How I'd Spend £500/month on Google Ads (vs How Google Wants You to Spend It)
£500 a month is a real budget. For a lot of small businesses, it's a significant investment. But Google treats it like a rounding error.
The recommendations you see inside your Google Ads account are designed for businesses spending thousands. Broad match everything. Trust the automation. Let the algorithm learn. That advice makes sense when you've got budget to burn while the system figures things out. When you're working with £500, you can't afford to be Google's training data.
Here's how I'd actually spend that budget, and why it looks nothing like what Google suggests.
What Google wants you to do
Log into any Google Ads account and you'll see an "Optimisation Score." Google will tell you you're at 60% or 70% and nudge you to accept its recommendations to get that number higher.
Those recommendations usually include:
Switch to broad match keywords. Google wants your ads to show for anything vaguely related to what you do. More impressions, more clicks, more spend. Most of those clicks won't be relevant.
Turn on auto-applied recommendations. Let Google make changes to your account automatically. Convenient for Google. Risky for your budget.
Use Smart campaigns. Hand over control entirely. Google decides who sees your ads, what they say, and where they appear. You get less data and less ability to fix what isn't working.
Add more keywords, more ad groups, more campaigns. Spread your budget thin across everything. Sound strategic, but £500 split five ways is £100 each. That's not enough to learn anything useful.
Google makes money when you spend money. Its recommendations are designed to increase spend, not efficiency.
What I'd actually do with £500/month
Start with one campaign, done properly. Not three half-baked ones. One focused campaign with tight targeting, clear messaging, and a landing page built for conversions. You can expand later once you know what works.
Use phrase match or exact match keywords. Yes, you'll get fewer impressions. That's the point. You want your ads showing to people who are actually looking for what you offer, not everyone who types something vaguely related.
Turn off most of Google's "helpful" features. Auto-applied recommendations, search partners, display expansion. These bleed budget into places that don't convert. I switch them off in every account I manage.
Set a realistic daily budget and stick to it. £500 a month is roughly £16 a day. That's enough to get data, but only if you're not wasting half of it on irrelevant clicks.
Check the search terms report regularly. This shows you what people actually typed before clicking your ad. You'll find irrelevant searches you need to block. Without this, you're spending blind.
Make sure tracking is set up properly. If you can't see which clicks turn into enquiries, you can't improve anything. This means having a thank you page after your contact form, and making sure conversions are being recorded in GA4.
The bit most people miss
The ads are only part of it.
You can have the best-targeted campaign in the world, but if your landing page isn't built for paid traffic, you're wasting money. If your contact form is buried at the bottom of a long page, people won't fill it in. If there's no thank you page, you can't track what's working.
Before spending anything on ads, I look at where those clicks are going to land. Sometimes the answer is "your website isn't ready for this yet." That's not a popular thing to say, but it saves people from throwing money away.
Why this matters
Agencies love bigger budgets. Their fees often scale with spend, so there's no incentive to make £500 work hard. The advice becomes "you need to spend more to see results."
I'd rather someone spend £500 well than £2,000 badly.
That means being honest about what's realistic, focusing budget where it can actually make a difference, and not chasing Google's optimisation score like it means something.
