How a small business should advertise on Google: where to start

Google advertising works simply: someone searches "plumber Tallinn", sees your ad, calls. No warming up, no followers. You catch people who already want to buy. Here is where to start and how not to burn the budget.

Why Google and not social media

On social media you show ads to people who were not thinking about you. On Google you answer the query of someone who needs it right now. For services with clear demand (repairs, beauty, food, moving, dentistry) search ads almost always bring leads faster.

How much money you need

Less than commonly thought. For a local business a reasonable starting budget is $15-30 a day. That is enough to learn within 2-4 weeks which searches bring calls and which just spend money.

Five mistakes that eat the budget

1. Too-broad keywords. You advertise on the word "repair" and pay for clicks from people looking for phone repair while you renovate apartments.
2. No negative keywords. You didn't exclude "free", "DIY", "jobs" and pay for people who never meant to buy.
3. Ads lead to the homepage. The person searched for a specific service, landed on a generic page and left. Send them to that service's page.
4. No tracking. Without analytics you don't know which ad brought the call. So you don't know what to switch off.
5. Switched off too early. The first week is data collection. Conclusions are drawn in weeks two and three.

What you can do yourself

Google Ads lets you launch a "smart" campaign in an evening, and for testing demand that is fine. But smart campaigns don't show what exactly you pay for and don't let you manage the searches. When you start counting the budget, you will need a regular search campaign with manual control.

Pre-launch checklist

• The page the ad leads to answers the query and has a form or phone number
• Keywords and negative keywords are collected
• Lead and call tracking is set up
• Geo is set: the city or radius where you actually work
• The daily budget is one you can afford for a month

If everything on this list is ready, launch. If not, fix the landing page first: ads amplify what exists. A good site they amplify upward, a weak one downward.

How we set up advertising and what the work includes is on the Google Ads page.