Running Google Shopping Ads on a Small Budget

If you’ve considered running Google Shopping Ads but you haven’t been able to find a budget for a campaign, then the following text is for you. Read on.

It’s quite obvious you can’t run a shopping campaign without spending money, but perhaps you can pull a few strings with your amazing persuasion skills and ask for only a £100pm budget.

To be honest, you can run a Google Ads shopping campaign on a very low budget, even with £50 for a test.

When you run a campaign on a small budget, it just means the data will take longer to appear, to build a picture of what could happen.

Let’s research what a realistic low budget could look like:

So let’s say the keyword for someone to search your business was:

“horse tack”

We would want out products to appear here in Google Shopping:

Now let’s throw that keyword into Google keyword planner and see the going rate for a click:

We can now see the cost to get a click to the website will be between £0.16 and £0.67 as suggested by Google Ads.

We know from experience that £0.16 is just a suggestion and nothing is stopping us from bidding £0.10 to get a click. By using the right settings we say to Google:

“Google, give us a relevant click but only when the conditions are right and we’ll pay no more than £0.10 per click”

This means you get Google to work with your business numbers, and not the other way round, initially.

Sometimes this strategy works but other times we’re forced to pay Google’s lowest suggested bid. Eitherway, you get to decide your bid amount.

You won’t be getting much clicks if you decided to bid £0.01 as the “baseline bid” is higher. Our job is to see if we can bid lower than the suggested low bid by Google. Meaning, if the low end bid is suggested at £0.15, we go in and test at £0.10.

So what does a test campaign on a small budget look like? Perhaps aim for 500 initial shopping ads clicks to see what we’re working with.

Let’s do some basic maths. 500 clicks x £0.16 per click = £80 budget

Maybe we want to be efficient and only pay £0.09 per click. 

That would then be 500 clicks x £0.09 per click = £45 budget

With those clicks, we get to learn something about the campaign. Which category is good or bad, what products need attention and clicks to speculate.

The budget could be spread out over 30 days to last a full month. The only way to find out if we can get cheap Google Ads clicks is to spend money and speculate in an efficient manner to find out what the “baseline / cheapest CPC” is to utilize the budget efficiently.

In a nutshell if the budget was £100 and we could get £0.14 clicks at the cheapest level, that would yield 714 clicks. We would want that instead of unknowingly bidding £0.30 cpc and only getting 333 clicks.

So if this is your situation, you’ll be running a test campaign until you have enough data to make decisions. Your speed of collecting data will be proportional to your budget size. All budgets work, big and small but the data to learn something just comes at different speeds.

You just need to know how to manage your expectations and to know how to interpret the data when it comes in which leads us on to the next thing.

Measurement is quite important with any form of advertising. You will have to make sure the Google Ads is linked up with the website, Google Analytics etc. To ensure conversion tracking is right because what you can’t measure, you can’t improve.

You honestly don’t need a big monthly budget, but what you do need is a consistent budget for the campaign, so data can be built and patterns to emerge. 

Don’t let anyone tell you that you need thousands of £ to test Google Ads.

If you would like a chat, we’re here for you: https://tidycal.com/michaelnguyen/30

Best regards,

Michael Nguyen

Michael Nguyen
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