- On Google Ads, the quality of the ad and its page weighs as much as the bid: it can beat a higher bid.
- A small budget must stay narrow: a few high-intent searches, one area, set hours, a dedicated page.
- Judge by calls, enquiries and bookings, measured with visitors' consent, not by clicks.
What a small budget can do, and what it cannot
Advertising on Google and advertising on Facebook or Instagram do not meet the same need. On Google Ads, the ad appears to someone who has just typed a search: they have already put their need into words, ‘locksmith open now’ or ‘florist delivery’ followed by a town. On Meta, which brings Facebook and Instagram together, the ad slips into a feed the person is scrolling for other reasons. The first captures an intention; the second makes an offer or a place known to people who were not yet thinking of it.
On a modest budget, it is generally intention that should be served first. The click is not always cheap there, but it comes from someone already looking for what you do. Awareness, on the other hand, calls for a presence repeated over time, which small budgets struggle to sustain.
- It can make you visible on a few precise searches, in a chosen area and at chosen hours, and teach you what makes people call.
- It cannot cover all your services, a whole region and every hour at once: spread thin, it leaves a mark nowhere.
- It cannot make up for a slow page, a vague offer or a phone nobody answers.
Where Meta fits
Meta also lets you target a radius around an address. It is a good tool for announcing an opening, a new service or a season to people in the neighbourhood who were not looking for you. Alongside a well-tuned Google campaign, it has its place; on its own, to catch customers in a hurry, it is likely to disappoint.
How the auction works
With every search, Google runs an auction between the advertisers whose keywords match. The amount offered, the bid, does not decide the outcome on its own. Google calculates a rank for each ad, called Ad Rank, which takes into account the bid, the quality of the ad and of its landing page (the page the visitor reaches after the click), minimum thresholds, the context of the search (location, device, time) and the expected impact of ad assets (phone number, address, links; they used to be called extensions). An ad that does not reach the threshold is not shown, whatever its bid.
Quality is judged on three components: expected click-through rate (the likelihood that people click on the ad), the relevance of the ad to the search, and the experience offered on the landing page. Google sums them up in a Quality Score, rated from 1 to 10 for each keyword. This score is a diagnostic tool, not a value used as such in the auction: it shows which of the three components is letting you down. An ad that answers the search exactly, leading to a page that keeps its promise, can thus rank above a competitor who bids more.
The price you pay follows the same logic. As a rule, the actual cost of a click is lower than your maximum bid: you pay what it takes to beat the rank of the advertiser below you, not your whole bid. Improving quality therefore lets you win positions and often pay less for them: it is the lever that does not depend on the size of your wallet.
Choosing the searches that mean buying
Not all searches are equal. ‘How to unblock a sink’ comes from someone who wants to do it themselves; ‘emergency plumber’ followed by a town comes from someone about to call. A small budget should focus on that second kind of search, known as high intent: it contains a trade, a specific service, a place or an urgency. A few well-chosen keywords are better than a long list that scatters the spending.
Match types
- Broad match lets Google show the ad on searches it considers related, sometimes quite far from the word you wrote. It brings volume and calls for close monitoring.
- Phrase match, written in quotation marks, targets searches that include the meaning of the phrase, with other words around it.
- Exact match, written in square brackets, targets searches with the same meaning as the keyword: it is the narrowest setting.
Negative keywords do the other half of the work: they exclude searches that will never bring you a customer. For a tradesperson, ‘free’, ‘jobs’, ‘training’ or ‘tutorial’ are obvious candidates. The search terms report in Google Ads shows the actual searches that triggered your ads, at least those Google makes visible. Read it every week at the start to add the missing exclusions.
Targeting an area and set hours
Google Ads lets you target a radius around an address or a list of towns. The right radius is the distance your customers actually travel to reach you, or that you travel to reach them: decide it from experience, not from the map. A locksmith, a restaurant and a beauty salon do not share the same area, even on the same street. Start narrow; there will always be time to widen.
One setting often goes unnoticed, in the campaign's location options. ‘Presence’ targets people who are in your area or regularly go there; ‘Presence or interest’ adds those who have shown interest in the area, wherever they are. The second makes sense for a hotel welcoming travellers; for a neighbourhood shop, the first is often more accurate.
Hours and devices
The ad schedule sets the days and hours when your ads can appear. If they invite people to call, run them when someone can pick up: an ad that rings a closed phone pays for a click for nothing. Like the noren curtain hung at the entrance of a Japanese shop, the ad should say you are open, and only when it is true. Depending on the bidding strategy, the bid can also vary by device.
A page made for the ad
A frequent mistake is to send every click to the home page. The visitor searched for a specific service; they land on a general page and have to search again, on a phone, often in a hurry. A dedicated page repeats the words of the ad, gives the price or how to obtain one, the area served and the opening hours, and puts the call or booking button within thumb's reach. It answers a single question, the one that triggered the click.
A slow or confusing page costs you twice. It weighs on the landing page experience, and therefore on the ad's rank and the price of the click; and it lets visitors you have already paid for walk away. Loading speed on mobile deserves particular attention, which we cover in our article on website speed. There is no need to rebuild the whole site: one solid page per offer is often enough to start.
What the page must show
- A way to act, visible without scrolling: call, book, request a quote.
- Reassuring proof: real photos, reviews, address, area served.
- A short form that asks only for what you need in order to reply.
Measuring real conversions
A click is not a customer. What you need to count are conversions, that is, the actions that have value for you: a call, a form sent, a booking. Google Ads can measure them if you declare them and if the website passes the information on. Without this tracking, you judge a campaign by its number of clicks, as you would judge a shop window by the number of passers-by.
- Define what counts
Keep the few actions that truly resemble a sale: the call, the enquiry sent, the confirmed booking, not a mere page visit.
- Declare them
Each action becomes a conversion in Google Ads, measured by a tag on the website or by call tracking. Check that it fires only once, at the right moment, for instance on the thank-you page after sending.
- Respect consent
This measurement relies on cookies or trackers, which require visitors' consent. Your website must collect it properly and pass their choice on.
- Compare with reality
Note the calls and enquiries you actually receive, and compare them with what Google Ads shows. A large gap points to a measurement that needs fixing.
In the European Economic Area, consent is not a detail. Since March 2024, Google has required advertisers to pass on visitors' consent signals, through its ‘Consent Mode’ in its second version, for certain measurement and targeting features. A visitor who refuses measurement cookies is not tracked like the others: some conversions therefore escape direct observation. Read the figures as a trend, and see in our article on cookies and the CNIL how to collect this consent properly.
The budget, and time to judge
In Google Ads, you set an average daily budget. Google may spend up to twice that amount on some days, when searches are plentiful, but it will not charge more than 30.4 times the daily budget over the month, the average number of days in a month. An example calculation, not a recommendation: with a daily budget of €10, one day may reach €20, but the month will not exceed €304. So think in months, not in days.
On a small budget, the danger is judging too quickly. A campaign must gather enough searches, clicks and conversions for its figures to mean something; a few days are not enough. Google's automated bidding strategies also learn from your conversions, and generally feel their way while they have few. Set yourself an observation period before touching anything, then change one setting at a time so you know what produced the effect.
The mistakes that cost money
Disappointing campaigns often suffer from the same flaws, rarely linked to the amount invested. They can be fixed quickly, provided you know where to look. Here are the ones we check first.
- Sending visitors to the home page. They have to search again for what the ad promised, and they leave.
- Keeping the default settings. Location set to ‘Presence or interest’, broad match without negative keywords, ads running at all hours: the budget goes to people who will not come.
- Counting clicks instead of enquiries. Without conversion tracking, you improve what is easy to measure, not what pays.
- Neglecting your business profile. Once linked to your Google Ads account, your Google business profile can show your address in the ad, and visitors often check it before calling: left incomplete, it wastes the click.
- Promising what the page does not deliver. A price, a lead time or an availability announced and then nowhere to be found damages trust, as well as the landing page experience as Google assesses it.
A well-tuned local campaign is nothing spectacular: it makes the phone ring at the right hours, for the right services, from people who live close enough to come. That is how we design it in our advertising discipline: narrow at first, measured honestly, widened only once it has proved itself. The rest, how the phone is answered and the quality of the work, belongs to the business.
An ad is only a promise; it is the page, and then the business, that keep it.
What you can do this week
Tick as you go: nothing is saved, it is simply a reminder.
Founder and director of Digital Air Media, a digital creation house opened in Paris in 2017. He writes here what the house applies to its own pages before offering it to others.