The key points
- Sufficient and consistent beats large and scattered.
- Work backwards from what a customer is worth.
- Your sales cycle decides how long to wait for results.
- One campaign run properly is better than six run thinly.
How do you set a sensible starting budget?
Start with the value of a new customer over a year, and how many enquiries it typically takes to win one. That tells you what you can afford to pay per enquiry. Then check the budget can run long enough to learn: platforms optimize on weeks of steady data, and stopping early wastes what was spent. On Google Ads the average daily budget can be exceeded on some days and missed on others, so judge spend over the month.
Why not spread a small budget widely?
Because each campaign needs its own data. Six campaigns on a small budget each get too little to learn from, and then the channel is blamed. We would rather run one campaign properly and tell you the budget only supports one.
A useful habit is to decide in advance what result would make you increase spend, hold it or stop. Writing those thresholds down before the campaign starts stops decisions being made on a bad week or a lucky one, and it makes the weekly review quicker and calmer.
What should you review each week?
Cost per qualified lead, cost per acquisition and return on ad spend, against what the customer is worth. Change only what the data supports and leave the rest alone. If a campaign is not producing qualified enquiries, the honest recommendation may be to reduce or stop spending, and a good provider will say so. If an agency is quoting you a budget, check how it reports and what it charges for before the first payment.
- Cost per qualified lead
- Cost per acquisition
- Return on ad spend
- A clear stop or scale recommendation
Budget questions
- What is a new customer worth to you over a year?
- How long is your sales cycle from enquiry to payment?
- Can you sustain the budget long enough to learn from it?
- Which page will the traffic land on, and does it convert now?
Sources
Rules and guidance this answer relies on. Policies change, so check the current version before acting on it.