The floor is around $1,000/month on a single platform. Below that, Google and Meta's algorithms don't have enough conversion data to optimize — they need 30–50 conversions per campaign per month to exit the learning phase. Under that threshold, you're paying for noise.

Ask one question first: do your customers already know they need what you sell? If yes — plumbers, accountants, legal services, home repair — start with Google Search. They're already searching. If your product is visual or discovery-driven (apparel, food, home décor), start with Meta.

Ignore industry benchmarks. Calculate your breakeven ROAS first: 1 ÷ gross margin. At 40% margins, you need at least 2.5x ROAS to not lose money. At 60% margins, 1.7x might already be profitable.

Three things kill small-budget campaigns almost every time: broad match keywords pulling irrelevant traffic, no conversion tracking so the algorithm optimizes blind, and sending paid clicks to a homepage instead of a dedicated landing page.

Plan for 60 days before drawing any conclusions. Weeks 1–3 are learning phase — the algorithm is collecting data, not optimizing. Weeks 4–8 are when patterns start to surface. Week 9 onwards is when you have enough signal to optimize with confidence.

Benchmarks vary too much by industry, audience size, and campaign structure to be useful out of context. A cost-per-lead that works brilliantly for a high-margin SaaS business would bankrupt a low-margin product brand — and vice versa.

If your monthly ad budget is under $3,000, a $1,500 agency retainer means you're spending more on management than on actual media. That's a structural problem no amount of campaign optimization can fix.

Yes — and we actively push for it. Performance Max lets Google's AI work across Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, and Gmail in a single campaign. When it's set up right, it finds customers in places a manually managed campaign never would.

Usually one of three causes: audience mismatch (right click, wrong buyer), a landing page that breaks the ad's promise, or mobile page load over 3 seconds — more than half of paid traffic bounces before the page finishes loading.

If you're new to paid ads: don't split it. Put the full $2K on one platform, one campaign, with a tight audience. Splitting early gives you two inconclusive data sets and no clear path to scale.