Sow The Seed Marketing

Spending more on Google Ads doesn’t automatically mean getting more enquiries.

I’ve seen businesses worry about whether their budget should be £500 or £1,000 a month when there are more fundamental questions to answer first. If the targeting is wrong, the landing page doesn’t do its job or nobody is properly measuring enquiries and sales, increasing the budget can simply mean wasting money faster.

Before you spend a penny on Google Ads, I’d ask these five questions.

1. What Do You Actually Want Google Ads to Generate?

This sounds obvious, but “more business” isn’t a particularly useful answer.

What do you actually want someone to do after clicking your ad?

Call you? Complete an enquiry form? Book an appointment? Buy something online? Visit your premises?

Knowing the answer affects everything from the campaigns you create to the pages you send people to and the conversions you need to track.

It also gives you something meaningful to judge the advertising against.

A campaign generating 500 clicks might look impressive in a report. If none of those people enquire or buy anything, those clicks haven’t achieved very much.

Start with the business outcome and work backwards.

2. Which Services or Products Are Actually Worth Advertising?

You don’t necessarily need to advertise everything you sell.

If you have a limited budget, trying to promote ten different services at once can spread that money very thinly.

Instead, look at which services or products make the most commercial sense.

Which have healthy margins? Where do you have capacity? Which customers are most valuable? Is there enough search demand? And which services do you particularly want more of?

Imagine you’re a trades business offering five different services across Shropshire. One service generates jobs worth several thousand pounds, while another usually results in relatively small one-off jobs.

That doesn’t automatically mean the higher-value service should get all the budget, but it’s information I’d want before deciding where to spend the money.

Google Ads should support what you’re trying to achieve as a business, rather than simply sending traffic to whichever pages happen to exist on your website.

3. Where Do Your Customers Need to Be?

Location targeting can waste an extraordinary amount of money if it isn’t thought through properly.

If you only work within 20 miles of Telford, there’s little point paying for clicks from people in London, Manchester or Glasgow.

Even within your genuine service area, some locations may be more valuable than others.

Think about where your best customers come from, how far you’re genuinely prepared to travel and whether there are particular towns or areas you want to grow in.

Then make sure the campaign reflects that.

I’d rather see a smaller Google Ads budget concentrated on the right services in the right locations than the same budget spread across a huge area simply because Google allows you to target it.

4. What Happens After Someone Clicks Your Ad?

Getting the click is only half the job.

The person who lands on your website needs to immediately understand that they’re in the right place.

If someone searches for a specific service and your advert takes them to a generic homepage where they have to hunt around for information, you’ve introduced unnecessary friction.

Look at the page you’re sending people to.

Does it clearly explain the service? Does it answer the questions someone is likely to have before enquiring? Is it easy to use on a phone? Is the next step obvious?

And does the page give someone a reason to choose you?

You can have excellent Google Ads targeting and still waste money if the website doesn’t turn the right visitors into enquiries.

That’s why I don’t look at paid advertising completely separately from the rest of your marketing. Sometimes the biggest improvement isn’t another campaign adjustment. It’s fixing what happens after the click.

5. Can You Tell Whether Google Ads Is Actually Working?

This is the one I’d want sorted before spending any serious amount of money.

You need to know what happens after someone clicks an advert.

At a minimum, that might mean tracking:

• Enquiry form submissions
• Phone calls
• Purchases
• Bookings
• Other actions that genuinely matter to the business

But don’t stop at counting conversions if you can avoid it.

Ten enquiries aren’t necessarily better than five if the ten are poor quality and the five turn into profitable customers.

Where possible, connect your advertising back to what happened commercially. Which enquiries became sales? What were they worth? Are certain campaigns generating much better customers than others?

That’s the information that helps you decide whether to increase a budget, change direction or stop spending on something that isn’t working.

So, How Much Should You Spend on Google Ads?

Only once you’ve answered those questions would I start deciding what an appropriate budget looks like.

There isn’t a standard amount that every small business should spend.

It depends on search demand, likely cost per click, how many visitors turn into enquiries, what proportion of those enquiries become customers and what a customer is actually worth to you.

I’ve covered this in more detail in How Much Should a Small Business in Shropshire Spend on Google Ads?.

You can also use my free Google Ads Budget Calculator to get a clearer idea of what different budgets could mean based on your own figures.

The important thing is not to start with “How much can I afford to give Google?”

Start with what the advertising needs to achieve for the numbers to make sense.

Don’t Spend More Until You Know What’s Not Working

If a Google Ads campaign isn’t producing the results you expected, increasing the budget isn’t always the answer.

First, work out where the problem is.

It could be the searches you’re appearing for. It could be your location targeting. It could be the adverts themselves, the page people land on or the way conversions are being measured.

There may even be cases where Google Ads simply isn’t the best place to put more of your marketing budget.

That’s why I’d rather identify the problem before you spend more money trying to solve it.

Want a Second Pair of Eyes on Your Google Ads?

If you’re considering Google Ads or already running campaigns and aren’t sure whether your budget is being spent in the right places, take a look at my Google Ads and PPC management service.

I’ll look at the numbers, the targeting and what you’re actually trying to achieve as a business rather than simply telling you to increase your ad spend.

If you’d like to talk it through first, you can book a free 30-minute Seed Session. There’s no pitch or obligation afterwards. We’ll look at where you are now and what, if anything, is worth doing next.