Picking The Perfect Starting Budget In Google Ads

In B2B & SaaS Don’t Overcomplicate Your Starting Budget

The question most people have before they run Google Ads is “how much does it cost?” or “what can I get for ___ budget?”

Honestly, I’ve encountered a lot of people who think that Google Ads is really expensive or that there is a limit to how much they can spend. Neither are true.

I’m about to break this down from the minimum you can spend to the max and how you should determine your starting budget.  Stick with me here, it’s a short one.

Determining the Minimum You Can Spend In Google Ads.

If you’ve received a cold email of mine, you’ve warily scrolled as I yapper about the control that Google Ads allows you.

When I talk about control, the real benefits to your ROI in Google Ads show themselves elsewhere, however, your first stop in terms of control will always be your budget.

So what is the minimum you can spend in Google Ads?

First, the arbitrary answer: you can spend as little as $1/day so you can basically go as low as you hope.

Now, spending a dollar a day will condemn your account to VERY slow aggregation of data and you probably won’t see positive ROI until years of running your ads. I wouldn’t recommend it.

I recommend that you base your min budget off of what your costs per clicks are and how many Keywords are important to you to start with. 

You can find generalized CPC information on keyword tools like Spyfu. These tools have limited visibility of Google’s data but they can give you a ballpark figure.

If you don’t want to be waiting a year to optimize towards positive ROI, then I recommend making sure your budget can afford around 10 clicks a day per keyword.

This will allow you to diversify your keywords in the name of trying different themes. Meanwhile, your data will stay consolidated so that you can learn quickly. Shooting for early optimizations at 3-6 months is a good start.

So say, for example, you want to target [appointment scheduler] in exact match.

According to SpyFu, you can expect to pay $3.14/click for this term (you can trust the data out of these keyword tools with 40% accurately but you have to start somewhere, right?).

If you only wanted to start with that one keyword, then you would want to start with a $30/day budget. BTW there’s no harm in starting a campaign with one keyword.

But here’s a catch; you can always lower your bids if you’re running Max CPC.

You could tell the system that you only want to pay $1/click. If the keyword you’re targeting has enough volume, you will likely still get clicks. 

So in that case, your budget could be $300/month!

If you haven’t picked up on my beating around the bush, there is no “lowest budget,” it all has to do with figuring out where you fall in these parameters.

Let’s now discuss a healthy way to pick a budget before we hit the MAX you can spend (hint: it’s virtually unlimited, which is a bad way to think about it).

Choosing Your Google Ads Budget – The Right Way.

Choosing keywords that are valuable to your company is the first step here. 

If you’re like most B2B startups, you probably have between $2,000 and $8,000/month to spend initially. Keep in mind that you want something simple but controlled. Complex campaigns are no longer successful to start off.

Pick 2 or 3 of your top themes and one to 1-3 keywords per theme. If they have a reasonable amount of volume, fall between 2-3 words and are phrase match (in most cases).

Tip: keep an eye on your search terms for the first few days. If you are negating every other search term and they are all different, you might want to add a word to your keyword or go down a tier on the strictness of the match type.

Now, go back to the principle from before. Make sure your daily budget allows for 10 clicks per day on each keyword. Multiply that by 30 and you have your monthly budget. 

If that’s too high, take some keywords out. If you have more to spend, add some themes or keywords.

I did a post/video the other month about setting expectations and determining when your business is ready to run ads that could be helpful if you have more questions on this.

Using the Cost calculator

Search Click Boom has created a Google Ads budget projection tool that will help you decide what budget to use based on how many conversions you want.

You can also use our ROI calculator for Google Ads to use your desired conversions, conv. rates and more to project your ROI!

What’s The Most You Can Spend In Google Ads?

Don’t ask this question, instead ask “where can I grow my budget that will be profitable?”

You can spend as much money as you want in Google Ads, but that doesn’t mean it will be on relevant traffic.

Instead, start with the tips from the previous section. When you are happy with the results and ready to grow, here are some questions you can ask yourself:

• Are there more keywords that are valuable to your company that you can try?
  • Are there search terms that you see that are valuable that you want to run with a tighter match type.
• Can you extract successful KWs to their own Ad Groups/Campaigns to create more relevant ad copy, landing pages and ultimately lower CPCs and raise conv. Rates?
• Can you move up the funnel to target pain-related keywords?
• Are you running retargeting?
• Are you running on other channels other than search?
• Consider competitor and branded campaigns.

Concluding

If you’re new to the Google Ads platform, each of those points probably bring up more questions than you had at the start.

Don’t over-complicate the process though.

When we isolate one problem at a time, we can hash out a quality campaign. The key to all of this is to really keep it simple. As a business owner, you know what your users search before they buy. Start there.

Once we see positive ROI, we can start taking risks and playing with the infinite complexities of Google Ads.

Thanks for reading!