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Running ads on a small budget doesn’t mean settling for small results. Andy Janaitis of PPC Pitbulls shares why simplification, clean tracking, and the right creative mix matter more than trying to mimic big-budget brands. In this episode, you’ll learn how to set up campaigns that give algorithms the data they need, avoid common pitfalls, and build profitable ad strategies without the overwhelm.
Why Small Businesses Should Stop Copying Big Brand Google Ads Strategies
You see that Liquid Death ad everywhere you scroll. Nike’s latest campaign keeps popping up across every platform. Apple’s minimalist messaging seems to follow you around the internet. And your brain immediately thinks: “That’s it—we need to do exactly what they’re doing.”
Hold up. That’s probably the worst thing you could do for your Google Ads campaigns.
Andy Janaitis, founder of PPC Pitbulls has spent over a decade helping small businesses grow past seven figures with Google and Meta ads. His engineering background brings a technical approach that cuts through the marketing fluff, and he’s got some strong opinions about why copying enterprise strategies will drain your budget faster than you can say “Performance Max.”
The Big Brand Trap That’s Killing Your ROI
When you try to mimic what major brands are doing, you’re playing a game you can’t win.
“You’ll see a lot of times even in email marketing where people say, ‘Oh, I broke down their marketing flows,'” Janaitis explains. “And then you see this big map of probably 50 different automated flows, each one that has 20 different emails in it. If you’re a small business doing under a million a year in revenue, that’s not feasible in the first place. But even if it was, that’s not the best approach for you.”
The same principle applies to paid advertising. While you’re busy trying to recreate Nike’s omnipresent brand awareness campaigns, you’re spreading your limited budget so thin that nothing has a chance to work.
Nike can afford to run 47 different campaign variations because they’ve got enough budget to feed each one. When you try to run 10 different campaigns with a $2,000 monthly budget, you’re giving each campaign about $200 to work with. That’s not enough data for Google’s algorithms to figure out who your ideal customers are, let alone optimize for them.
Why Campaign Consolidation Is Your Secret Weapon
Here’s where Janaitis gets a bit contrarian: fewer campaigns often mean better results.
“Everything is a lot more automated in both platforms, Google and Meta,” he notes. “The approach that we find works the most, especially for smaller businesses, is to really focus on consolidating the number of campaigns, even the number of creatives that you have, so that you’re not splitting your budget too many ways.”
This isn’t about being lazy or oversimplifying. It’s about understanding how machine learning actually works.
When you consolidate your campaigns, you’re doing two crucial things:
- Giving each campaign enough budget to generate meaningful data
- Allowing the AI algorithms to learn patterns from a larger data set
Instead of teaching Google’s algorithm about 10 different micro-audiences with $200 each, you’re giving it $2,000 worth of data about your core customer base. The algorithm gets smarter, faster.
The Data Problem Nobody Talks About
Before you worry about campaign structure, though, you need to solve the foundational problem that most small businesses completely ignore: conversion tracking.
“Make sure that you actually have the technical system configured so that the data is being passed back,” Janaitis emphasizes, “so you can measure the outcome of the ad performance, but also to pass that back to the platform so they can learn and optimize.”
Without proper conversion tracking, you’re essentially asking Google to optimize your campaigns blindfolded. The algorithm has no idea which clicks turned into sales, so it can’t learn who your best customers are.
For e-commerce businesses on Shopify, this is relatively straightforward—there are out-of-the-box apps that handle most of the heavy lifting. WordPress users or lead generation businesses can set this up through Google Tag Manager.
But if you’re doing serious volume (over $10,000 monthly ad spend), server-side tracking becomes crucial. iOS updates and privacy changes have made browser-based tracking less reliable, so server-side tracking helps ensure you’re getting clean data back to the platforms.
The Micro Conversion Strategy for Small Budgets
What if you’re just starting out and only generating 10-15 purchases per month from your ads? That’s not enough data for Google’s algorithm to optimize effectively. Janaitis recommends aiming for 30-50 conversions minimum to see real optimization.
This is where micro conversions become your best friend.
“In the e-commerce world, it would be things like add to cart or begin checkout,” he explains. “In the lead gen world, it could be downloading your PDF, your lead magnet before you actually get to that booking call.”
By optimizing for these precursor actions, you’re giving the algorithm more signals about people who are likely to eventually purchase. Just remember to switch back to optimizing for actual purchases once you hit that 30-50 conversion threshold—you don’t want to optimize for window shoppers forever.
Your Small Business Advantage
Here’s the part where being small becomes an advantage.
Big brands have to speak to everyone. They need campaigns that work for soccer moms in Ohio and tech bros in San Francisco. Their messaging has to be broad enough to appeal to their massive, diverse audience.
You don’t have that problem.
Janaitis shared an example of a meat snack provider that discovered their product worked exceptionally well for two very specific audiences: CrossFit enthusiasts who wanted high-protein, clean snacks, and moms looking for organic lunch options for their kids.
“This smaller brand had the advantage of, ‘Hey, I can run only two campaigns to a very small audience,'” he explains. “‘When you see an ad that says, hey moms, this is the perfect meat stick to put in your kid’s lunchbox on their way to school,’ that speaks a lot better than just, ‘Hey, this is a really popular snack, everybody likes it.'”
That’s your competitive edge right there. While Nike has to create campaigns that somehow speak to everyone, you can create laser-focused messages that make your ideal customers feel like you’re reading their minds.
The Smart Way to Test New Ideas
This doesn’t mean you should never experiment. Testing is crucial for long-term success, but there’s a smart way to do it that won’t tank your performance.
Janaitis recommends the 80/20 rule: keep 80% of your budget on campaigns that are already working, and use only 20% (or preferably 10%) for experimental campaigns.
“Once something pops over there and you say, ‘Hey, this is something that’s working,’ go ahead and move that over to the main campaign and really maximize it with as much budget as you can.”
Even better, both Google and Meta allow you to test multiple creative variations within the same campaign. Instead of splitting your budget across different campaigns, you can add new images, videos, or ad copy to your existing campaigns and let the algorithms do the testing for you.
The Budget Reality Check
So what’s the minimum budget you can get away with? Janaitis typically recommends around $1,500 per month as a baseline, but it depends on your average order value and industry.
If you’re selling $1,000 furniture pieces, you’re not going to get many conversions with a $1,500 ad budget. But if you’re selling $30 products, that same budget can generate enough conversion data for the algorithms to optimize effectively.
For agency management, he suggests around $2,000 monthly as a baseline where you can get meaningful strategic work done. “There’s only so much you can do if you’re paying an agency $400 to manage your ads,” he notes. “It takes time to configure things properly, understand your real business goals, and get things set up right.”
Getting Started: The One Thing to Do This Week
If you take nothing else from this, do this one thing: set up proper analytics tracking.
“Make sure that your analytics are set up and get to know your numbers,” Janaitis advises. “Before you get started, understand if you’re running any sort of ads today, how many purchases are coming from that platform? How much are you spending? Is it profitable or not?”
Google Analytics 4 is free and will give you the foundation you need to measure what’s actually working. Without this baseline, you’re just throwing money at ads and hoping something sticks.
The Bottom Line
Stop trying to be Apple. Stop trying to be Nike. Stop trying to be whatever enterprise brand you admire.
Your small business advantage isn’t a limitation—it’s your secret weapon. You can speak directly to specific audiences in ways that massive brands simply can’t. You can be personal where they have to be generic. You can be targeted where they have to be broad.
But only if you stop copying their strategies and start leveraging your unique position in the market.
Consolidate your campaigns. Set up proper tracking. Use your small budget as a feature, not a bug. And remember: in the world of Google Ads, being focused beats being flashy every time.
Google Ads Success on a Small Budget Episode Transcript
Rich: My guest today is the founder and chief strategist of PPC Pitbulls, a boutique digital marketing agency that helps small businesses grow past seven figures using Google and Meta ads. He partners with founder-led brands and e-commerce teams to simplify their paid ad strategies, ensuring campaigns are built on solid tracking, clean execution, and profitability, not noise or guesswork.
With over 10 years of agency and analytic experience, his background spans engineering, web development, and digital strategy. He’s known for his practical, down-to-earth approach that cuts through marketing overwhelm, and empowers business owners to take confident action.
Whether he is helping a brand understand attribution or demystify performance max, he brings clarity, integrity, and a deep respect for the entrepreneurial journey. And today we’re going to be diving into how to run Google Ads if you’re a small business with a small budget, with Andy Janaitis. Andy, welcome to the podcast.
Andy: Thanks for having me, Rich. I appreciate that warm introduction.
Rich: So there’s a lot of specialties within digital marketing. What led you to focus on Google ads and e-commerce?
Andy: Yeah, you mentioned it there. I come from a background in engineering. I found my way into web development and product management, so I have a really kind of technical background. And when I started this business and found my way into the digital marketing space, it was just a very natural fit. Google ads, there’s a lot of technical things. I think that’s a lot what we’ll talk about today that, some of the foundational key things that are so important to get your ads right are relatively technical and, come from a development mindset. Making sure that the analytics and the signal is working properly so that your ads, have a chance at actually optimizing properly.
So yeah, I had some colleagues that I was working with that kind of pulled me over into this world. And yeah, it’s just a really natural fit for my development and engineering background.
Rich: Excellent. So Andy, a lot of small businesses try and copy what the big brands are doing. Why does this often backfire for SMBs?
Andy: Yeah, it’s one of the things we see all the time. Especially if you’re toying around on LinkedIn, you see so much kind of guru speak of, people say, “Oh, I helped this brand scale to nine figures.”
Let me break down. One of the things I love, you’ll see a lot of times even in email marketing, you’ll say, “Oh, I broke down their marketing flows.” And then you see this big map of probably 50 different automated flows. Each one that has 20 different emails in it. And it’s like if you’re a small business doing under a million a year in revenue, that’s not feasible in the first place. But even if it was, that’s not the best approach for you. So I think people get themselves into trouble, honestly, by trying to do too much.
So in our world, when we look at it from a paid ads perspective, a lot of what we want to do is simplify. So think about, for instance, all the time people will ask, “Is it Google or Meta?” And the answer is, it depends on your business. And there’s a lot of kind of nuance there. But I think for most small businesses, focusing on those two big major platforms when you start thinking about paid ads makes a lot of sense.
I think new founders can get themselves in trouble saying, hey, I got to be spending money on Google and Meta and Pinterest and TikTok and LinkedIn ads. And you never really get to spend enough time to learn and get any one of those platforms right. But more importantly too, you’re dividing your budget that many ways, which means you’re dividing the data that you create that many different ways. So none of those platforms really have an opportunity to kind of learn and optimize and get the most out of them.
Rich: All right. Now when you first start working with a client, if they’re all running ads, but they obviously brought you in because they weren’t running the way they should, what are some of the most common mistakes you see in their ad accounts?
Andy: Yeah, so it, it all comes back to that simplification. One of the first thing is just way too many campaigns, way too many ad sets depending on if it’s Meta ads or ad groups. If it’s Google, way too many keywords if they’re running search campaigns.
A lot of that goes back to an old-fashioned approach where everything was very manual. We wanted to say, hey, I want to be running each individual campaign to only target one very small, niched, ideal customer persona who’s searching for one particular problem set. And we’ll develop an entire campaign around solving that. Whereas today, everything’s a lot more automated in both platforms in Google and Meta. And the approach that we find that works the most, and especially works for smaller businesses, is to really focus on consolidating the number of campaigns, even the number of creatives that you have, so that you’re not splitting your budget too many ways.
And then you’re allowing the algorithm, you’re leaning into this AI-driven algorithmic optimization. And because you’re not splitting the budget too many ways, you’re passing as much data as possible in the form of purchase signals back into the model so that it can learn who are the types of people who are right for your product and who are a good match for your brand. And that’s really the best way to do it.
So I would say, I guess maybe it’s two big problems that we see a lot is way too complex campaign structures. And then on top of that, we talked a lot about consolidating the data and how we’re passing the data back. Sometimes we see that’s just not happening at all. So making sure that you actually have the technical system configured properly so that the data is being passed back just so you can both measure the outcome of the ad performance, but also to pass that back to the platform so they can learn and optimize and give you better results over time.
Rich: That’s a great point. And I’ve run into some of the same things, small business clients who want to run tons of campaigns right out of the gate. How do you explain to them that is not in their best interest? What is the phrasing that you’re using where they’re like, “Okay, Andy, I get it. Let’s run it your way first”?
Andy: Yeah, so it’s a challenge. A lot of times we think about it in terms of people will say, “Hey, I see one of my competitors” – and obviously it’s oftentimes a giant competitor – “I keep seeing this ad follows me around everywhere I go, how come we’re not doing something exactly like that?” And, we’ll have a new conversation like that every week or two, with different ad concepts and different things we could be trying.
I think for us, the way that we get across first and foremost, and this kind of goes to if you’re working with an agency, you’ve got to have some level of trust between the client and the agency that hopefully they hired us because they trust our expertise and there’s a reason why we’re working together. So please, let us do what we do.
But when it comes to working with an agency, I always say too, if an agency can’t explain why they’re doing something in a way that you understand and doesn’t sound like technical mumbo jumbo, then they’re not doing right by you. So we do always make sure to break it down and simplify. And what I always say it’s ‘benchmarking’. We look across all of our clients and across what’s working for the industry, and more often than not, these automated approaches are working, simplified, consolidated campaign structures.
In Google, that means a lot of Performance Max. Typically, we see these Performance Max campaigns outperforming a lot of other approaches. In Meta, it’s Advantage Plus, we typically see that outperforming a lot of other more manual-based approaches. But at the end of the day, it’s looking at, “Hey, here’s where your budget is at. We could do that and try out that concept for you. But all that’s going to mean is that we’re taking away some budget from what we see is already the winner.”
What we see this campaign’s working the best, so why would we take budget away from that to go try something new? And sometimes you’ve got to experiment, obviously within reason. If you split that too many ways, you’re just bleeding the winners dry while you’re pursuing a new strategy that often doesn’t pan out.
Rich: You touched upon this, but obviously machine learning plays such a big role in Google and Meta ads today. What can we do to help the algorithms learn more effectively with the limited data that we might be able to provide them given a limited budget?
Andy: Yeah, so we think of signal that you’re passing back a couple things. First of all, you got to make sure that you are technically configured to pass that signal back. When a purchase occurs, you’re giving that data back to Google or Meta. Making sure that you just have conversion tracking set up properly. That’s the number one. We work with a lot of e-commerce businesses, so if you’re in something like a Shopify, there’s out of the box apps that will pretty much get this set up for you.
If you are running on WordPress or you’re a lead gen agency, you can set it up with Google Tag Manager fairly easily. And what that’s going to do is it’s going to send user behavior signals that occur in the browser straight back to Google and Meta. So that’s step number one. You got to have it, it’s got to be set up right.
Step number two to take that one step further is to work with Server Side tracking. So in today’s kind of privacy focused age, there’s a lot of tracking techniques that don’t work as well as they used to. Because of things like cookie blocking, iOS 14 signals don’t get from the browser back to those platforms quite as well as they used to.
So Server Side tracking is a technique where we’re sending the data to our own server, and then from that server onto Google or meta. And it tends to work a little bit better. We typically recommend that for brands I always say it’s almost like more headache than it’s worth to set that up if you’re doing under 10,000 a month in ad spend. But that is the next big step for making sure you’re getting the highest quality data back-to-back to those platforms.
The last thing I want to say is what we call “micro version”. For big brands, especially in the e-commerce world, you’re looking for how many purchases did we get? And it’s great, you get a hundred purchases, 300 purchases, 500 purchases. If you have a big enough budget that’s plenty of good data to send back to allow the models to optimize.
But for smaller brands, if you’re just starting out maybe you’re looking at your ads producing 10 or 20 purchases a month. That’s not really enough data to get the models back. We say as a rule of thumb, you want 30 to 50 purchases at a minimum to allow your campaigns to really start to optimize. So what you can do in those cases is use precursor conversions. So things like in the e-commerce world, it would be things like, and things like add to cart or begin checkout in the lead gen world, it could be, things like downloading your PDF your lead magnet before you actually get to that booking call or whatever it is you’re actually hoping for.
And what’s good about that is you’re now passing some data back on people who are probably more likely to make a purchase, right? But you don’t have to get all the way to making the purchase. One thing to be aware of there, of course, is there’s this like window shopping technique that, that. I never really imagined would happen, but it’s crazy. We see it in every account we work in. There’s a lot of people out there that will add a ton of items to their cart and then never come back and purchase it. So you want to make sure that once you have enough real purchase data, you’re relying on that good source of truth data, and you turn off those micro conversions just to make sure that you’re not optimizing your campaigns for window shoppers in the case of that add to cart behavior.
Rich: I also think that a lot of e-commerce stores collectively have trained us to not check out on our first attempt because it’s only a matter of time before we get an email or a text saying, “I notice there’s still stuff in your cart. Here’s 10% back if you close that sale.” I definitely know a lot of people who refuse to go through the first time unless they’re on a time crunch and finalize that purchase because they know that there’s a reward coming if they just behave badly.
There’s a lot of us out here that believe that more testing is always better, more creatives, more campaigns, constant A/B split testing. How do you advise clients who want to spread their testing and kind of spread their budgets a little too thin?
Andy: Yeah, so it’s the right instinct. It definitely, you don’t want to rest on your laurels, especially if you get to profitability in your campaigns. You don’t want to just stop because over time you’re creative, we call it creative fatigue. People will start seeing the same ad over and it becomes less effective over time.
So you’ve got to be testing new things, figuring out, both ads. Your purchaser’s preferences shift as well as just in general. You can’t see the same ad a million times and have it still be effective. So you’ve got to be trying new things. The challenge is you don’t want to be, as we’ve talked about earlier, pulling too much budget away from what’s really working today in order to test out new approaches that may or may not work.
And typically are going to give you lower, on average going to give you lower results because they’re untested, unproven, you’re trying new things out. So we’d like to think of it. Almost in terms of there, there’s kind of two ways to go about it. So if you’re going to have true experimental campaigns, you’re going to say, hey, I’ve got a new concept that I really want to test. I like to try to advocate for 20% or less than the total budget. Usually closer to 10% of the budget put towards that experimental campaign that way.
Once something pops over there and you say, “Hey, this is something that’s working, go ahead and move that over to the main campaign and really maximize it with as much budget as you can”, I think that’s a great approach. The other thing you can do both on Google and Meta, most of the campaign structures that we use, it’s allowing you to put a lot of different creative, both headlines, descriptions, text, as well as images and videos into the same campaign. So you don’t necessarily need to have another full campaign that splits the budget out. What you can do is just add some of those videos and text options into your preexisting campaign, and then over time, Google or Meta will do some of that testing for you and you’ll be able to see that, hey, over the last 30 days. This one piece of creative really got a lot more service. It, had higher impressions, higher click-through rate than all of my other pieces of creative.
So now I know that’s the concept that’s working. As I go to add more things in, let’s follow those guidelines and move down that same direction. That’s really our preferred approach is rather than splitting the budget out further, it’s just constantly testing in some new creative I would say maybe you don’t have to do it, honestly, as often as some of the gurus out there would probably have you believe you do. But I would say, probably on a one-month, maybe even two-month cadence, going in and looking and seeing what’s currently not performing super well and what is performing super well, add in a few more creatives like those that are currently performing well or some new experimental creatives and turn off some of those that aren’t performing super well.
Rich: But it sounds like you’re definitely leaning into a lot of the AI machine learning that are taking effect on these platforms. Do you think it makes sense for us to start running with fewer variables to start with and then we start getting that actual sale data that we can feed back to the platforms before we start throwing a whole bunch of stuff into P Max, or Advantage Plus, or whatever the different tools are?
Andy: I think a number of campaigns, fewer is better. Simplify it. Don’t split the budget up. But I would say in both of those platforms, typically it’s going to ask for each of the different creative types. Images, it’s going to let you go up to about 15 images, depending on the platform videos, you’re going to have up to five videos, headlines typically is up to 15 or up to five on Meta. You want to hit those numbers. You don’t necessarily have to hit 15. If it says you can put in 15, I’d say get to 12. Or if it’s going to let you have five headlines, use all five headlines to give it the best chance to try a few different things out.
You can try different concepts within those, you don’t want to use all five of pretty much the same headline. Try different differentiators for your product or different kind of selling points of your product. So I would say yes, fewer campaigns, fewer ad groups and ad sets. But within the ad itself, go ahead and use that capability. You don’t want to just add one headline, one description, one image, because that’s more similar to the older way that we would do things where you’re setting up an individual ad and specifying, “I want this exact text to go with this exact image and this exact placement.”
Instead what we’re doing today is, hey, here’s a few options. Mix and match them in the ways that, that, start to work the best. And we see these emergent behaviors as the algorithm tells us what’s working.
Rich: All right. We’ve touched upon the fact that there’s e-commerce, there’s lead gen. Do you have a different approach when you’re working with clients that are either an e-commerce brand versus a lead gen company?
Andy: Yeah, there’s definitely some differences. A lot of differences and a lot of similarities. But some of the big differences for e-commerce we see that product-based ads are going to always typically work the best.
So in Google, this is the shopping feed that’s that carousel right under the search bar where you have the individual product with the price point. It’s the product data pulled directly from your website. That tends to work really well.
Whereas on lead gen, obviously you don’t have the possibility to do that. So you’re probably looking more on either typical search ads as well as image or video ads for kind of that higher funnel education piece.
And then across the spectrum, whether it be e-commerce or lead gen, one kind of thing that we always think about is whether your product or service is something that somebody’s already looking for and knows they’re in market for they have intent to buy that service. In those cases, Google is going to do really well for you because you already have the search intent. You know somebody’s searching for, I want to buy this particular product, or hey, I have a plumbing issue, I need to go in and, fix this particular issue with my sink.
However, if you have a product or service that either people don’t really know they need until they hear about it and learn about it, or it takes a little bit of education to let them know that here’s the differentiator. This is why we’re different than other products in our category. That’s where Meta’s going to perform a little bit better because it’s more people scrolling through their feed, and you’re interrupting them with this ad that gives you a chance to get in front of them and teach them something new that they weren’t necessarily thinking about prior.
So I would say that’s probably the bigger distinction rather than, just pure e-commerce versus lead gen. But those are some of the differences to be keeping in mind.
Rich: Alright. Now a lot of small businesses must come to you. They come to us, and they’ve got brand aspersions that may be beyond where they currently are. They see brands like Liquid Death or Apple or Nike, and they’re like, let’s just do what they’re doing. How can small brands lean into what makes them unique rather than trying to mimic these enterprise type brands?
Andy: Exactly. Yeah. So one thing I like to tell people about, always think that when you’re scaling your ads when you put out a little bit of money into ads, that money is going to be targeted. Hopefully if you set everything up right around the people who are most likely to buy your product. So the types of people that are closest possible to your ideal client.
But then as you scale up a little bit. You’re going out a little bit further and because you’re reaching a little bit broader segment of people, they’re a little bit less likely to buy your product. So that in some ways can be, it can be tough to scale. It means that as you want to put more money against your ads, you’re reaching a broader audience who probably isn’t quite in market for your product yet, or maybe, doesn’t hit on all of your key differentiators. Not all of them are applicable to them.
So I think the big difference between small brands and large brands is that with the largest brands, they’re already looking at that kind of maximum scale, so they need to be able to speak to everybody. So a lot of the times you’ll see, especially from an ad perspective, almost more like entertainment-based ads, things that are fun to watch and just staying top of mind. They’re playing an awareness game to stay out there.
For smaller ads, you have an advantage in that you’re so focused, you have such a small budget going that you’re only going to reach this smaller group of people, which means you can speak much more specifically to them. So I always say, lean into that you don’t need to be able to speak to how anybody could possibly use this product. You can speak to one particular audience, the most likely audience to buy that particular product and how does this work best for them.
I think about a meat snack provider that we talked about, and they would say, “Our key clients really, it’s a meat snack stick. Anybody could eat this, right? We, on the one hand, we could write an ad that really is just, “Hey, it’s flavorful. Anybody out there, go for it. It’s a great product.” But on the other hand, it has certain differentiators that align it with certain audiences.
So what they found was it was really good because it was high protein, clean, all of those types of things. It worked really well for people in the CrossFit space who wanted something that was a clean protein and they were able to make ads around that, that spoke just to that particular group.
And at the same time, they found that it also worked really well. For moms who are packing their kid’s lunch because it was organic, didn’t have a lot of the nasty stuff that you wouldn’t want to give to your kids, and who also came in a small enough size that it fit into a lunchbox, so they’re able to make some ads that fit that persona perfectly and just spoke directly to those people.
So whereas larger meat stick brands would probably have to put out an ad that was either entertaining to everybody or spoke to all of the special things that were going for this particular snack. This smaller brand, they had the advantage of, I can run only two campaigns to a very small audience, and it can be so targeted that when you see an ad that says, “Hey moms, this is the perfect meat snack to put in your kids’ lunchbox on their way to school”, that speaks a lot better to them than the just, “Hey, this is a really popular snack. Everybody likes it” kind of thing.
Rich: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Since we’ve been talking about limited budgets, and I hate to put you on the spot here, but in your opinion, what is the lowest budget that a small business can run if they’re doing this themselves? And what is the lowest budget you would recommend if they’re working with an outside agency like yours on a monthly scale?
Andy: So the short answer and the least fun answer to hear is, ‘it depends’, right? It really depends on your business. But what I like to think, typically if people are going to push for a number, I typically throw out about $1,500 a month as about as low as I would like to think. And here’s some of the factors that’ll tell you whether you can go on the lower side of that, and try to push even lower, or whether you really need that $1,500 a month and push up.
You have to think one, if your average order value is higher. We talked earlier about how it’s so important that you’re sending enough data back to these platforms. So remember that if your average order value is higher, typically it’s going to cost you more to get each because your competitors probably have similar average order values.
Your cost per acquisition is going to be higher as well, right? So if you are selling a product, we work with a furniture supplier where their average order value is, $750 to over a thousand dollars, depending on the category. In those categories, you’re not going to get that many purchases for $1,500 in ad spend. It’s just, that’s not that realistic that you’re going to spend $1,500 in ad spend and get a hundred people buying a thousand-dollar couches. It’s not going to happen. If you have a really high average order value, expect that your budgets are going to be a little bit higher. If you have a smaller average order value, and you’re in a category where you can be competitive with a smaller average order value, maybe you can keep those budgets lower because you’re getting more purchase data for a smaller amount of purchases.
The other thing, when you talk to the agency point, I always think you want to find an agency that you’re comfortable with. And sometimes when you get into the very, very low management fees, if there’s agencies out there that say, “Hey, we’ll run your ads for $400 bucks a month”, something like that, there’s only so much you can do. It takes time to configure things properly, understand your real business goals, and get things in. I don’t know that you’re going to find really good strategy at that very lowest end.
So if you’re looking for us, we think about $2,000 in management fees as a reasonable kind of baseline where you can really get some good work done for a small business. If you’re in that range, you want to think if I’m paying an agency $2,000 to manage my ads it probably doesn’t make a ton of sense for me to spend only $1,000 on those ads. Because again, there’s only so much benefit you can get from $1,000 in ad spend, and if you’re paying an additional $2,000 for it to be managed, the numbers just aren’t going to work out.
So those are two of the big factors that I like to think about is average order value, the purchase volume that you can currently bring in, and send that data back to the models. And then also how much are you going to be paying for your ad spend to be managed and make sure that you’re choosing an ad spend that you fits with that and you’re getting enough bang for your buck.
Rich: Awesome. All right. Andy, if I wanted to take just one step this week to get better results out of my Google or Meta campaigns, where would you recommend I start?
Andy: Definitely make sure that if you don’t have it already set up, make sure that your analytics are set up. We like to use Google Analytics GA4, it’s a free tool that you can use. Make sure that your analytics are set up and get to know your number. Before you get started, understand if you’re running any sort of ads today, how many purchases are coming from that platform where you’re running ads, how much are you spending? Is it profitable or are not?
It’s amazing how often we work with new brands and find that people just don’t know that number. “Hey, I put this much into ads. This is our total sales number.” And were those sales attributed to the ads or not? It can be dicey to figure all that out and get complicated. But if you don’t have your analytics set up in the first place and you’re not even trying to look at those types of numbers, you’re really going to be in the dark and you can’t make any decisions on whether your ads are working or how to improve those ads.
Rich: All right. If people want to learn more about you and check out your website, see if you’re a good fit to help them run their ads and generate more business, where can we send them, Andy?
Andy: Yeah. Come find us at ppcpitbulls.com. And we’ll actually have a special page just for listeners of this podcast. So it’ll be ppcpitbulls.com/agents. If you come to that URL you’ll see some of the resources that we’ve talked about here today. Including if you’re an e-commerce brand, I have a quick download for the top four metrics that we look at.
We talked a lot about analytics today, but the four metrics that you really need to be calculating, I’ll give you step-by-step instructions how to find that data in Shopify and GA4, and how to interpret it and understand what your numbers are and what you need to be doing to improve your ads.
Rich: Awesome. And we’ll have those links in the show notes. Andy, thank you so much. I appreciate your time today.
Andy: Alright, thank you, Rich.
Show Notes:
Andy Janaitis and his team at PPC Pitbulls help small businesses and brands grow with smarter Google and Meta ads. With a background in engineering and analytics, Andy has a clear, practical approach that cuts through the noise and helps business owners run profitable, data-driven campaigns. Be sure to check out the resource he put together especially for AOC listeners!
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, a web design & digital marketing agency in Portland, Maine, and founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his 25+ years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.