Managing paid search with limited spend takes focus, not luck. Brooke Osmundson explains how to get more from every dollar by tightening your targeting, refining your keywords, and improving what happens after the click. She also shares fresh insights on using AI, seasonality, and audience signals to help small budgets perform like big ones.
How to Make Paid Search Work When Your Budget Is Under $50 a Day
Here’s something I hear often these days: “Google Ads have become too expensive for us. Only big brands with unlimited budgets can make them work.”
And honestly? I get it. Costs have gone up. Competition is fierce. And if you’re working with $20 to $50 per day—or less—it can feel like you’re bringing a spork to a gunfight.
But the truth is paid search can absolutely work for small budgets. You just can’t play by the same rules as enterprise brands throwing around unlimited cash.
I recently sat down with Brooke Osmundson, Director of Growth Marketing at Smith Microsoftware, to talk through the real challenges small businesses face with paid search—and the practical strategies that move the needle when you’re budget-constrained.
The Core Problem: Trying to Do Everything
According to Brooke, the single biggest mistake she sees with small budget advertisers is simple: they’re trying to do too much.
“You’ve got somebody in the company that says, ‘I want to make sure we’re showing up any time this search is performed,'” she explained. “Whether you’re targeting the entire U.S. or a smaller region, there’s just not enough budget to go around.”
Think about the math here. If you’re spending $50 a day but your industry has cost-per-clicks around $20 to $25 (hello, manufacturing and construction businesses), you’re getting maybe two clicks per day. Not two conversions—two clicks.
At that volume, you’re not giving Google’s algorithm enough data to optimize your campaigns. You’re basically flying blind, hoping those two daily clicks somehow turn into customers. And you’d need a near-perfect landing page and conversion rate just to get one lead or sale per day.
That’s not a strategy. That’s hope masquerading as marketing.
Start with Real Numbers, Not Best Practices
Before you launch a single campaign, Brooke recommends doing something most people skip: real research into what your cost per click reality looks like.
“Before even starting your first Google Ads campaign, you really need to do your research,” she said. “Look at the searches you want to show up for. What does that competition really look like? Is this too expensive for me to start with?”
I see businesses constantly following “industry best practices”—segmenting by category, building elaborate campaign structures, targeting broad audiences—without first asking if they can even afford to compete in their space.
If your CPCs are $20 and your budget is $50/day, those best practices don’t apply to you. You need a different playbook.
Geographic Targeting Isn’t Just for Local Businesses
Even if you ship nationwide, you might want to limit your geographic targeting when you’re on a tight budget.
Brooke put it this way: “A $20 to $50 a day budget spread across all 50 states… if your business does really well in Idaho and North Dakota, but there’s more searches in California and Texas that may not convert as well, guess who’s probably going to get those searches and impressions? The larger states.”
Your limited budget gets burned on high-volume markets that don’t convert for you, while the markets where you perform best get ignored.
The solution? Look at where your orders or leads are coming from. Even if you don’t have a physical presence there, if certain regions convert better, focus your ad spend there first. You can always expand once you’ve proven ROI.
The Performance Max Problem
Performance Max campaigns sound incredible on paper. Google’s AI automatically optimizes your ads across Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and Discover. Set it and forget it, right?
Not so fast.
“Performance Max needs more budget to learn,” Brooke explained. “If you’re under that $50 a day, I actually would start with search campaigns where you do have more control.”
PMAX campaigns need significant data to train the algorithm effectively. Without enough budget to generate that data, you’re essentially asking the AI to optimize with one hand tied behind its back.
Traditional search campaigns give you more control over where your money goes, which is exactly what you need when every dollar counts.
Match Types Still Matter (Especially Now)
With all of Google’s automation, you might think keyword match types don’t matter anymore. You’d be wrong.
“I still think that there is a place for a branded or exact match only strategy if you’ve got limited budgets,” Brooke shared. “You want to make sure that you are controlling where your ads are showing.”
When you use broad match keywords with a small budget, Google’s automation can send your ads to all sorts of loosely related searches. Some might convert; many won’t. But you’ll burn through your daily budget fast either way.
Tighter match types—especially exact and phrase match for your core converting keywords—give you control. And control matters when you can’t afford to waste clicks.
Your Website Might Be the Real Problem
Sometimes the issue isn’t your ads at all.
“You have a stellar click-through rate, but nobody’s converting,” Brooke pointed out. “Might make you step back and think, they’re interested in this ad, but is there something I can improve on my website experience?”
People are clicking because your ad is compelling. But if they’re not converting, your landing page probably sucks.
The good news? This is something you can fix without spending more on ads. Improve your landing page experience, streamline your forms, clarify your value proposition, add trust signals like testimonials and authority badges.
Using AI to Stay Competitive
If you’re worried that you can’t afford fancy tools for competitor research or ad optimization, Brooke has a simple suggestion: use free AI tools like ChatGPT.
“Use some of those to understand what your competition is like,” she recommended. “Ask good questions to get good answers. The more specific you can be, the better.”
You can ask AI tools to analyze your competition, help generate ad copy, review your campaigns, or even create image assets. Google’s own platform now has built-in AI tools for generating image assets—especially helpful if you don’t have a design team.
Just remember: garbage in, garbage out. Give the AI good inputs about your target audience, goals, and landing page, and you’ll get better outputs.
The Bottom Line
Can paid search work with small budgets? Absolutely. But you need to be strategic, not scattershot.
Focus on one or two core products or service areas. Do the math on your CPCs before you commit. Target geographies that have proven that they convert. Start with traditional search before jumping to Performance Max. Use tighter match types. And for the love of all that is holy, fix your landing page.
Brooke put it perfectly: “Focus on one area, show good results, and then that’s where the people that hold the purse in the marketing budgets might say, okay, well, let’s now try to expand further. But if you just try to spray and pray every market that you can, every state that you can, you’re not going to get the results that you could.”
Your enterprise competitors can afford to waste money figuring things out. You can’t. But that constraint can actually be your advantage—it forces you to be smarter, more focused, and more strategic with every dollar.
And that’s exactly what being an agent of change is all about.
Transcript from Brooke’s Episode
Rich: My next guest currently serves as the director of Growth Marketing at Smith MicroSoftware, where she drives product brand growth in the telecommunications industry across paid search, social, Apple ads, programmatic and more. She’s a frequent speaker at industry conferences and has been featured in international marketing publications.
Outside of work, she can usually be found on the golf course, watching Law and Order SVU, or working on home projects. She also was amazing when she presented to a packed house at The Agents of Change digital marketing conference back in 2023, and she’s my go-to person when I or a member of my team have questions about sticky situations in paid search.
So I’m very excited to have my good friend Brooke Osmundson, back on the show, as we take a look at the unique challenges of paid search with small budgets. Brooke, welcome back to the show.
Brooke: Thank you for the intro. I’m not used to all of the compliments, so thank you. And it’s great to be back. I know you and I connected over two years ago, and it’s fun to see these continue to go full circle.
Rich: Absolutely. For people who might not know a lot about you, how did you get into paid search and digital advertising?
Brooke: I smile when I get this question, because I feel like I’m one of the few that actually got my first job out of college was in digital marketing. I started my first real job four days after college. And I applied for a digital marketing specialist. I’m like, my degree is in marketing, and this is back in early 2013. And so I actually started my work in-house for a company.
I feel like the more that I talk to people, the industry, they start agency side they figure out what really lights them up, whether they stay agency side or go in-house. But I started as a digital marketing specialist for a wedding invitations company. And that was so fun as a young 22-year-old. I was there, I managed three different e-commerce brands, and I was really self-taught. After my mentor, I had him for about three months and he was great. But after that it was, “you’re on your own, kid”. And so I really just was put right into the ring. I was there for about four and a half years.
I then transitioned to agency side, where I worked on a lot of different clients anywhere from just small local clinics and hospitals all the way up to Fortune 100 companies. And now again, full circle, I’m back in-house for SmithMicro and I serve as their director of growth marketing. So I’ve ping ponged back and forth between working directly for brands and have been on the agency side as well.
Rich: Nice. Definitely good to strengthen your skills both in-house and out. We see this a lot on our end because we work with a lot of small businesse. But there are a lot of small businesses out there that just feel like digital ads are either too expensive or they’re really for the bigger brands, for enterprise level brands. Do you feel that’s true?
Brooke: I feel that there is some truth to that. I will say, working with small brands in the past, I would say it used to be more successful for them than it is now, and I think that there is a wide variety of reasons for that.
Google apps, Google search has gotten more expensive over the years, just like everything else that you buy in the grocery store, everything has gotten more expensive. And so we honestly can’t expect that average cost per clicks to stay in the 50 cents, dollar, $2 range. But that’s not all of it either. Competition has changed. I just feel that there’s a lot more in the market for competition.
I think that there’s, we’ll probably go through a lot of reasons why things might be more challenging for businesses. But I do think that there is a lot that they can do to combat… I shouldn’t say “combat”, you’re not fighting with Google. It’s more so learning or relearning how to work with a shifting market.
Rich: Okay. Alright. So things have changed, and we’ve definitely seen prices go up or bids go up. And that’s true with any platform that kind of proves itself. If you’re getting in early on Google Ads or Meta ads or TikTok ads before it’s been proven, yes, your rates are going to be lower because not everybody knows. But now everybody knows that Google ads are good for transactional searches and great way of getting visibility.
So when a business, and it doesn’t have to be a small business, it’s any business with a small budget, let’s say $20 to $50 a day, what are some of the most common mistakes for brands that size?
Brooke: I think the easiest way to put it is they’re trying to do too much with a limited budget. Especially if you’re just starting out, you’ve got somebody in the company that says, “I want to make sure we’re showing up anytime this search is performed.” And whether you’re targeting the entire US or you’re targeting a smaller region, there’s just not enough budget to go around.
And I will say it may be a lot easier for a company that does have a $20 to $50 budget a day to see success at the beginning if they have cost per clicks around two to three colors. But on the other hand, I see a lot of small businesses that are in more competitive industries – manufacturing, construction – and you’re looking at $20 to $25 cost per click.
And I’d like to take that conversation of budgets and bidding in a different direction a in a little bit, but there is definitely a correlation there. And if you do the simple math of if you’re spending $50 a day, but you have cost per clicks at $20, that math is just not mathing. You’re going to get maybe two clicks a day. And then if you just think about it, simply pulling back those layers, you’ve got to have a stellar landing page, a stellar conversion rate just to get one lead or one transaction per day.
So that’s where, before even starting your first Google Ad campaign, I think you really need to do your research and looking at the searches that I want to show up for, what does that competition really look like? Is this too expensive for me to start with? I see a lot of people focusing on the industry best practices. We should segment by category, we should do all of these things, but they forget the basics of, can I do all of this right away? And I think that just trying to do too much is a challenge for many to start with.
Rich: So if I’m understanding correctly, one of the biggest issues is just everybody wants to be everywhere for everything before they start actually having to spend money. So if I’m just getting started and I’ve got a small budget under $50 a day, what I’m hearing you say is the first thing I want to do is I really want to focus maybe on just one campaign, not try and be too many things.
And then is another thing, if we’re not necessarily selling locally, does it matter whether or not we target the entire US or whether we target a more local area? Is that one of the ways that we might be able to get more juice out of our budget? Or is it not important to target locally if you’re not necessarily tied into a local market?
Brooke: I could take that either way. I feel like if you got a less than $50 a day budget, and maybe there is some locality to your business where technically you could ship to the entire United States, but maybe you know that a certain market does really well for you online or if you’re lead gen, I would focus there. Because a $20 to $50 a day budget spread across all 50 states.
And you also think about the population. Say your business does really well in Idaho or North Dakota, but there’s more searches in California and Texas, but they may not convert as well. Guess who’s probably going to get those searches and those impressions, the larger states. So I do think that there is something if you are able to maybe test out a certain region where you know, does well, even if it’s just, you don’t even have a physical store there.
I think this also goes back to the basics of understanding your business as a whole and not just siloing we want to run Google ads. Look at your business where your orders are coming from or where your leads are coming from and maybe focus there. I think that’s a great idea.
Rich: I’m also wondering, because I’m thinking about a lot of our clients locally that might be a high-end destination resort. And they often will tell us, “Oh, we do really good in the Mid-Atlantic states”, or “We do really well in Chicago”, wherever it is that they just happen to know that they do well already. Might it be a good idea to just focus on that one area so you can test some of your campaigns, test some of your landing pages in that smaller microcosm, so that once you realize, hey, we’ve got a winner here, then you might be able to expand it to other areas or increase your budget.
Brooke: I think that is absolutely right, because again, if you’re getting more conversion data, or just data overall in one region, it’s going to give you more statistical significance to say, “We think that this works. Now let’s go expand into another region”. Instead of, okay, you’ve got pepper a few conversions here, some over in north, maybe Maine. But I do think that focusing is going to be a lot better than just trying to grasp everywhere that you can.
Rich: I want to take a step back, Brooke, and ask what might be a really basic question because I don’t really get into Google Ads on a daily basis. So if I’m interested in running Google Ads and I know that I have a small budget, how can I determine what my cost per click may be? What are the tools that are in Google Ads once I’ve got my account set up so that I can test to see, is this a $2 click or a $25 click?
Brooke: I love this question. And I feel that the Google Keyword planner in Google Ads is pretty underutilized. Yes, there are tons of paid tools that you could use. But again, if you’re already a small business with a small budget, you may not have the budget for additional tools.
So in the platform there is something called the keyword planner. And they’ve also expanded that even more to where it will forecast out historically the last 12 months. So say you are a very seasonal business, you should be able to get that data of Q4 is really competitive. You might see costs rise and cost per clicks rise. Then you can then take that data to say, I’m not just going to have a flat budget all throughout the entire year. I know that I’m going to need to budget more for these months where I just know that competition is going to go up. Conversely, say it drops off early Q1, you might be able to save a little bit more budget there.
But so that’s where you start with, how is your website categorized? Different product categories. Start putting those in the keyword planner. And then it’s also going to spit out a ton of different ideas. This is how I start crafting most all of my campaign’s ad groups and try to understand how do I segment this where it’s not too over segmented, but it’s consolidated enough to account for maybe different costs per clicks in this product category versus this one.
Because depending on what you are selling or your services, one category might have a $5 CPC, but another one that you want to go after does have those $20, $30 CPCs. It might tell you, what can I afford to do now? Even though I see a lot of people are stubborn I really want to go after this, but is it the best business decision you can make right away?
Rich: So the bottom line is the giant whales in the industry have no problem spending $25 to $125 a click, because they have that budget. But if we’re one of those small minnows swimming around the whales, we have to choose our niches. And we may need to go longer tail because that is where the whales aren’t paying attention. That’s what I’m hearing from you, correct?
Brooke: Yes. Either longer tail or, again, I don’t know if you want to get into keywords right away, but there is something to be said about the use of broad match now. I used to not be a fan. But again, if we want to save that for later we certainly can.
Rich: I want to come back to that. I want to come back to that only because I had another question lined up. Because you started talking about seasonality, and we have a lot of clients who have seasonal businesses. Living in Maine, some businesses go up in the winter, some disappear.
So when we’re talking about seasonal businesses, one of the truths that we always hear is, you never want to shut off your ads. How true is that if you have a small budget? Is it a matter of you just want to at least have a dollar a day running, even if nobody’s clicking on it? It seems like Google, and Meta to a lesser degree, tell us that if we shut off our ads, we’re basically starting with no information when we restart those ads. How true is that?
Brooke: It’s not entirely true. Because I will also go the inverse of, we actually just recently did this where we wanted to test how does this app or product perform if we don’t show our ads on Google?
We actually had them paused for about a month or so, and then it’s not like Google or Meta, they don’t have your historical data. That’s what a lot of the algorithm, they need that historical data. So it’s not like all of a sudden, poof, that goes away. Google’s starting from scratch and learning all over again who’s going to be your ideal customers?
So I would say that is not necessarily true. However, if you have very limited conversion data, even if you have your ads on, that’s going to make it a lot harder for Google and the algorithm or Meta, whatever platforms you’re going to be on, it’s going to take them longer to understand how to optimize your accounts, your bids, your audiences. And so I would say if you’re small budget, you may have less volatility actually just pausing your campaigns.
Now I want to go back to what you said about is it worth it to just even have a dollar a day? I would counter, what’s your goal for that dollar a day? You could possibly run a low budget display campaign. You could just even run your branded search terms. That’s a whole other argument for a different podcast conversation about should you bid on your brand terms. But I would say if they are going to shut off, maybe that would be the best route is maybe just have your brand campaigns running.
That can still be low, especially if they’re a lower budget business or they’re small. Maybe they don’t have a ton of traffic keeping that afloat. I would say there’s no harm in that because you’re still defending that first result on the page when somebody’s searching for your brand.
Rich: When I was talking about the dollar a day, the only reason I was thinking of it at the time was just the idea of not shutting off the pipes entirely, so they freeze over the winter. So that would be the only reason I would put a dollar a day, hoping that actually nobody clicks on my ad, so I don’t have to spend any money. So if that’s valuable, I’d want to do it.
But if you’re telling me that you can shut off your ads and come back and there’s really not any sort of penalty for that, that’s good to know. I think for a lot of companies who may have limited budgets and really only want to run ads in the spring or fall or whatever their periods of busyness are.
Brooke: Yeah. I wouldn’t say that you’re getting penalized by any means. But it is, say you are paused six months out of the year, I would take that off season to analyze what worked, what didn’t. Is there something I want to do differently before I start running these again?
And I do always caution, you might expect a little bit of volatility. And I don’t mean that in a bad way, but that’s also just Google’s way of understanding it’s going to make some mistakes, and we can’t expect it to be perfect because we aren’t perfect ourselves. I make manual mistakes every day. But I think if small businesses knew that, it’s okay. If you are expecting a certain CPA as a whole for this six months, you’re probably not going to hit it right away those first couple weeks.
But then going back to that dollar a day. I would say if you’re not getting any sort of data and Google’s not getting any data, it’s not worth it in my opinion. That would be my counter argument, is they don’t know what to do with that. You might get a lot of impressions, or not a lot, but some impressions. But if nobody’s clicking, that might teach them to say, oh, this isn’t doing well for them. So I’m going to show less often when you do start increasing your budget again.
Rich: So it sounds like we shouldn’t lower our budget to a point that it might actually, if we lower too much, it might actually hurt us. Because we might be training the algorithms that we don’t have something that’s worth clicking on.
Brooke: Yes.
Rich: Interesting. Alright, you had raised broad match before, so let’s talk about the different type of matches and which ones are best for small budgets.
Brooke: Oh, I used to go back and forth on this. Because, again, I started in PPC back in early 2013. I feel like I’m dating myself a little bit, but that was when Google Shopping was also free and so I’ve seen a lot. And everything that I had learned back then was exact match only, do not use. We had broad match modifier, which was better than broad. And then there is phrase match.
So now there’s just the three types. There’s exact, there’s phrase, and there’s broad. Over the last few years as Google has introduced more automated campaign types, just more loosening of the restrictions, if you will, exact match is no longer exact match. I’m okay with that, because that means you don’t need to have 10 misspellings or variants that you’re bidding on, that’s just keyword bloat at this point.
And if you’re still doing that, I would advise you to not do that. I used to when they started loosening those restrictions, I thought, oh phrase match is the best way to go. And it was not the best way to go. It tanked my performance. Like we shut off all of our exact, we did not do broad match, and we just used phrase match. And that did not work for any of our clients. And so now I’ve really had to relearn what should I be doing? What makes the most sense?
Now, every account is going to be different, but I do think that there is something to be said, especially for small budgets. You have your core keywords that you know that you want to go after or are beneficial to you, like making sure that you have those covered and exact. I would also put in one, maybe two broad keywords to bring down that. Broad keywords will most likely have lower cost per clicks as well, so it might make your budget go a little bit further where you don’t have to spend, the $10, $15, $20 per click on all of those exact matches. So you’re still expanding your net a little bit by using broad.
Google has come a long way on broad, and I will give them the credit that they deserve. It’s still not, again, it’s not great. It’s not perfect. You have to have a good negative keyword strategy. But I have found that approach, especially for small businesses, to be much more beneficial than using phrase only or trying to do a combination of all three. I still see accounts that will segment their ad groups by match type, and I will hammer home that is probably the worst thing that you could do right now, especially if you have a small budget. You end up competing against yourself because the match types have loosened so much.
And so I think the more you can consolidate into those kind of keyword themes and you’ve got your core ones, but then you’ve got a catchall with a broad match keyword in each of those ad groups, that should help your budget stretch further.
Rich: Just to clarify, what’s the difference between the phrase match and the broad match?
Brooke: Phrase match is supposed to be, I’ll just use the wedding invitations term because it’s just easiest for me. I’ll go back to my roots. So if I had a phrase match of ‘wedding invitations’ in my ad group, I could show up for ‘cute wedding invitations near me’. So you can show up for things before or after your phrase of wedding invitations, or ‘rustic wedding invitations for Minnesota’ or anything like that. Obviously, you don’t have negative keywords, you could show up for a lot of different things. Now exact match should function as wedding invitations.
Rich: No more, no less.
Brooke: Yes. You might even show up for wedding invites. So Google is coming, they’re trying to understand semantics and synonyms, and so that’s where I keep going with exact matches no longer exact match. If I spelled invitations wrong or wedding wrong, it should pick up on that in exact match, because it’s gotten so good that it understands that.
Now if I had a broad match of wedding invitations, even if somebody bid, or even if somebody just searched wedding invitations and I had that exact match and that broad match in my account, that exact match should still pick up as long as it had a competitive cost per click.
Now with the broad match, you could show up for even more broad than anything that you could with phrase or exact. That could be a lot of your longer tail ones that you may not know that you might want to bid on. So that’s like the hierarchy of how that works.
Rich: So with broad match, are you saying that I might also come up for, say, ‘bar mitzvah invitations’ or ‘wedding dresses’? Is it that broad? And that’s where the negative keyword list comes in.
Brooke: I’m going to go with the, “it depends”. I would hope that Google would understand that bar mitzvah and wedding are completely different things where it shouldn’t. But again, that could be one of those where it’s learning. And this is where I go back to if you are going to bid on broad keywords, which I will argue that you should – having a good negative keyword strategy upfront. You don’t want these to run and then all of a sudden after a month, look at all of these irrelevant keywords. Look, broad match doesn’t work. It’s like, well, you also have to kind of give Google some guardrails of, I don’t want to show up anything related to this.
Or, say you had a campaign for ‘save the dates’ and one for wedding invitations. I would also want to make sure I’m negating save the date invites from my wedding invitations campaign, because Google might try to think that they are the same thing or it’s going to be constantly learning and testing the waters a bit, in my opinion.
Rich: Alright, let’s get back to focus on these small budgets. How can small budget businesses use long tail keywords or audience targeting to improve their efficiencies?
Brooke: Let me start with long tail keywords. I think one that requires a decent amount of research to understand what are people searching, you might have to comb through your search terms. Also, the issue with trying to look through your search term report is it’s probably not going to give you a lot of long tails of what people are searching because there’s less volume. So you might have to do your research outside of Google.
But what we typically find, so long tail keywords I would consider for anybody who’s not familiar, anything that might be like five words or longer in a search. Depending on your industry, might be four, it might be seven. While those are less in volume, they’re historically more likely to convert. Why? Because people are being more specific in their search.
And if you can show up for that more specifics rather than – I’ll go back to the wedding invitations, it’s a very broad keyword – but if I wanted to bid on ‘rustic wedding invitations with trees and lace’ or something like that, and I use that as a long tail keyword, how many people are serving for that? Probably more than you think, to be honest.
I live in Minnesota up north in the woods, but if I wanted to show up for those people, they will historically be more likely to convert. So I would think about balancing your volume of conversions with also the volume of people searching. The more specific you can capture those, the better your conversion rates should be able. I don’t want to say, ‘will be’, because of many other factors outside of my control.
Now on the other side, there is audience targeting in search ads. I think that is overlooked and may be a little bit misunderstood, especially for search. Usually, you think of audience targeting for display campaigns or YouTube, and you can even use them as signals in Performance Max. But you can use them on search, and I think that is so valuable, especially for smaller businesses.
I’ll give the example of when I was working in industrial segment of 3M. I was not going after the consumers, people like me or my mom going to Target and I needed to find double-sided tape for Christmas presents or birthday present wrapping. But they still wanted to go after industrial adhesive tape that could go either way for a consumer or a business. What we were able to do, and I want to give examples to try to get businesses who are listening just some creative ideas of what you could do. There are different levels of audience targeting that you could use in search.
For example, there is, I believe it’s employment. So if they work in a certain industry like construction, that was perfect for us, or healthcare, or education. So instead of just bidding on “industrial adhesive double-sided tape”, we took that you have to work in this construction industry. Now it’s still very broad, but it’s something. And while our impressions went down, we expected that to happen because you’re narrowing your reach. Our click through rates increased by, gosh, I think it was like 37%. Our conversion rates increased because we were reaching the right user. This is very important for people who do have smaller budgets. If you want to go after some of those more general keywords, you need to target or narrow your reach wherever you can.
I have also seen businesses or accounts take that very literally and will just start adding a lot of affinity audiences, which are more like lifestyle categories. There are in market audiences, so even if you’re not in a business-to-business industry, but it’s still more consumer, there are tons of in-market categories that you could choose to target and not use the observation only setting.
I should probably mention there is a quick difference between those two. Targeting only setting for audiences is you’re only going to reach those people who fit that criteria. If you add them on as an observation only in Google that will say, I’m going to gather information about people who are in this audience when they search, but I’m not going to narrow the reach. You’re still eligible to show up for anybody who searches that.
So you have a very limited budget, this is the industry of people that I want to target or say you want to target homeowners or parents of ages this through this, you can do that, which is really great. So yes, you might narrow your reach, you might not get as many impressions as you would expect. But in turn, that should help your conversion rates, your volume increase. Anything that you can do to make your budget go further.
Rich: Okay.
Brooke: I know that was a long-winded answer.
Rich: No, it’s all good. I’m just thinking, obviously artificial intelligence is everywhere these days. And tools like P Max and machine learning have been going on with digital ads, especially paid search forever. So we’re always using these tools.
I’m curious for those companies that have small budgets and want to get started or improve their performance with paid search, do you have any tools or tactics in using AI? More hands-on, not just relying on what Google’s giving us, but also maybe either in prepping or reviewing things. Are you using AI in any way that might help keep our budgets in check as well?
Brooke: Especially if you’re not using paid tools for competitor research. Again, if it’s like more if you’re just starting out. But it’s also true for any small business and you haven’t checked on your competition in a while. I do use ChatGPT a lot, and I’ve played with a lot of the other different AI tools out there. That one still, I feel like, gives me the most in-depth answers.
Use some of those to understand what your competition is like. And I will say you have to ask good questions to get good answers. So the more specific that you can be. You can even ask them to, they may not be able to give you everything, what kind of ad copy are they using? You might just need to test some of that in the wild yourself. But I think using these tools to understand that landscape before you get started will help.
Say you’re a small budget, but maybe there’s only one or two other competitors. I might be able to start this at $20 to $50 a day. If it’s saturated and there’s 10 other competitors, but you know that you can’t afford $20 cost per click on that budget, then you might be able to rethink your strategy and Google ads before you launch something and start putting a bunch of money towards that without really understanding what the magnitude is.
So I’ve used AI for competitor research. I’ve used it for even ad copy help analyzing, “This is what has been running, here’s my results. What could I do to make this better?” But you also have to give it good inputs. Here’s my target audience. Here’s the goal of this. Here’s our landing page.
Other tools that we have used and especially good for small businesses. I’ll go back a little bit with search ads, whether you do that or like Performance Max, which you can serve on pretty much any of Google’s inventory. There’s going to be image components that you’ll need inputs for. Google also has image inputs for image assets that can show up alongside. So even Google’s tool within their platform, I will say, has come a long way in helping you generate image assets, whether you start with an upload of a product that you have, and then it can take it further.
Or if you’re okay with stock images and it starts doing that, use some of those free tools within the platform, especially if you don’t have a design team. All of these things can help small businesses get started a little bit faster.
Rich: Awesome. It sounds like to me that Google ads, paid search in general, can still be very effective with a small budget. But unlike our giant competitors who can just throw money at the problem, we need to spend a little bit more time upfront thinking through this, narrowing our focus and just staying on top of this, if we want to see results that will provide a positive ROI.
Brooke: Yes. Focus on one to two categories. And I say that, like maybe two, it may just have to be one. And again, I’ll go back to what I said at the beginning, is if you’re at an injury that has a $2or $3 cost per click, that’s great for you. You can still get a decent amount of volume per day on that. But anything, in my opinion, actually over six or seven with those daily budgets, it’s really going to stifle that algorithm because it’s trying to understand how can I squeeze as much out of this? And it’s just, it’s not going to be great. So really understanding the checks and balances there.
Focus on one core product or service area that you can, that you know fits within your budget. Show really good performance. And again, sometimes it’s not just about the ad. You have to look at your audience. You also have to look at your landing page, so you have a stellar click through rate but just nobody’s converting. It might make you step back and think. They’re interested in this ad, but is there something I can improve on my website experience too that is often overlooked? Not just in small businesses. I see tons of very poor websites when I try to go shopping on these large stores as well. So they could always use some help.
So again, focusing on one area. Show good results, and then that’s where the people that hold the purse in the marketing budgets might say, okay, let’s now try to expand further. But if you just try to spray and pray every market that you can, every state that you can, unfortunately you’re not going to get the results that you could back in 2013 if you did that.
Rich: All right. I feel like we could talk about more tech and techniques for hours, so we’ll have to have you back. But Brooke, if people want to follow you online, learn more from you, where can we send them?
Brooke: I am mainly on LinkedIn, so you can just find me at Brooke Osmundson. That would be the best way to find me and get ahold of me.
Rich: Awesome. Brooke, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for your time today.
Brooke: Yes, thank you.
Show Notes:
Brooke Osmundson is the Director of Growth Marketing at Smith Micro Software, where she leads paid search, social, and programmatic campaigns that drive measurable results. A frequent industry speaker and conference favorite, she’s known for her clear, practical insights that help brands turn limited budgets into powerful performance.
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.