15 Essential Tips to Save Money in Google Ads

Introduction

Google Ads is a powerful tool for driving traffic, leads, and sales, but if you’re not careful, it can quickly become a costly endeavor. Many small businesses unknowingly waste money on campaigns that aren’t optimized, relying on the incorrect settings, poorly targeted strategies, and inefficient campaign types that drain their budget without delivering results.

The good news? It doesn’t have to be this way. With the right approach, you can dramatically reduce wasted ad spend while maximizing the return on your investment. In this post, we’re sharing 15 essential tips that will help you save money in Google Ads—actionable strategies to help you take control of your campaigns, target the right audience, and spend smarter. These include the following:

Whether you’re new to Google Ads, running campaigns on a small budget, or looking to fine-tune your existing campaigns, these tips will help you stretch your budget further and achieve better results. Let’s get started!

Tip 1: Set Up Accurate Conversion Tracking

Accurate conversion tracking is a critical component of building a successful Google Ads account. With Google Ads increasingly relying on smart bidding strategies, which use data to optimize for specific outcomes (maximize conversions or maximize conversion value), effective conversion tracking is essential to ensure these automated systems can optimize your campaigns and deliver the best possible results.

Why Not Tracking Conversions Wastes Money

Clicks and impressions might make your campaigns appear successful, but they don’t provide the full picture. Without tracking conversions—such as purchases, form submissions, or phone calls—you can’t measure whether those clicks are actually driving business results.

This lack of data also prevents you from using smart bidding, which relies on conversion data to optimize your campaigns for your specific goals. Instead, you’re forced to rely on manual bidding or automated bidding strategies like “Maximize Clicks,” which don’t focus on achieving meaningful outcomes, such as sales or leads.

For example, if one ad drives a high volume of clicks but generates no sales, you could unknowingly waste money on an underperforming campaign while missing the chance to reinvest in strategies that truly work. Without conversion tracking, your budget is spent inefficiently, and your campaigns fall short of their potential.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Set up conversion tracking in Google Ads as soon as you create your account. This feature allows you to monitor key actions that matter to your business, such as form completions, bookings, or sales.

Additionally, this conversion data allows Google to start learning about what factors determine the likelihood of future conversions.

If you’re new to Google Ads, start by identifying one or two core goals to track—like a customer submitting a contact form or calling your business. With accurate data, you can pinpoint which ads and keywords are driving real results, allowing you to focus your limited budget on the campaigns that generate the highest ROI.

Tip 2: Turn Off Auto-Apply Recommendation Settings

When you’re just starting out with Google Ads, it’s tempting to trust Google’s automated recommendations to simplify your campaign management. However, auto-applied settings can quickly lead to overspending—something small businesses with tight budgets can’t afford.

Why Auto-Apply Recommendations Waste Money

Google’s recommendations often prioritize spending over efficiency. For example, auto-applying broad match keywords, raising bids, changing bid strategies, or adding unnecessary ad extensions can result in higher costs without a corresponding increase in conversions. This can quickly drain your budget, especially if you’re new to managing Google Ads campaigns.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Turn off auto-apply recommendations in your Google Ads account settings. Instead, review Google’s suggestions manually and only implement changes that align with your goals.

For instance, if Google recommends increasing your bids, evaluate whether your current ad placement and performance justify it. Taking a hands-on approach helps you stay in control of your budget and ensures your campaigns are tailored to your specific needs.

Tip 3: Avoid Using Broad Match Keywords Initially

Broad match keywords may seem like a great way to reach a large audience, but for businesses with small budgets or new Google Ads accounts, they can quickly eat up your ad spend without delivering results. If you’re looking to make every dollar count, broad match isn’t the best place to start.

Why Broad Match Keywords Waste Money

Broad match allows Google to match your ad to a wide range of search terms, many of which might not be relevant to your business. For example, if you own a small coffee shop and bid on the broad match keyword “coffee,” your ad could appear for searches like “coffee recipes” or “coffee mugs,” which aren’t likely to bring in local customers. These irrelevant clicks add up, draining your budget without generating conversions.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Start with exact match or phrase match keywords to target highly specific searches. For example, instead of bidding on “coffee,” use “coffee shop near me” or “local coffee shop.” These options ensure your ads are only shown to people actively searching for services like yours. As your campaign gains traction, consider testing broad match—but only after adding a list of negative keywords to filter out irrelevant searches.

Tip 4: Don’t Start with Performance Max Campaigns

Performance Max campaigns might sound appealing, especially for new advertisers, because they promise to automate much of the ad setup and optimization process and “optimize for performance”. However, for businesses with small budgets and no account history, jumping into Performance Max can quickly waste money.

Why Performance Max Campaigns Can Waste Money

Performance Max campaigns rely heavily on machine learning, which needs a significant amount of conversion data and/or time to work effectively.

Without accurate tracking and sufficient historical data, these campaigns often spread your budget too thin across multiple channels—such as YouTube, Search, Display, and Gmail—without delivering meaningful results.

For a new account or a business with limited funds, this lack of focus can result in overspending on low-performing placements.

In addition, since Performance Max relies on multiple touch points across a variety of channels, it will oftentimes take credit for low hanging fruit. For example, Performance Max will immediately target your brand terms on search to users who may have recently visited your site and are already likely to convert. This will allow the campaign to show initial success, but at a much higher cost than necessary.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Start with Search campaigns or Shopping campaigns that allow you to have more control over where your ads appear and who sees them.

Focus on a single channel like Google Search until you gather enough data to understand what works for your business. Once you’ve built a strong foundation and have conversion tracking in place, you can test Performance Max to scale your efforts. This approach ensures your budget is used efficiently while avoiding costly mistakes.

Tip 5: Add Negative Keywords

Negative keywords are one of the simplest yet most effective ways to ensure your ad budget isn’t wasted on irrelevant searches. For businesses with limited budgets, this strategy can make a huge difference in improving ad relevance and reducing unnecessary spend.

Why Not Using Negative Keywords Wastes Money

Without negative keywords, your ads could show up for searches that are irrelevant or unlikely to convert.

These clicks cost you money but don’t bring in paying customers, quickly draining your budget.

Even if you’re running Exact Match keywords with a small budget, Google will still show your ads for search terms that aren’t relevant to your business or your goal of spending wisely. This is an inevitably and cannot be avoided.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Create a list of negative keywords to exclude terms that don’t align with your business goals.

Start with obvious ones, like “free,” “jobs,” or “cheap” and continuously refine your list by reviewing the Search Terms Report in Google Ads and adding irrelevant search terms. This proactive approach keeps your ads targeted, guides your campaign’s bid strategy, and ensures you’re only paying for clicks from potential customers.

Tip 6: Target the Correct Locations

For small businesses, especially those with a local presence or limited service area, precise location targeting is essential to prevent wasted ad spend. Without it, your ads could be shown to users far outside your target region, leading to clicks that will never convert.

Why Poor Location Targeting Wastes Money

If your ads appear in locations where your business doesn’t operate, you’re wasting money on clicks from people who aren’t viable customers. For example, a local plumber who only serves clients within a 15-mile radius would lose valuable budget if their ads showed up in a different city or state. Similarly, targeting an entire country instead of specific regions dilutes your budget and reduces the effectiveness of your campaign.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Set up location targeting in Google Ads to focus on the areas where your potential customers are most likely to be. Use tools like radius targeting to draw a boundary around your business location, ensuring your ads only appear to users within a specific distance.

Additionally, make sure to click Location options and choose the option Presence: People in or regularly in your included locations and not Presence or interest: People in, regularly in or who’ve show interest in your included locations (recommended). Google will automatically default to Presence or Interest, which can mean your ads could show outside of the areas you serve.

If your business has multiple locations, set up separate campaigns for each to tailor ads and budgets to the performance of those regions. Regularly review your location performance report to refine your settings and further reduce wasted spend.

Tip 7: Start with a Realistic Budget

When you’re new to Google Ads or working with a limited budget, starting small is crucial. Spending too much too soon can drain your resources without giving you time to assess what’s working.

Why Starting with a Big Budget Wastes Money

Many new advertisers make the mistake of setting large daily budgets without a clear understanding of how their campaigns will perform. This approach often leads to overspending on underperforming ads or keywords. If your campaigns aren’t optimized, a large budget can magnify inefficiencies, quickly exhausting your funds without delivering conversions.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Set a small, manageable daily budget—$10 to $20 is a good starting point for most small businesses. Monitor your campaign performance closely, and gradually increase your budget as you identify high-performing ads and keywords. This cautious approach ensures that every dollar is spent effectively while minimizing waste.

Tip 8: Use Manual Bidding to Start

Bidding strategies play a significant role in how your ad budget is spent. For new accounts or small budgets, starting with manual bidding provides better control over your spending.

Why Starting with Automated or Smart Bidding Can Waste Money

Smart bidding and automated bidding strategies, like Maximize Clicks or Target Impression Share, prioritize achieving certain metrics like clicks or impressions rather than aligning with your specific goals or budget.

These methods can lead to higher bids and increased costs, especially if your account lacks sufficient data for the algorithms to optimize effectively. Without conversion tracking in place, automated bidding can waste your budget on clicks that don’t convert.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Start with manual CPC bidding, which allows you to set maximum bid amounts for each keyword. This gives you control over your spending and lets you allocate your budget to the keywords and campaigns that perform best.

Once you have enough conversion data, you can experiment with switching over to with smart bidding strategies like Maximize Conversions with a Target Cost per Acquisition (tCPA).

Tip 9: Regularly Monitor Campaign Performance

Google Ads campaigns are not a “set it and forget it” tool. Regularly checking in on your campaigns helps you identify what’s working and where your budget is being wasted.

Why Neglecting Campaign Performance Wastes Money

When campaigns are left unchecked, underperforming ads or keywords can continue to drain your budget. For example, a keyword with a high cost-per-click but low conversion rate could eat up a significant portion of your spend without delivering results. Additionally, shifts in audience behavior or market trends can impact performance, requiring adjustments to your strategy.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Review your campaign performance at least once a week. Pay attention to key metrics like CTR (click-through rate), CPC (cost-per-click), and conversion rate. Pause underperforming keywords or ads, and reallocate your budget to higher-performing ones. This regular optimization ensures your budget is spent on what delivers results.

Tip 10: Avoid Using too Many Responsive Search Ads

Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) are a great tool for testing multiple ad combinations, but for small budgets, running too many RSAs in a campaign can lead to inefficiencies and wasted spend. While RSAs are designed to optimize performance by testing various headline and description combinations, using too many can actually work against you.

Why Too Many RSAs Waste Money

Each RSA allows Google to mix and match up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions, creating potentially hundreds of variations. If you include multiple RSAs in a single campaign, smart bidding will need to test even more combinations, spreading your limited budget too thin.

Instead of gathering meaningful data to identify high-performing combinations, your campaigns could waste spend on variations that don’t resonate with your audience. This is particularly problematic for smaller budgets, where there’s less room for trial and error.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Stick to one RSA per ad group for campaigns with small budgets. This gives Google enough combinations to test while ensuring your budget is concentrated on finding the best-performing variations quickly. Regularly monitor the performance of your RSA and use the insights to refine your ad copy for better results without unnecessarily increasing your testing costs.

Tip 11: Improve Your Ad’s Quality Score

Quality Score is one of the most critical factors in running cost-effective Google Ads campaigns. It directly impacts how much you pay per click and how often your ads appear. Ignoring it can lead to higher costs and lower ad visibility, which is a big problem for businesses with small budgets.

Why Not Focusing on Quality Score Wastes Money

Quality Score is Google’s measure of how relevant your ads, keywords, and landing pages are to the user’s search query. If your Quality Score is low, Google will charge you more per click to show your ads, regardless of your bid. For example, two businesses might target the same keyword, but the one with a higher Quality Score could pay $2 per click while the other pays $5. Without optimizing for Quality Score, you’ll end up overspending on every click and getting less visibility, making it harder to stretch a limited budget.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

To improve your Quality Score, focus on these key areas:

1. Ad Relevance: Ensure your ad copy matches the intent of the keywords you’re targeting. Use specific, compelling language that directly answers the user’s query.
2. Landing Page Experience: Your landing page should be highly relevant to the ad and offer a seamless user experience. This includes fast load times, mobile-friendliness, and clear calls-to-action.
3. Expected CTR (Click-Through Rate): Write engaging headlines and descriptions that encourage users to click on your ad. Use A/B testing to find the best-performing versions.

By prioritizing Quality Score optimization, you’ll not only reduce your cost-per-click but also improve your ad’s visibility and performance, ensuring your small budget delivers maximum value.

Tip 12: Avoid Relying on Google Ads Specialists

Google Ads specialists, provided by Google, might seem like a convenient way to get expert guidance, but relying solely on their advice can often lead to unnecessary spending. Their recommendations may prioritize features that increase your spend rather than optimize for your business goals.

Why Relying on Google Ads Specialists Wastes Money

Google Ads specialists often suggest strategies like increasing your daily budget, broadening targeting, or using new campaign types like Performance Max without fully understanding your business objectives and with a goal of getting you to spend more money.

While these strategies can be effective sometimes, they’re often inefficient for small businesses with limited funds or for businesses focusing on maximizing ROI.

Following their generic advice can lead to wasted spend on clicks that don’t convert or campaigns that aren’t aligned with your goals.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Take a hands-on approach to your campaigns or work with an independent digital marketing agency, like us at GrowthIQ Digital, that understands small business needs.

Focus on strategies tailored to your business, such as precise targeting, clear conversion tracking, and gradual budget scaling. This ensures every dollar is spent effectively, rather than blindly following broad recommendations.

Tip 13: Optimize Your Landing Pages

Your Google Ads campaigns are only as good as the landing pages they lead to. If your landing page doesn’t provide a seamless, relevant experience, you’ll struggle to turn clicks into conversions—wasting precious ad spend in the process.

Why Poor Landing Pages Waste Money

When users click on your ad, they expect to find exactly what was promised. A poorly designed or irrelevant landing page can cause them to bounce, meaning you’ve paid for a click that delivers no results. For example, if your ad promotes a specific product but the landing page is your homepage, users may get frustrated and leave. Slow loading times, confusing navigation, or a lack of clear calls-to-action can further decrease your chances of converting visitors.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

To maximize your ad spend, focus on these landing page optimizations:

1. Relevance: Ensure your landing page aligns with the ad’s message and the user’s intent. If your ad promotes a discount, the landing page should prominently display the offer.
2. Simplicity: Remove distractions and focus on one clear call-to-action (e.g., “Sign Up,” “Buy Now,” or “Schedule a Consultation”).
3. Mobile Optimization: Make sure your landing page is mobile-friendly, with fast load times and easy navigation. A mobile-optimized page is essential as most users search on their phones.
4. Page Speed: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to identify and fix issues slowing down your page. A delay of even a few seconds can significantly increase bounce rates.
5. Trust Signals: Add testimonials, reviews, or certifications to build trust and encourage users to take action.

By investing time in landing page optimization, you can dramatically improve your conversion rates, ensuring that every click delivers real value and reduces wasted spend.

Tip 14: Avoid Pausing and Unpausing Campaigns

Pausing and unpausing Google Ads campaigns might seem like a good way to manage your budget, but for campaigns using smart bidding strategies, this habit can do more harm than good. It disrupts the optimization process, leading to inefficiencies and wasted ad spend.

Why Pausing and Unpausing Campaigns Wastes Money

Smart bidding relies on continuous learning from real-time data to adjust bids and improve performance. When you pause a campaign, Google’s algorithms lose momentum and stop gathering valuable insights.

When you later unpause the campaign, the system essentially has to restart the learning process, which can result in higher costs and suboptimal performance. This is particularly problematic for small budgets, as every dollar spent during the relearning phase is less efficient.

For example, if you pause a smart bidding campaign that had been optimizing for conversions, unpausing it weeks later may lead to increased costs-per-click (CPC) and lower conversion rates as the algorithm works to re-optimize.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

If you’re trying to manage your budget or control when ads run, consider these alternatives:

1. Use Ad Scheduling: Instead of pausing campaigns, use ad scheduling to control when your ads appear. This allows you to run campaigns only during high-performing hours without disrupting the algorithm.
2. Adjust Daily Budgets: Reduce your daily budget for underperforming campaigns rather than pausing them entirely. This keeps the campaign active and allows the system to continue learning.
3. Pause Specific Ad Groups or Keywords: If you need to scale back, pause low-performing ad groups or keywords rather than the entire campaign. This minimizes disruption to the campaign as a whole.
4. Monitor Seasonal Trends: If your campaigns are seasonal, plan for downtime by lowering budgets rather than pausing. Then gradually increase spend as the season approaches to maintain performance.

By keeping your campaigns active and making smaller adjustments, you’ll preserve the algorithm’s optimization efforts and ensure your budget is spent more effectively. This approach reduces waste and maximizes the efficiency of your smart bidding strategies.

Tip 15: Refine Your Language Targeting

Language targeting in Google Ads allows you to control which audiences see your ads based on their language preferences. While it may seem like a minor setting, improper use of language targeting can result in wasted ad spend on clicks from users who aren’t likely to convert.

Why Incorrect Language Targeting Wastes Money

If you target all languages by default, your ads may appear to users who don’t speak the primary language of your business or website.

For instance, a local restaurant running ads in English may end up showing ads to users with browsers set to other languages, leading to irrelevant clicks. These users might not be able to understand your offer or navigate your website, resulting in wasted ad spend with no chance of conversion.

For businesses with limited budgets, targeting the wrong language can dilute your efforts, making it harder to reach the right audience effectively.

What to Do Instead to Save Money

Refine your language targeting to ensure your ads are reaching users who are most likely to convert:

1. Match Language to Your Website: Target the language that aligns with the content on your website. For example, if your website is only in English, target English-speaking users exclusively.
2. Analyze Audience Data: Review demographic data in Google Ads or Google Analytics to identify which languages your audience speaks and adjust your targeting accordingly.
3. Create Separate Campaigns for Additional Languages: If you cater to multilingual audiences, create separate campaigns for each language. Customize the ad copy and landing pages to ensure they are relevant to the targeted language.
4. Monitor Performance by Language: Use the Languages Report in Google Ads to evaluate how different language settings are performing. Pause or adjust underperforming settings to optimize your spend.

By carefully refining your language targeting, you’ll ensure your budget is focused on users who can understand and engage with your ads, reducing wasted clicks and improving conversion rates. This small adjustment can make a big difference for businesses with tight ad budgets.

Conclusion

Managing Google Ads effectively is critical for small businesses with tight budgets. Every dollar counts, and wasting money on avoidable mistakes—like broad targeting, poor tracking, or unnecessary automation—can quickly drain your resources. By implementing the strategies in this guide, such as refining language targeting, optimizing landing pages, and avoiding frequent campaign pauses, you’ll ensure your ads are focused, efficient, and delivering results.

Google Ads doesn’t have to be overwhelming or costly. With the right approach, you can make smart decisions that maximize your ROI without overspending. Take the time to fine-tune your campaigns, regularly review performance, and prioritize quality over quantity. These steps will help you stay ahead of the competition and turn clicks into customers.

If you’re ready to take your campaigns to the next level or need expert guidance, GrowthIQ Digital is here to help. Contact us today for a free consultation, and let’s work together to make your ad budget work harder for your business.