How I Work With Small Budgets

When I first started managing Google Ads, I thought the job was basically “turn on ads and watch the clicks.” The more I’ve actually worked and studied, the more I’ve realized that’s only a small piece of it. A big part of being a good Google Ads manager is deciding where the money goes, moving budget into what’s working, cutting what isn’t, and setting clear goals so we know if the spend actually makes sense. Clicks by themselves don’t mean much if we don’t know whether we’re trying to get calls, form fills, purchases, or just more branded searches. Once we agree on those targets, every decision in the account starts to have a purpose.

The other layer is analytics. It’s not enough to say “this ad got a lot of impressions.” I’ve had to learn which metrics actually matter: CTR to see if the ad is pulling people in, conversion rate to see if the landing page is doing its job, and cost per conversion to make sure the client isn’t overpaying for each lead or sale. There are a ton of numbers in Google Analytics and Google Ads, but they’re not all equally important. The real work is picking the handful that match the client’s goals and checking them often enough to catch problems before they burn through the budget.

All of that leads straight into website audits. Especially when a client has a small budget, I’ve learned the most important thing is where we’re sending the traffic. If the ad promises “fast custom shirts” but the page is slow, confusing, or buried in generic content, people will just click off. So I started looking at pages the way a new visitor would: Is the headline close to the search term? Is it clear what to do next? Can someone check out or contact us in as few clicks as possible? The goal is for the ad, the keyword, and the landing page to all tell the same story.

Google assigns a Quality Score based on things like expected click-through rate, ad relevance, and landing page experience. When those pieces line up, Quality Score goes up, and higher scores usually mean cheaper clicks and better ad positions for the same budget. When they don’t line up, you’re basically paying a penalty to show ads that people don’t want to click on. That’s why I’ve come to see my job as more than “running ads”, it’s about shaping the full experience from search term to landing page so every dollar has a better chance of turning into a real result.