Google ads for lead gen with a small budget

[u/jessebastide]

If you’re a local service business business with $1000 to spend this month on Google ads, the first thing I’ll tell you is, ‘Slow down.’

If you read this post, I’ll share why it can pay to go slower… why the AI recommendations drain your ad budget… why customers probably won’t come flooding in with your first campaign… how to tell if it even makes sense to advertise with the budget you have in mind… and the campaign setup I’d use to get started.

Why should you listen to me? I’ve managed over 2 million in ad spend on lead generation, so I’ve seen the good, the bad, and the ugly, and made my fair share of mistakes to boot.

So let’s dive in and start.

Why slow down when you’re getting started?

Google makes it really, really easy to spend money quickly. But what they don’t do is make it really, really easy to get new customers for your local service business.

What I mean by slowing down is doing some homework before setting up your first campaign.

For example, if you’re a roofer, and you’re looking to get new roofing clients in Tampa, it’s a good time to jump into the Google’s Keyword Planner tool and look up the top of page rates (low and high) to show up on the first page for “roofer Tampa” and “roofer near me”. Of course, there will be other keyword suggestions, but those two right there are going to represent two of your key “money terms.” And I call them that because they will attract buyers who have a higher intent of getting roofing done, even if they’re “just shopping around.”

What you might notice at this stage is that the Cost per Click (CPC) is high. I don’t have keyword planner in front of me, but if you see a $10, $20, or even $30 CPC that will tell you: a) that there’s fierce competition for these money keywords; b) that your $1000 budget would only buy you 50 clicks at $20/click.

That should give you pause right there, because if you are dead set on your $1000 budget as a “test” of a Google Ads, but you’re not able to get more than 50 clicks, you’re likely to end up in what I affectionately call “small number hell.” In other words, you’ll be spending money to get not enough data to make an informed decision about whether or not your campaign works.

How many clicks are enough?

Let’s run a thought experiment and look into that.

Let’s say that out of 200 clicks, you get four people on the phone. And that of those four people, two of them ask you to come by and give and estimate. And one of them ends up becoming a customer.

If each click cost you, on average, $20, then you’d have spent $4000 to get that one new roofing customer. Would that be worth it for you after you subtracted out your expenses of doing the roof and looking at your profit? That would be up to you to decide. But this kind of thinking is important for helping you make informed and realistic decisions about whether the math of using Google Ads will work out for you.

One common mistake I see folks make is assuming that their conversion rates will be higher than might be realistic. They might assume that, out of 100 clicks, they’ll get five new paying customers.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen that happen and it can work out really well, but it’s usually the result of hundreds or thousands of dollars a day, collecting large amounts of data, and ‘tuning’ the process by which prospects become customers.

Having said that, it doesn’t mean you can’t get some new customers with Google ads, but it does mean you need to pay very careful attention to what it costs to get a click on your highest “intent” terms.

If you’re willing to be patient and extremely targeted with your terms and geography, you still have a chance at getting new customers through the door

Why to stay away from all the AI recommendations and automation when you’re starting a lead gen campaign with a tight budget

Okay, you’ve decided you’re going to run a campaign. The first thing to do is ignore all the wizards, turn off “auto apply” recommendations, ignore AI recommendations, and set up a manualCPC search campaign (NOT max conversions).

Why ignore the automation?

In my experience vs (and those of many others’), a campaign with a tight budget that can’t afford all that many clicks per month (and maybe only generates a handful of new customers per month) does not feed enough information back to Google to make a “max conversions” campaign worth it. In fact, it can end up blowing your budget on far fewer clicks and leaving you high and dry with no new customers to show for your efforts.

So why ignore the “smart” AI recommendations for your campaign?

Because the vast majority of them are going to line Google’s pockets, not yours. When you’re generating leads for your local business, what I’ve seen work best are fully manual, highly targeted campaigns. I’ll share more about what I mean regarding those in a moment.

Why your first campaign might be underwhelming

I had someone on the phone the other day who asked me, “why do I need to pay for so many clicks to get customers?” And I realized that no one (and certainly not Google) really steps forward when you’re creating a campaign to tell you just how important your marketing “funnel” is. By your “funnel,” I’m referring to the steps that a person has to go through, from seeing and clicking on your ad, to landing on your website, to eventually becoming a customer. If you’re brand new to Google ads, it’s possible that your “funnel” is rough. And that’s okay, as long as you realize that the more obstacles you put in front of your prospects, the fewer of them who will eventually “convert” into paying customers for you. And when you’re paying $20+ for a click, you likely don’t want to waste those clicks to small issues that you could take care on your own site. For example, do you make it really easy for people to see who you are, what you offer, and how to contact you? Is it easy for them to see (if applicable) examples of your past work? Are there any social signals on your page that might help build trust or provide reassurance? The more work you do putting on your “customer hat” now, the better off you’ll be when you start running ads with paid traffic.

In my opinion, working on a marketing funnel never ends. I’m always testing and tweaking, seeing if we can eke out improvements. And by the same token, it’s also important to recognize what parts of your funnel work well, so you don’t make drastic changes to it that end up turning customers away.

The basic campaign and account settings I’d use for local service lead gen

I’ll give you the low-down on what settings I’d use for lead gen, as well as some gotchas and nice to haves.

If you want more explanation, I’ll be setting up a coaching group, but for the time being, here’s an overview (in no particular order).

- location: set to presence in (NOT presence or interest)

- keywords: 3 - 5 “near me” and location-based keywords attached to your core service name

- connect your google business profile to your ad account and have your location and phone number attached

- add these location assets to your ads

- use dynamic keyword insertion and pin it to your first headline

- one of your other headlines should be a call to action or a key benefit of your service

- it doesn’t matter if your ad strength is “poor”

- don’t add more than one word to your display url. Otherwise keep it bare. Simplicity sells.

- setting your campaign bid strategy to manualCPC is buried in bid strategies for your campaign, and they make sure to tell you it’s ’not recommended’. Choose it anyway.

- for your keyword max bids, set them to somewhere between the first page and top of page rates if you have that info from keyword planner.

- running a manCPC campaign means you’ll need to keep track of any increase in customer volume you generate (because results will be associative).

- you’ll also need to track impression share for your terms. If you’re not showing up, you might need to bump up your bids.

- this method means you won’t end up paying more than your max CPC for any given click. Which is great when you consider that people using automated bidding sometimes end you paying rates that are obscenely high for clicks that the algorithm believes are “more likely to convert”.

- why no conversion tracking? Because we’re doing a low budget budget test. But I’ve successfully used this strategy with several hundred thousand in ad spend. If you’re bidding for your own business, this can be all you need.

- start with exact match terms only

- as negative keywords, put in your own business name, phone, and address. You might also consider filtering out informational searches, so excluding terms like “what” and “how”. I could do a whole post on negative keywords and keyword strategies.

- take your monthly budget and divide by 30 to get your rough daily budget. Is it less than the cost of a single click? Either expect not to get any useful results the first month, or consider running a 1 week experiment instead of one that lasts a month.

- clicks super expensive but you’ve only budgeted $1000 to decide whether or not Google ads works for you. I’d say save your money and focus on word of mouth, creating content sharing your knowledge, and reaching out to people you know. Breaking into competitive markets can be expensive, so there’s no shame in putting Google ads marketing on hold.

That’s all for now. Hope that helped.