Solved: Best PPC Strategy with a Limited Budget?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

It's good you're looking to get serious with PPC. That $500 is more than enough to learn the ropes properly if you spend it smartly. I'm happy to give you some of my initial thoughts and a bit of a roadmap. Forget just 'playing around', what you're about to do is buy your first dataset and learn a repeatable process. That's a much better way to think about it.

We'll need to look at the right mindset first...

Alright, first things first. Let's get one thing straight. You need to delete the phrase "willing to lose" from your vocabulary. You're not gambling in a casino. You're a software/analytics person, so think of this in terms you understand: you are purchasing data. Every single dollar of that $500 is an investment in a dataset that will teach you something. It will tell you which keywords people actually search for, which ad copy gets a click, and which landing page gets a conversion. Some of that data will tell you what *doesn't* work, which is just as valuable, if not more so, than finding out what does. Your goal with this first $500 isn't to hit a 10x ROAS. Your goal is to end the campaign with a clear, data-backed understanding of a process you can replicate and improve. That's a win, regardless of how many leads you get.

Too many people jump in, throw money at a campaign with no structure, see no immediate return, and conclude "PPC doesn't work". That's nonsense. It's like writing a single function without understanding the overall architecture, watching it fail, and concluding that programming is impossible. You have a technical background, so apply that same structured, logical thinking here. Form a hypothesis (e.g., "I believe people with X problem will search for Y keyword and respond to Z message"), build the test (the campaign), run the test (spend the budget), and analyse the results (the data). Then iterate. That's all this is.

I'd say you should pick your battleground carefully...

Your first question was about which platform to focus on, Google or Meta. For you, with your background and a small test budget, the answer is clear: Google Ads. And specifically, Google Search Ads.

Here's why. Meta (Facebook/Instagram) is what we call interruption marketing. You're trying to grab the attention of people who are scrolling through photos of their friends' holidays and arguing about politics. You have to stop them in their tracks with compelling visuals and clever copy. It's an art form, and it's difficult to master from a standing start. The algorithm is powerful, but it's optimising for engagement within a social context, which can be a bit of a black box when you're just starting out.

Google Search, on the other hand, is intent marketing. It's much simpler and more logical. You're not finding people; they are finding you. They have a problem, they've gone to Google, and they are actively typing in the solution they're looking for. Your only job is to put the right answer in front of them at the exact moment they ask the question. It's a cleaner, more direct feedback loop for learning. If you bid on a keyword and get clicks, you know people are searching for it. If they don't convert on your page, you know the problem is with your offer or your landing page. The variables are more isolated, which is perfect for a structured learning enviroment.

One of the biggest mistakes I see is people running 'Brand Awareness' campaigns on Meta thinking it'll lead to sales. The truth is, when you set your objective to "Reach" or "Brand Awareness," you're telling the algorithm to find the cheapest possible eyeballs. It will dutifully find you users who are famous for never clicking, engaging, or buying anything, because their attention is not in demand. You're literally paying to reach non-customers. With Google Search, you're paying to reach someone who has just typed "emergency electrician near me". The difference in intent is staggering. As a beginner, you want to fish where the fish are already biting.

You probably should choose a simple objective to start...

Next, you asked about whether to aim for lead gen, e-commerce, or something else. My advice is to stay away from eCommerce for this first learning campaign. Far, far away.

Why? Because a successful eCommerce campaign relies on a dozen things outside of the ads themselves. I remember looking at a store for handcrafted products once; the ads were getting clicks, but no one was buying. We looked at the store and the problems were obvious: the start page was cluttered and slow, the product photos were amateur, there were no proper product descriptions, and the whole site just didn't feel trustworthy. You could have the best ads in the world, but they won't fix a broken store. When you're learning, you want to minimise the number of variables you have to troubleshoot. With eCommerce, it's really difficult to know if your ads are failing or if it's your pricing, your shipping costs, your product itself, or your website's design.

Lead generation for a service business is a much better learning laboratory. The goal is simpler: get a person to fill out a form or make a phone call. The conversion path is shorter and there are fewer moving parts. You can create a single, focused landing page and direct all your traffic there. The success or failure of the campaign is much more directly tied to your ads and that one page, making it far easier to analyse the data and learn from it.

To make this practical, I'd even suggest you invent a fictional service business to "market". This frees you from worrying about actually delivering the service and lets you focus 100% on the advertising mechanics. Pick something simple and B2B, as the logic is often clearer. For instance, let's pretend for the rest of this letter that you are marketing a "Fractional CFO Service for SaaS Startups". This is a great test case. It's specific, high-value, and solves a real problem.

You'll need to become an expert on your customer's nightmare...

This is probably the most important part of this whole letter. Before you write a single ad or choose a single keyword, you have to know *exactly* who you're talking to. And I don't mean "SaaS founders, aged 30-45, in London". That's a demographic. It's useless. It leads to boring, generic ads that get ignored.

You need to define your customer by their pain. By their specific, urgent, expensive, career-threatening nightmare. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) isn't a person; it's a problem state. What keeps our fictional SaaS founder awake at 3 AM?

• It's not "needing financial advice".
• It's the terror of looking at their bank balance and having no idea what their cash runway actually is.
• It's the frustration of trying to build a financial model for investors but getting lost in a spreadsheet from hell.
• It's the fear that one of their competitors is about to close a Series A round while they're still struggling to figure out their burn rate.

That's the nightmare. Your service doesn't sell "financial strategy"; it sells a good night's sleep. It sells the confidence to walk into a VC pitch and not get torn apart on the numbers. Once you understand this, everything else becomes easier. Your ad copy writes itself. Your keyword selection becomes obvious.

Here’s a flowchart to visualise how you move from a useless demographic to a powerful 'nightmare' profile.

With this 'Nightmare' ICP, your keyword research becomes targeted. You're not just bidding on "cfo services". You're bidding on what the founder would actually type into Google in a moment of panic:

• "saas startup financial model template"
• "how to calculate customer lifetime value saas"
• "what is a good burn rate for a startup"
• "investor pitch deck financial slides"
• "fractional cfo for tech startups"

These are keywords that express a specific, urgent need. These are the people you want to talk to. This is how you use a small budget effectively – by being incredibly relevant to a very specific group of people with a very specific problem.

We'll need to do the maths to understand your budget...

Now let's talk about money. That $500 (£400ish) budget seems small, but it's all about what you can afford to pay for a lead. This is where most beginners go wrong. They focus on metrics like Cost Per Click (CPC) which are mostly irrelevant. The only two numbers that really matter are your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) and your Lifetime Value (LTV).

The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a great customer?". To answer that, you need to work backwards from how much a customer is worth.

Let's continue with our fictional "Fractional CFO for SaaS Startups" business. Here's how you'd calculate the LTV:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): Let's say you charge £2,000 per month.
• Gross Margin %: As a service, your margin is high. Let's say 85% after accounting for software costs etc.
• Monthly Churn Rate: What percentage of clients do you lose each month? A good fractional CFO is sticky. Let's say you only lose 3% of your clients per month (meaning the average client stays for around 33 months).

The calculation is: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

LTV = (£2,000 * 0.85) / 0.03

LTV = £1,700 / 0.03 = £56,667

Suddenly, things look very different. Each customer is worth over £56k in gross margin. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to CAC ratio. This means you can afford to spend up to £18,889 (£56,667 / 3) to acquire a single new customer.

Now let's work further back. If your sales process converts 1 in 10 qualified leads into a paying customer, you can afford to pay up to £1,888 for a single qualified lead. That's your absolute maximum target CPL.

This maths is transformational. It frees you from the tyranny of cheap leads. You're not looking for £5 leads anymore. A £250 lead from a founder who is a perfect fit for your service doesn't seem expensive; it seems like an absolute bargain. Your $500 budget isn't going to get you a customer, but it's more than enough to test if you can get a few leads for, say, under £150 each. If you can prove that, you've proven the model works.

Use this calculator to play around with your own numbers. It'll show you how small changes in churn or revenue can massively impact what you can afford to spend on ads.

I'd advise you to create an offer they can't ignore...

Now that you know who you're targeting and what they're worth, you need to give them a reason to click your ad and give you their contact details. This is your 'offer' or 'Call to Action' (CTA), and it's where most B2B advertising falls flat on its face.

The single worst CTA in history is "Request a Demo". It is arrogant. It presumes your prospect, a busy founder, has nothing better to do than schedule a meeting to be sold to. It's high-friction and offers zero immediate value. It instantly positions you as just another vendor begging for their time. You MUST do better.

Your offer's only job is to deliver a moment of undeniable value. An "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your full service. You have to solve a small, real problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

For our fictional Fractional CFO service, what could that be?

• Bad Offer: "Request a Demo" or "Book a Consultation". (Boring, high friction)
• Good Offer: "Get a Free SaaS Runway Calculator". (A valuable tool they can use immediately)
• Better Offer: "Free 15-min Pitch Deck Financials Review". (Directly solves a pain point with your expertise)
• Best Offer: "Connect your Stripe/Xero for a Free, Automated Cash Flow Health Check". (Delivers massive, personalised value instantly)

See the difference? The good offers give something of value away. They are generous. They demonstrate your expertise instead of just claiming it. This builds trust and makes the prospect far more likely to take the next step. For your learning campaign, creating a landing page that offers a simple PDF guide or a spreadsheet template is a perfect, low-effort way to create a valuable offer.

Once you have your offer, you can write ad copy that actually works, using a framework like Problem-Agitate-Solve. You don't sell the service; you sell the solution to the nightmare.

Headline: Stop Guessing Your Cash Runway.

Description: Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark? Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis? Get our free SaaS Runway Calculator and turn uncertainty into predictable growth in the next 5 minutes.

This copy speaks directly to the 'Nightmare' ICP we defined. It's not generic, and it leads with value. This is how you get the right people to click.

Finally, this is how you should structure your first campaign...

Okay, let's bring this all together into a practical, actionable campaign structure for you to build in Google Ads. Keep it simple. Complexity is the enemy when you're learning.

Campaign Goal: Leads

Bidding Strategy: Start with Maximise Clicks. Don't use Maximise Conversions until you have at least 15-20 conversions recorded, otherwise Google's algorithm won't have enough data to work with and performance will be poor. Once you have data, you can switch.

Structure: One Campaign, Two Ad Groups.

Ad Group 1: Problem-Aware Keywords

• Theme: Target keywords that people search when they know they have a problem but don't know the solution yet.
• Example Keywords: "how to calculate saas churn rate", "startup financial model template", "what is customer acquisition cost", "saas metrics for investors".
• Ad Copy Focus: Educate and offer a tool. "Confused by SaaS Metrics? Get our Free Financial KPI Cheatsheet for Founders. Download Now."
• Landing Page: A page to download the cheatsheet/template in exchange for an email address.

Ad Group 2: Solution-Aware Keywords

• Theme: Target keywords that people search when they are actively looking for the kind of service you offer. This is where the highest intent traffic is.
• Example Keywords: "fractional cfo for startups", "part time cfo saas", "outsourced finance director for tech company", "cfo services london".
• Ad Copy Focus: Focus on the benefit and a low-friction offer. "Expert SaaS CFO, Fraction of the Cost. Get a Free 15-Min Pitch Deck Financials Review. Book a Slot."
• Landing Page: A page with a simple form to apply for the free review.

Negative Keywords: This is absolutly critical. You need to tell Google what you *don't* want to show up for. You should build a list including terms like "free", "jobs", "salary", "course", "training", "how to become". You're selling a service, not offering a job or a university course. Adding these will save you a huge amount of your budget from being wasted on irrelevant clicks.

Run this structure for as long as your $500 budget will allow. Don't touch it for the first 3-4 days to let it gather data. Then, check in daily. See which keywords are getting clicks. See which ad copy has the highest Click-Through Rate (CTR). Pause keywords that are spending money with no conversions. Your goal is to come out the other side with a list of 5-10 proven keywords and 1-2 proven ads that you *know* work. That's your successful outcome.

I've summarised the main action plan for you in the table below. It's a simple framework to follow for this first campaign.

This whole process might seem like a lot of work before you even launch an ad, and it is. But this is the work that 99% of beginners skip. They jump straight to the tactics without a strategy. By doing this prep work, you put yourself in the top 1%. You'll be spending your money intelligently to buy data that will make you a better advertiser, not just throwing it at a wall to see what sticks.

This is obviously just a starting point, and there's a lot more nuance to it. But it's a solid, repeatable framework that will serve you well. Getting this right takes experience, and sometimes it's more efficient to have an expert guide you through it or handle it for you, especially when you move from learning to wanting to generate a real return on your ad spend.

If you get to a point where you'd like a professional eye on things, we offer a free initial consultation where we can review your strategy or your campaign together. It's often really helpful to get a second opinion.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh