§ SMBDoorway · Small business

Google Ads for small business.

If you're spending £2k–10k/month and you're not sure where it's going, you're the person I help. Most small-business accounts don't need more features — they need fewer, better-run ones.

Worked example → £5,000/mo starting spend, with the 37% wasted on junk terms, wrong geo, and bad placements cut back to £3,150 of working spend.
fig_01
budget_flow · monthly
£5,000 → £3,150 working
Starting spend
£5,000
Junk search terms
−£980
Wrong geo
−£420
Dud placements
−£260
Bad device splits
−£190
Working spend
£3,150
British high-street retail — small business context
fig_02Unsplash
Small business, real footfall, real tills — paid search should track to that, not form fills.fig_02
§ 01What goes wrong

Three things small-business accounts get wrong.

The problem with most small-business Google Ads accounts isn't ambition — it's entropy. An agency started it three years ago, a freelancer touched it two years ago, your marketing intern added five campaigns last quarter, and now nobody really knows what's in there. The fix is rarely more complexity. It's usually ruthless simplification.

01 / 03

Budget efficiency

Of every £1,000 you spend, typically £300–600 ends up working — the rest goes on junk search terms, dud auto-placements, and geo-areas you don't serve. The waterfall opposite is what a typical cut looks like: 38% of the budget recovered in the first month, just by cutting the obvious bleed.

02 / 03

Account structure

Most small accounts should have 3–5 campaigns, not 17. I consolidate down to a structure that makes bidding signals work, then leave it alone. Fewer moving parts means faster machine learning, less admin, and — frankly — less for the next person to break.

03 / 03

Reporting you can read

Dashboards with 40 widgets are a way for agencies to look busy. Every month I send one PDF with three numbers on the front page: spend, bookings/sales, cost per booking/sale. Everything else goes in the appendix. If you can't explain the month in one sentence, the report is wrong.

§ 02Next step

Want to know where your £ is actually going?

The audit tells you, line by line, and ranks what to fix first. £500 fixed, yours to keep.