5 Tips to Make a Small Budget Work on Google Ads

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Hite Digital

4 min readJan 24, 2019

Online advertising is a MUST for a company’s marketing mix nowadays. It is one of the most effective ways to reach a wider audience and expand your business because a high percentage of consumers are constantly browsing online. Many businesses choose Google ads as one way of advertising because it is the largest search engine on the Internet, and an easy and effective way to reach potential clients that are actually SEARCHING for your product or service.

Unfortunately, many small to medium businesses that want to advertise on Google Ads have a limited budget, therefore, they are forced to allocate a small amount of money to their campaigns.

Although a high budget is always recommended, a restricted amount of money should not restrain small or medium businesses to try this platform. Managing campaigns from different companies of all types of industries has taught me that you can still obtain good results working with a low budget. The secret is bidding lower or removing what is not working, and allowing the budget to go where you are actually seeing results.

My 5 tips to make your small budget work on Google Ads:

1. Pause keywords

There are some keywords that simply do not generate leads even though they are showing in good positions. Before pausing any keyword, make sure your keyword has been showing in good positions (1–3) and that it has generated a fair amount of impressions and clicks. If you are still not seeing results, do not hesitate to PAUSE it, this budget can then be reallocated to better-performing keywords which will show more often and increase conversion opportunities.

2. Decrease your Keywords Positions

Working with a low budget may keep your campaign with the “limited by budget” status, this means that you are not going to show for certain searches because you have no budget to show for all searches.

In order to show as often as possible and still generate leads, aim for positions between 2.0 to 3.0. Why? Because a better position means a higher bid, your ads will be showing fewer times than they possibly could and you might be losing on potential customers. Focus on how many times your ad will be showing rather than the position it will be showing.

3. Decreased bids for specific locations or remove them.

With enough conversion data to start optimizing, you can review the location report. Here, you can observe which locations have a better cost per lead and those that have only spent money without generating conversions to your business. Google gives you the option to bid as granularly as by postal code. Take advantage of this and let go of those locations that do not work!

4. Decrease bids for low performing devices or remove them.

When checking performance per device, you will notice that some devices perform better than others. Focus on those that are giving you results. Google Ads allows you to decrease bids or remove devices according to their performance. You can do these changes at the campaign level or at the ad group level.

5.Negative Keywords

This fast and easy optimization tip is taken for granted by most people managing campaigns. You have no idea how much money could be saved by simply adding negative keywords to your campaign. After reviewing the search terms report, you can start excluding all of the words that are not related to your business. When doing so, make sure that you do not only add this search terms as an exact match since this will only block that specific search term.

For example:

Your company offers “roof replacement” and you get the following search term Toyota Solara convertible roof replacement]. You do not offer car roof replacement, so you will want to exclude all searches that contain “Toyota”. Do not only exclude the search term but also add “Toyota” as a negative keyword to block all traffic who use this keyword on their search.

See? We’ve just saved $11.

If you still haven’t reviewed your search terms report, I’m pretty sure you will find a lot of opportunities to start cutting costs.

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Implement these few tips on your campaign and I am pretty sure you will not only obtain a lower cost per lead but also increase the number of leads you are getting!

What other ways of decreasing costs can you think of? Share it in the comments below.