Surfside PPC Podcast

Welcome to the Surfside PPPC podcast. Go to Surfside PPPC.com to join Surfside PPPC Premium and ask your questions. Thanks for listening and please subscribe. What's up everyone? Welcome to episode 12 of the Surfside PPC podcast. So, in this episode, I'm going to be going over a little bit about how to run Google ads on a very small budget. So, I'm also going to have a video component to this. I'll have a premium version of this and then I'll also just have a free video going out on YouTube that will somewhat be along the same lines as this. So, I got a question about running Google ads with a small budget. And and I'll go over some of the strategies that I think work the best when you are running Google ads with a budget that's not, you know, obviously massive or the biggest in your industry. And in all honesty, I think you should start Google ads with a small budget because ultimately what you're trying to do is find some level of success and then work your way up from there. So, let's get into our question number one. Before we do, as always, you can get my free training videos. So, I have two free training videos if you go to surfsideepc.com. Two free Google ads training videos. It's about an hour and a half worth of content if you're just getting started. It's a really good starting point and if you're trying to just look at your overall strategy and if there's any holes in it, it could also be very useful that way as well. So, it's good for beginners, good for kind of looking at the complete picture of Google Ads. With all that being said, let's get into our question. We're really just going to do one question on this podcast, but basically, how do we run Google ads with $20 per day? So, let's put our question in now.
Is it possible to start Google Google Ads with a small budget. Is $20 a day good for Google Ads? How do I know if I can get started with a small budget? Do you have any strategies or best practices so I can get the most out of a small budget Google Ads strategy?
Okay, so question is, you know, we have a $20 daily budget. How do we actually run that per day with, you know, our business? Now, $20 a day is an impossible budget in some industries. It just is. If you're an HVAC company, if you're a roofing company, If you're any of these types of local service, if you're a law firm, if you're an insurance, all of these are very, very expensive industries, like to the point where clicks, you're not going to get a click per day with your current budget. So, the very first thing that I would always do is I would open up the Google keyword planner and I would try to find the bid ranges for how much advertisers are actually bidding for these keywords. I know if you install the keyword surfer plugin, they will actually have that data when you do a search in Google. I have that installed in mine just to sometimes quickly look up what does you know Google say the cost per click is for roofer near me and you know you'll see it's 20 plus dollars so really a small budget Google ads campaign can work much better if your cost per click is manageable in the example that I can give you for my own business is if I was targeting a keyword like Google ads consulting that is generally a click that is going to cost 15 2025 $30 so it's it's hard to run that type of campaign at a really small budget The workaround is essentially saying two things. One is I'm going to take my $20 per day daily budget. I'm going to target exact match keywords. I'm going to do Google Ads. Basically, the way Google Ads used to be done where we're going to target this specific keyword, Google Ads consulting services, Google Adwords consultant, Google Ads consultant, you know, things like that where people are actively looking for somebody like me to consult them on their Google Ads. And essentially what we can do is say we could probably drive two clicks a day at $10 a day and then over the course of a month, you have an extra 50 or 60 clicks that came in related to Google Ads consulting. And it's one of those things where it's like, okay, if I invest $500 to $750, can I land two clients? Because if I land two clients, it probably pays for itself. If I land one client and especially if it becomes a management job, that could potentially pay for itself. But what I can learn over time is, okay, using Google Ads, my customer acquisition cost is this. So therefore, I need to either raise my consulting price or not use Google Ads. alto together or try to figure out, you know, does it make more sense to try to go after more volume? If we're currently breaking even or slightly profitable. So, that's kind of the goal when you're getting started with a small budget is I would use more exact match keywords. I would do a little bit more manual bidding. Now, for certain industries, you can easily get away with much lower budgets. So, if you're like, for example, in certain health practices, there are some types of doctors where you're not, you know, if you're not a especially if it's not a specialty type of doctor where things are very expensive per click. There's also some some areas where there's not as much competition in terms of total number of doctors there. So, one of the biggest industries that's just blown up in terms of, you know, more locations, more doctors is dentists. So, dentists have become very, very competitive because you just see more dental practice popping up. And the dentists I've worked with tend to kind of come and go pretty quickly. Like, we run things, it works for a little bit, and then they're kind of like, "Yeah, we're we're good." So, medical practices can be interesting as clients. It could either be the greatest clients ever who are just happy with uh yep, let's get our ads running. Let's make sure we're driving x amount of calls per month and patients per month. And then others where it's you run for a couple months like yeah, this doesn't work. It's like I'm telling you it works. But basically for for lower budget type of campaigns, really if you can get a cost per click in for two, three, four, $5, it's pretty reasonable to run a very successful campaign even at $20 per day. So I work with an orthopedic and you could potentially say that c certain areas of the country if you're an orthopedic orthopedist orthopedic care, urgent orthopedic care, you can get clicks for pretty cheap and it's going to bring you in patients for pretty cheap. And ultimately, you know, as long as you're making a decent amount per patient, then it really pays for itself pretty easily. So, there are some industries where you can get calls, you can get a call a day for $20. Now, there's other industries where you're just not going to be able to move the needle with a very small budget. So, the workaround in some cases is if you have a longer sales cycle is just get people in the door initially. So, for Surfside PPC, I could potentially say, "You know what? The very first thing I want to do is I want to offer up free Google Ads training videos. These are going to be geared towards agencies and other marketers and people that are learning Google Ads so that I can bring people in the door who might potentially say, "Do you want to manage my Google Ads for me or do you offer weight lab weight label services or I have three Google Ads accounts that I'm managing. Can you consult with me on them?" So, that's the very first thing. And you can get people in the actual door onto an email list with a follow-up. So, that's what I currently have. I use ConvertKit. Well, Kit now, kit.com. And I've used different tools over the years, so there's not one tool that is the best tool, but Kit has been pretty easy to use for me, and I like the way it's set up, but basically with it, it's able to track my sales through Shopify, and I'm able to send people to my website, and it's able to actually say, "Here's how many course sales we drove this month. Here's how many consultings, you know, we drove this month. Here's everything that we drove that came through." So, it's it's a way to actually see the overall success of your newsletter. And Also, if you are running ads campaigns, increasing the headcount to that newsletter is going to be the best way to basically upsell any of your products or services. So, I know there is going back to the medical portion of this. I worked with somebody once who I consulted with and they had a pretty big dental practice and one of the things they were looking for is more dental implant clients. So, they basically just ran a campaign to people 40 and up. It might have been 35 and up, I think, for Google ads. So, 35 and up and it was people actively searching anything related to dental implants, teeth implants, any type offormational search, cost search, and basically they had a whole entire series of everything you need to know about dental implants from costs, how to get them, how long they take, you know, basically everything you would need to know. So, they had like a small brochure about it, they had a video they would send you, and basically they said that, and this was through my consultant with them, they had a follow-up series that they actually used through GoHigh level and they had basically this pipeline where you came into the pipeline and you either exited the pipeline when you booked your dental implants or you eventually left this email list that sent you a periodic every I think they had it set up for every one week or two weeks they had an email being sent out about everything you need to know about dental implants because when people start searching for what is the cost of this specific thing that's a good way to actually bring them in in the door when you have a longer sales cycle sometimes somebody might be searching for or you know what is the cost of this brand new piece of gym equipment? Okay, well it's going to be $2,500. Like, all right, well, I am going to have to save up a few bucks to be able to afford this this new piece of gym equipment. So, it's one of those things where if you're like, yeah, we don't have $2,000 a day to be promoting this to, you know, trying to reach every single person ever. We're trying to build up our initial campaign. Then that is where you can get away with a little bit of a smaller campaign. And in the case of e-commerce, you could run a performance performance max campaign at a lower budget. The number one thing you need to keep in mind is whatever the cost of your purchase conversion is, if you're setting your daily budget for 50% of that, then you're really going to have trouble driving volume. It's, you know, the old 15 conversions in 30 days, it's really you want 30 conversions in 30 days. You want one conversion per day being tied back to Google Ads or more. And then it's much easier to actually optimize for those conversions. I will be honest, my easiest accounts to manage are accounts where I am getting a lot of conversion volume. I have a ton of click volume coming in. And really, the only thing I'm really worried about is how efficient can we be this month? How much volume can we drive this month? If we spend $15,000, we're probably going to end up driving, you know, over 100 leads. We're getting multiple leads per day. I'm getting a lot more information about where those leads are coming from. So, when it comes to a small budget Google Ads campaign to kind of wrap this up, I think my number one strategy is for a higher cost per click, go more the exact match keyword route and In that case, what you could do is say, "Okay, we're going to try to target the absolute best keywords for our business, and that's our number one priority right now." The next thing you could do is say, if you do have a smaller cost per click, so some industries, you're going to be able to drive clicks for cheaper if every single click costs two, three, four, five, $6. I have a couple medical patient medical practices that are in that range, and we could easily run $20 per day budgets, drive a call or maybe two calls per day, and essentially keep things pretty efficient at a very low budget, spending $500 to $1,000 a month. If you're in e-commerce, you could run a performance max campaign and just say, "We're going to optimize for purchases, and our goal is to get our cost per purchase as low as possible." The other thing you can do is run a performance max and say, "We're going to optimize for begin checkouts and and also the purchase action so that we can kind of get more people into the funnel and get more people interacting with our products and really just learning about it. So, there's no one-sizefits-all strategy for having a smaller budget. It's really a matter of what is the cost per click for what you're actually targeting. If it's way too high to begin with, then yes, you it it is impossible to run Google ads with a small budget and make it work. If you can get cost per click around that5 to $10 range, then you could probably get enough enough activity, enough volume to make it work. The other option with small budgets at times is just running a performance max and really keeping a close eye on it and making sure you have good conversion tracking set up. I ran a performance max campaign with a pretty small budget for Surfside PPC for like a couple weeks and it drove me two different consulting sales. One really big consulting sale that actually turned into a second consulting sale and then an an additional consulting sale. They all came through my brand keyword of Surfside PPC. So you might say, Corey, you probably would have gotten those anyway, but from a pure just Google Ads perspective, if you're just launching your campaigns and you're just getting started with with running Google ads and you're saying, I want to start with a small budget to see that see if this works, then yes, it is very doable. For some industries, a small budget is $100 a day. So, that's just what keep in mind. I did this specifically for $20 per day budget, which is impossible for C. Like, if a attorney came out came to me and said, I have a $100 per day budget, I would tell them that's too low because I can only drive a click or two at that every single day, depending on the type of attorney they are. If I can drive clicks for $10 to $15, then sure, $100 a day can work. So, it's always the challenge where in some of these higher budget, higher spending accounts. Just keeping that spend high at times can be difficult because the client wants it up and down and up and down. And you're really better off saying, "Here is what we would prefer to spend. Here is what our end goals are to drive every single month." And that's one of those things where over time you're able to figure out that number much better. But you can start with that $20 per day budget, work your way up to a much larger budget once you say, "Yeah, this this can be more profitable." But if you're looking to drive tens of thousands of dollars in revenue, it's going to be hard to do it. by spending less than $1,000 on Google ads per month. Like, it's really one of those things that it's a volume game and the companies that do the best are the companies that do spend the most on it and also have other traffic sources and other ways that they're getting people come in and purchase from them. I actually saw somebody from A16Z, I should know the name, but it was somebody just tweeted about how all paid advertising is essentially, you know, a a way that your business is not defensible. and paid advertising is always going to be towards whoever has the highest budget and it's always going to and it's you know the largest company is always going to have the largest budget and things like that which yes obviously companies that are making more money are going to spend more money on advertising but it doesn't mean you as a small company like me as Surfside PPC I should say well I'm not going to spend money on ads even though a lot of my competitors do there's no reason for me to do it it's like okay if your competitors are doing it look at their pricing model look at their overall what is their flow from ad click all the way to landing page. You can fill out the form. You can see how they follow up with you. Copy the exact same thing because clearly it's working. But that that's kind of one way to do it if you're like, I have no clue where to get started with my small budget. But ultimately, just get in, pick out the exact match keywords that make the most sense. For me, I would pick out like three or four Google Ads consulting type of exact match keywords. Set your bids, manual CPC bidding, and just try to get some initial data coming in, some clicks, some impressions. If you start driving conversions. If you start driving leads, then feel free to expand your campaign and increase your budget. Start using more smart bidding strategies like target CPA, expand your keyword targeting to more phrase match. Really, you want to avoid broad match with a small budget because it's going to end up wasting some of it unless it's a really low cost per click. That's really where broad match can make some sense. But otherwise, once once you start running the ads and getting a little bit of data, it becomes easier to kind of understand, okay, here's what I can expect I'm going to get from my actual advertising spend. Thanks for listening to the Surfside PPC podcast. Please surfside PPPC.com for management or consulting options. Or to get my course, join Surfside PPC premium through my YouTube channel, my school page, or my Patreon. Please subscribe.