Google Ads suits small businesses that need enquiries now and can afford to pay for them. It is the fastest channel to switch on and the easiest to waste money with, because several defaults are written for advertisers considerably larger than you.
This is the order that avoids the expensive mistakes.
Set up measurement before you spend anything
You cannot judge a campaign that is not measured, and the temptation is to start spending and sort tracking out later. Conversion tracking for form submissions and phone calls should be working and tested before the first click, otherwise the first month of data is lost and the platform has been learning from nothing.
Test it by submitting your own form and confirming it registers. A surprising share of accounts are running with tracking that silently stopped working after a website change.
Start narrow, then widen
- One campaign, one service, one small geographic area you genuinely serve.
- A short list of terms with clear buying intent rather than everything related.
- Phrase and exact match to begin with, since broad match needs data you do not yet have.
- A landing page written for that service, not your homepage.
Starting narrow feels overly cautious and it is what makes a small budget produce usable signal. Spreading a modest budget across five services and a whole region produces data too thin to act on.
The defaults that quietly cost money
- The display network is enabled by default on search campaigns. Turn it off.
- Location targeting defaults to people interested in your area rather than people in it. Change it to presence.
- Automatically applied recommendations can change your campaign without asking. Turn them off.
- Ad scheduling runs all hours by default, including times nobody answers the phone.
Small accounts lose most of their budget to three settings nobody changed, rather than to bad keywords. The defaults are written for advertisers with far more room than a local business has.
Ryan Cole, Founder, Presseo
Budget: enough to learn, or do not start
The honest floor is whatever it takes to collect enough conversions to make a decision, and that depends on what a click costs in your trade. In a market with inexpensive clicks a modest monthly budget produces signal within weeks. Where clicks are expensive, the same budget produces noise. Underfunding a campaign is not a cautious version of running one.
Negative keywords from day one
Add the obvious exclusions before launch: jobs, salary, free, DIY, courses, and any service you do not offer. Then read the search terms report weekly for the first month. This is where a small account most reliably recovers wasted spend, and it takes twenty minutes.
What to look at after four weeks
Not clicks or impressions. Look at how many genuine enquiries arrived, what each cost, and whether any turned into work. If enquiries are arriving and not converting, the problem is the page or the follow-up rather than the ads, and more budget will make it worse rather than better.
When to stop
If after a properly funded three months the cost per booked job is above what a customer is worth, stop and say so. Some terms in some markets are not winnable at a small business budget, and knowing that early is worth more than persisting politely. Our local SEO index covers the slower channel that often suits those markets better.
Writing ads that pre-qualify
On a small budget the most useful thing an ad can do is discourage the wrong clicks. Naming the area you serve, the service specifically, and any relevant qualifier keeps out people you were never going to help and who would have cost you the same per click. An ad that reads well to everybody is usually an ad that attracts a share of clicks you would rather not pay for.
Where price is a common objection, saying something about it in the ad rather than hiding it until the call reduces wasted clicks noticeably. Businesses worry this loses enquiries, and on a limited budget the enquiries it loses are largely the ones that were never going to convert.
Match the ad to the page it points at
If the ad names a service, the page it lands on should open with that service rather than with a general introduction to the business. This continuity is the difference between a visitor who scans and stays and one who cannot immediately tell whether they are in the right place, and it costs nothing to get right.
It also affects what you pay. Relevance between the search, the ad and the page feeds into ad rank, which means a well-matched page tends to lower the cost of every click as well as converting more of them.
Want it set up properly the first time?
We will build the campaign, the tracking and the landing page together, so the spend is measurable from the first click.
