What I Look at Before I Spend $1 of a Small Business Owner’s Money on Ads
Running an ad is easy.
You can create a Google Ads account, choose a budget, write some copy, and start spending money surprisingly quickly.
Running ads that actually make sense for your business is a different story.
Before I recommend that a small business spend money on paid advertising, I want to understand what we're sending people to, what we're asking them to do, how we're going to measure success, and whether advertising is even the right next move.
Because getting more clicks isn't the goal.
Getting the right people to take the right action is.
Here are some of the things I want to understand before I spend $1 of a small business owner's money on ads.
First, Is Paid Advertising Actually the Right Next Step?
Just because you can run ads doesn't mean you should.
Paid advertising can be incredibly useful. It allows a business to get in front of potential customers much faster than many organic strategies, and it gives us a lot of control over who we're trying to reach.
But ads can't fix every marketing problem.
If your offer isn't clear, your website is difficult to use, or you don't have a good way to turn an interested visitor into a lead, paying for more traffic may just expose those problems to more people.
That's why I don't like starting with, "How much should we spend on ads?"
I want to start with, "What are we trying to accomplish, and are ads the best way to accomplish it?"
If you're still deciding whether paid advertising belongs in your marketing mix, I've written more about SEO vs. Google Ads for small businesses.
What Are We Actually Selling?
This sounds obvious, but it's one of the most important questions.
What exactly do we want someone to do after seeing the ad?
Book a consultation?
Call the business?
Purchase a product?
Request a quote?
Schedule an appointment?
And what are we offering that makes someone want to take that action?
The more specific we can get, the better.
"Get more customers" is a business goal. It isn't an advertising strategy.
Before launching a campaign, I want to understand the specific service or product we're promoting, who it's for, why someone would choose it, and what action we want that person to take.
That gives the campaign something concrete to work toward.
Who Are We Trying to Reach?
Not everyone needs to see your ad.
In fact, one of the easiest ways to waste an advertising budget is trying to reach too many people.
For a small business, I would much rather spend a limited budget reaching a smaller group of people who are genuinely likely to become customers.
That means understanding your audience before choosing targeting.
For a local business, geography can be especially important.
If you only serve customers within a particular area of Houston, for example, there's usually no reason to pay for clicks from people hundreds of miles away.
But location is only one piece.
Depending on the campaign, we may also need to think about what someone is searching for, what problem they're trying to solve, how close they are to making a decision, and whether they're actually a good fit for the business.
More impressions aren't necessarily better.
More relevant impressions are.
What Happens After Someone Clicks?
This is one of the biggest things I look at before launching paid advertising.
Where are we sending people?
If the answer is simply "the homepage," I want to know why.
Sometimes the homepage is perfectly appropriate. Other times, the ad should send someone directly to a relevant service page or landing page.
Whatever page we choose has a job to do.
It should make it clear that the visitor is in the right place, explain the offer, establish enough trust to keep them interested, and make the next step obvious.
If someone searches for a specific service, clicks an ad about that service, and lands on a page where they have to hunt around to find information about it, we're creating unnecessary friction.
And we're paying for that visitor.
Before spending more to get people onto your website, it's worth making sure your website can actually do something with that traffic. If you're struggling with that piece, take a look at why your website may be getting traffic but not leads.
Can We Track What Matters?
I don't want to launch a campaign and then tell a business owner:
"Great news! You got 400 clicks."
My next question would be: What did those clicks do?
Did people call?
Did they submit a form?
Did they schedule an appointment?
Did they buy something?
Those are the actions I care about.
Before running ads, I want conversion tracking set up so we can connect advertising activity to meaningful business outcomes as closely as possible.
Otherwise, we may know how much money we're spending without really knowing what we're getting in return.
That doesn't mean every customer journey will be perfectly trackable. Marketing attribution can get messy.
But we should have enough information to make better decisions than "traffic went up."
This is also why I encourage business owners to understand how to measure marketing ROI without getting distracted by every metric available.
What Is a Lead Actually Worth to the Business?
A $50 lead can be fantastic for one business and terrible for another.
It depends on what happens to that lead.
Imagine one business earns $100 from the average new customer while another earns several thousand dollars.
Those businesses shouldn't necessarily evaluate advertising costs the same way.
That's why I want context around the numbers.
What is an average customer worth?
How many leads typically turn into customers?
Do customers make one purchase, or do they continue working with the business for months or years?
How profitable is the service we're promoting?
You don't necessarily need perfect answers before advertising, especially if you're a newer business without years of data.
But the better we understand the economics behind a customer, the better we can evaluate whether the campaign makes sense.
Is the Budget Realistic for What We're Trying to Accomplish?
I don't believe small businesses need massive advertising budgets to get value from paid media.
I do think expectations need to match the budget.
A limited budget may mean we need to get more focused.
Instead of advertising every service across a huge geographic area, maybe we prioritize one service.
Instead of running campaigns across multiple advertising platforms, maybe we start with the one that gives us the strongest opportunity.
Instead of trying ten different things at once, maybe we gather useful data from one focused campaign first.
I've written before about how much small businesses should spend on Google Ads, but the bigger point is that the number itself isn't the strategy.
The budget has to make sense in the context of the market, competition, audience, goals, and business.
What Happens When the Lead Comes In?
This isn't technically an ad-platform question.
I still care about it.
Let's say the campaign works.
Someone sees your ad, visits your website, likes what they see, and submits a form.
Then what?
If that lead sits unanswered for four days, increasing the advertising budget isn't going to fix the problem.
The same applies if nobody knows who is responsible for responding, the sales process is confusing, or the business doesn't have the capacity to take on more customers.
Marketing doesn't stop the second someone submits a form.
If we're going to invest in generating leads, I want the business to be prepared to do something with them.
How Will We Know When Something Needs to Change?
I don't expect a new campaign to be perfect on day one.
Paid advertising requires testing.
We may learn that one keyword generates better leads than another. One ad message may resonate more strongly. One service may generate plenty of clicks but very few inquiries.
That's useful information—as long as we're paying attention to it.
What I don't want to do is launch a campaign, leave it untouched for months, and assume that because money is being spent, marketing is happening.
Advertising needs to be reviewed and optimized based on what the data is telling us.
At the same time, I don't want to overreact to every small fluctuation.
The goal is to collect enough meaningful data to make smarter decisions over time.
I Don't Want to Spend Your Money Just Because We Can
This is ultimately what all of these questions come back to.
Paid advertising is one of the services I offer through Waves Marketing Solutions.
Obviously, I believe in it.
But I don't believe every business needs to start running ads immediately, and I don't believe increasing ad spend is automatically the answer when a campaign isn't performing.
Sometimes we need to fix the website first.
Sometimes the offer needs work.
Sometimes tracking needs to be cleaned up.
Sometimes the campaign needs to be restructured.
And sometimes paid advertising genuinely is the right next move.
My job isn't to find somewhere to spend your marketing budget.
It's to figure out where that budget has the best opportunity to help your business grow.
If you're considering paid advertising but aren't sure what you should be spending—or whether you're ready to run ads at all—schedule a consultation. We can look at what you already have in place and determine whether paid media makes sense for your business.