and your offering, which will avoid unnecessary budget usage as your ads will only be shown to those in the cities or regions where you’re most likely to find customers.
Tip: make sure you have the ‘Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations’ setting selected so that your ad only targets people who are actively in, or regularly in, your included locations. Otherwise, your ads can be shown to people who have previously lived or worked in a certain area years ago, which would be a waste of spend.
Optimise ad copy and landing pages
No matter how well-targeted your ads are, if they don’t persuade people to convert, your budget will go to waste.
Your ad copy should be clear, concise and focused on the user’s needs. Highlight your unique selling points, such as tailored 1:1 support, sustainability practices or product-specific features and make sure that your call-to-action (CTA) is strong and compelling enough to encourage users to act.
Even on a tight budget, you can run A/B tests to see which versions of your ads perform best. Try different headlines, descriptions and CTAs to find what resonates most with your audience.
Your ads are only half the battle when it comes to attracting and converting customers – your landing pages are where the real opportunities lie. When somebody clicks your ad, they need to land somewhere that aligns with the ad, captures and engages their attention and prompts them to move further through the funnel. For instance, if someone clicks on an ad for “women’s running shoes,” the corresponding landing page should immediately feature those products as well as a strong headline, a trust signal (such as customer testimonials or free returns) and a clear call-to-action (such as shop now or browse our best-sellers). A seamless user experience can increase your Quality Score, lower your cost per click (CPC) and improve your return on investment (ROI).
Track performance and optimise regularly
A Google Ads campaign on any budget demands regular monitoring and optimisation, but you’ll need to be even more savvy with your checking and optimising when working with a small budget to avoid any of it being wasted.
Conversion tracking is essential to measure what actions users take after clicking on your ad. This data will help you understand which campaigns, keywords or ads are driving results – and which aren’t.
Regularly review your keyword performance. If a keyword has a high cost-per-click but low conversion rate, consider reducing the bid or pausing it to reallocate budget to better-performing keywords. Utilise the negative keyword list function too, to identify and remove irrelevant search terms that are triggering your ads and wasting your budget.
Running a Google Ads campaign on a limited budget may feel challenging, but with a focused strategy, you really can drive meaningful results. By setting clear goals, choosing the right campaign types, targeting effectively and optimising your ads and landing pages, you can stretch your budget further than you might expect.
