You’ve got $3K a month for ads.
What should you actually do with it?
When the budget is limited, every decision feels a little more important. These are the questions small business owners ask us most often, and the answers we would actually give them.
Enough to learn something useful, if the budget has a clear job and is not spread too thinly.
When you are working with a smaller advertising budget, every decision feels a little more important. Should the money go into Google or Meta? How long do you wait before deciding a campaign is not working? Is a $50 lead expensive? Should you be using Performance Max? These are not theoretical questions when it is your own money leaving the account each month.
How much do I actually need to spend?
There is no magic number where paid advertising suddenly starts working. A business spending $700 carefully can sometimes learn more than one spending $2,000 across too many campaigns, audiences and objectives.
What matters is whether the budget gives the campaign enough opportunity to learn something useful. If a small budget is divided between Google, Meta, TikTok and several campaigns within each platform, there may simply not be enough activity anywhere to understand what is working.
Should I start with Google or Meta?
Think about how somebody normally becomes your customer. If the first thing they do is search for what you sell, Google is a natural place to look. Someone searching for an emergency plumber, accountant or renovation company already knows what they need.
If people are more likely to discover your product while scrolling, Meta may make more sense. Fashion, food, beauty, pet products and other visual categories often need to catch someone's attention before that person ever thinks to search for them.
What ROAS should I be aiming for?
This is one of those questions where the internet can make things unnecessarily confusing. Someone says 3x is good, someone else says never accept less than 5x, and then you open LinkedIn and somebody is celebrating 10x.
None of those numbers knows anything about your business. A company with strong margins can make money at a return that would be terrible for another business. Operating costs, repeat purchases and customer lifetime value also change what a healthy return looks like.
Why did my campaign spend money without bringing in sales?
Sometimes the answer is in the campaign. Sometimes it is what happens after the click.
Google may be matching the ads to searches that are too broad. Conversions may not be tracked properly, so the platform cannot tell which traffic is useful. Or the advert may be doing its job perfectly well, but the page people land on is slow, confusing or completely different from what the advert promised.
How long should I give a campaign before deciding whether it works?
Long enough to learn something, but not so long that obvious problems are allowed to keep spending money. That is less satisfying than saying “wait exactly 60 days”, but it is much closer to reality.
A new campaign needs time to collect information, and constantly changing audiences, budgets and creative can make it difficult to understand what is actually affecting performance. At the same time, patience should not become an excuse for ignoring a campaign that is clearly attracting the wrong people.
What should a lead or sale cost me?
Start with what the customer is worth to your business. A $100 lead might be painfully expensive for one company and an excellent result for another.
If one new customer is worth $5,000 over the course of the relationship, the economics look very different from a business making $30 on a single purchase.
Do I need an agency?
Maybe. But the maths needs to make sense.
If you have $2,000 available for advertising and a large part of it disappears into management fees before a single advert runs, there is naturally less money left to generate customers. That does not make agencies bad. For the right business, good agency support can be incredibly valuable.
The problem is that the traditional agency model was not designed around every small advertising budget. Some owners therefore run campaigns themselves, but that creates a different problem because they now have to become the business owner, media buyer, analyst and creative director at the same time.
Should I use Google Performance Max?
It can be a very useful part of the mix, but simply switching on Performance Max does not guarantee better advertising.
PMax gives Google more freedom to find opportunities across its ecosystem. That can work well when it has useful conversion data, good creative assets and a clear understanding of what the campaign is trying to achieve.
My ads are getting clicks but nobody is buying. What now?
Do not immediately assume you need different ads. The advert has already persuaded someone to click, which means it has done at least part of its job.
Look at what happens next. Does the landing page continue the same message? Is the offer clear? Does the site work properly on a phone? Can somebody understand what to do next without hunting around? Are there unexpected costs or confusing steps before checkout?
I have $2,000. How should I split it?
You may not need to split it at all. There is a natural temptation to put some money on Google, some on Meta and perhaps a little on TikTok so that the business is “covered”.
With a limited budget, that can leave you with several campaigns that have spent money but none that has taught you very much.
If customers are actively searching for what you sell, Google may deserve the first test. If the product needs to be discovered, Meta may be the better place to begin.
The question behind all ten questions
Small business owners do not struggle because they cannot access advertising tools anymore. Meta, Google and TikTok have made launching campaigns easier than ever, and AI is automating more of the work every year.
The difficulty comes after the campaign starts. Performance changes, costs move, creative gets tired and customers behave differently. The dashboard tells you something happened, but somebody still has to decide what to do about it.
That is the part we think small businesses need more help with.
When the budget is limited, the goal is not to advertise everywhere. It is to understand where the next dollar has the best chance of doing something useful.
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