Solved: Grow Brand on Google Ads with £1-2k/day Budget?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

That's a great question, and the short answer is yes, it's absolutely possible to grow a brand spending £1-2k a day on Google Ads. We've seen and managed campaigns at that scale and much higher. But the real answer, the one that'll stop you from just setting a massive pile of cash on fire, is a bit more complicated.

It's less about the budget and more about the machine you're feeding that budget into. You can't just turn up the spending dial and expect more customers to fall out the other end. Scaling to that level means you need to have your foundations absolutely nailed down. It's about maths, psychology, and a brutally honest look at your offer. I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on what those foundations look like.

We'll need to look at your numbers first...

Before we even touch Google Ads, we need to talk about the maths of your business. This is the bit most people skip because it's not as exciting as launching a new campaign, but it's the single most important factor in whether you succeed or fail at scale. The real question isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but rather, "How high a Cost Per Acquisition can I afford to acquire a truly great customer?" The answer is your Lifetime Value (LTV).

If you don't know what a customer is worth to you over their entire relationship with your business, then setting a daily ad budget is just guessing. You're flying blind. When you know your LTV, you know exactly how much you can pay to get a customer and still make a healthy profit. It removes the emotion and guesswork from your advertising.

Here’s the basic formula we use:

LTV = (Average Revenue Per Account * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Let’s break that down. 'Average Revenue Per Account' (ARPA) is what a typical customer pays you per month. 'Gross Margin' is your profit on that revenue after accounting for the cost of goods sold. 'Monthly Churn Rate' is the percentage of customers you lose each month. A high churn rate will absolutly destroy your LTV.

Once you have your LTV, you can determine your target Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). A healthy ratio for a growing business is typically around 3:1 (LTV:CAC). This means for every £1 you spend on acquiring a customer, you should get at least £3 back in lifetime gross margin. So, if your LTV is £9,000, you can afford to spend up to £3,000 to acquire a single customer. Suddenly, a cost per lead of £100 or £200 doesn't seem so scary, does it? It looks like a bargain, provided your sales process can convert those leads effectively.

This is the fundamental maths that unlocks aggressive, intelligent growth. Without it, spending £1,000 a day is just gambling. With it, it's a calculated investment. I've built a little calculator for you below to play around with your own numbers.

I'd say you need to define your customer by their nightmare...

Once your numbers are straight, the next foundation is your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP). And I need you to forget the sterile, demographic-based profile your last marketing hire probably made. "Companies in the finance sector with 50-200 employees" tells you absolutely nothing of value. It leads to generic, boring ads that speak to no one and get ignored by everyone.

To stop burning cash, especially at scale, you have to define your customer by their pain. You need to become an expert in their specific, urgent, expensive, and potentially career-threatening nightmare. Your ICP isn't a person; it's a problem state.

For example, your Head of Engineering client isn't just a job title; she's a leader terrified of her best developers quitting out of frustration with a broken workflow. She lies awake at night worried about project deadlines slipping and the CTO breathing down her neck. That's her nightmare.

For a legal tech SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing better document management'; it's 'a senior partner missing a critical filing deadline and exposing the firm to a million-pound malpractice suit.' That's a specific, expensive, and urgent problem.

When you understand the nightmare, you understand their search intent on a much deeper level. They aren't just typing "project management software" into Google. They're typing "how to stop developers leaving" or "best way to track engineering velocity" or "software to prevent missed legal deadlines". These are high-intent keywords that come directly from a place of pain. This intelligence is the blueprint for your entire Google Ads strategy.

You probably should rethink your offer...

Now we arrive at the most common failure point in all of B2B advertising, and the single biggest lever you have for improving your Google Ads performance: your offer. Specifically, your Call to Action (CTA).

The "Request a Demo" button is perhaps the most arrogant and ineffective CTA ever conceived. It presumes that your prospect, a busy and important person, has nothing better to do than book a 30-minute slot in their calendar to be sold to. It's high-friction, it promises low-value ("I get to watch a presentation"), and it instantly positions you as just another commoditised vendor, no different from the ten others they've seen this week. When you're trying to spend £2k a day, you can't afford this kind of friction. It's like trying to drive a Formula 1 car with the handbrake on. You'll just burn through fuel (your budget) and go nowhere fast.

The only job of your offer is to deliver a moment of undeniable value—an "aha!" moment that makes the prospect sell themselves on your solution. You must solve a small, real problem for them, for free, to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

What does this look like in practice?

• -> For SaaS founders: The gold standard is a free trial (no credit card required) or a freemium plan. Let them actually use the product. Let them feel the transformation from their current 'nightmare' state to the better 'after' state. When the product itself proves its value, the sale becomes a formality.
• -> For a marketing agency: This could be a free, automated SEO audit that shows them their top 3 keyword opportunities and how they stack up against a competitor. Instant value, no sales call needed.
• -> For a data analytics platform: It could be a free 'Data Health Check' that they can run on a small sample of their database, which instantly flags the top issues.
• -> For us, as a B2B advertising consultancy: It's a 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns completely free of charge. We solve a real problem (diagnosing why their ads aren't working) to demonstrate our expertise.

A lower-friction, higher-value offer will have a monumental impact on your landing page conversion rate. And a higher conversion rate is the secret to scaling on Google Ads. It means you can afford to bid more for clicks, which means you get more volume, and your cost per acquisition actually goes down as you spend more. It seems counter-intuitive, but it's the truth.

You'll need a message they can't ignore...

With the right numbers, the right ICP, and the right offer, you're ready to write the ads. Your ad copy needs to speak directly to the 'nightmare' you identified. It needs to be a pattern interrupt. In a sea of bland, feature-focused ads, yours needs to feel like it was written specifically for them. We often use a couple of proven copywriting frameworks for this.

For a high-touch service business, you deploy Problem-Agitate-Solve (PAS). You don't sell "fractional CFO services"; you sell a good night's sleep.
-> Problem: "Are your cash flow projections just a shot in the dark?"
-> Agitate: "Are you one bad month away from a payroll crisis while your competitors are confidently raising their next round?"
-> Solve: "Get expert financial strategy for a fraction of a full-time hire. We build dashboards that turn uncertainty into predictable growth."

For a B2B SaaS product, you use the Before-After-Bridge (BAB). You don't sell a "FinOps platform"; you sell the feeling of relief.
-> Before: "Your AWS bill just arrived. It’s 30% higher than last month, and your engineers have no idea why. Another fire to put out."
-> After: "Imagine opening your cloud bill and smiling. You see where every dollar is going and waste is automatically eliminated."
-> Bridge: "Our platform is the bridge that gets you there. Start a free trial and find your first £1,000 in savings today."

Notice how both of these examples connect directly to the nightmare. They aren't talking about features; they're talking about feelings, outcomes, and transformations. This is what gets the click from the right person. This is what pre-qualifies them before they even hit your landing page. When you're spending thousands a day, the quality of your clicks is far more important than the quantity. Poor messaging gets you lots of expensive, irrelevant clicks. Sharp, pain-driven messaging gets you fewer, more qualified clicks that are much more likely to convert.

To make this more practical, here's a breakdown of how you could apply this to your ad copy for different keyword types.

You'll need a fool-proof Google Ads strategy...

So, how does this all translate into an actual Google Ads account structure that can handle £1-2k per day? It’s about being incredibly deliberate with your targeting. You need to pre-qualify your audience at every step.

The core of this is understanding keyword intent. We generally break keywords down into three buckets:

1. Informational: The user is looking for information. Keywords like "what is project management", "how does scrum work". You should almost never spend money on these for direct conversion campaigns. The intent to buy is zero.
2. Commercial: The user is researching solutions. Keywords like "best project management tool for agencies", "jira vs asana", "project management software reviews". These are great for MoFu (Middle of Funnel) campaigns. You can capture this interest and nurture them.
3. Transactional: The user is ready to buy. Keywords like "trello pricing", "clickup free trial", "monday.com alternative". These are your goldmine. This is where you should focus the majority of your budget, especially when you start to scale.

A scalable account will have separate campaigns built around these intent clusters. Your Transactional campaign will have the highest budget and most aggressive bids. Your Commercial campaign will have a more modest budget, and your ads will point to comparison pages or case studies, with a softer CTA. This structure lets you control your budget and allocate it to the keywords most likely to drive revenue, which is essensial when you're spending thousands a day. If you lump them all together, your budget will get eaten up by lower-intent searches and your CPA will skyrocket.

You also need a robust retargeting strategy. Anyone who visits your website from a high-intent keyword but doesn't convert should be put into a retargeting audience. Show them display ads, YouTube ads, and RLSA (Remarketing Lists for Search Ads) campaigns that address common objections, show off testimonials, or offer them a special deal to come back and finish signing up. At £1-2k/day, you'll be generating a lot of traffic, and a huge amount of your profit will come from converting those people who didn't buy on the first click. I remember working with a B2B SaaS client in the medical recruitment space; by implementing a rigorous funnel structure like this on Google and Meta Ads, focusing on keyword intent, and building a solid retargeting plan, we reduced their cost per user acquisition from over £100 down to just £7.

You'll need to plan for scaling plateaus...

Here's a hard truth: as you increase your ad spend, your Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) will almost always go up. This is quite normal. You're reaching further into your target audience, finding people who are a less perfect fit, and increasing bids to win more competitive auctions. A lot of businesses panic when they see this and pull back on spend, killing their growth.

The key is to understand this is going to happen and have a plan to manage it. You can't just keep pouring money into the same keywords and ads and expect linear results. The campaigns that get you to £500/day won't be the same ones that get you to £2,000/day. You'll hit plateaus where performance stalls, and you'll need to pull different levers to break through them.

The main levers are:

• -> Funnel Optimisation: This is the big one. A 1% improvement in your landing page conversion rate can have a bigger impact than finding a dozen new keywords. You need to be constantly A/B testing your headlines, your offer, your page layout. A higher conversion rate lets you absorb the natural CPA increase that comes with scaling.
• -> Creative & Copy Testing: You need a relentless testing process. New ad copy, new angles based on customer feedback, new landing page designs. What worked last month will eventually fatigue. We've had several SaaS clients see huge breakthroughs with things like User-Generated Content (UGC) style videos or ads that directly call out a competitor's weakness.
• -> LTV Improvement: While the marketing team is focused on the front end, the product and customer success teams need to be working on the back end. How can you increase the LTV of each customer? Can you add upsells? Improve retention to reduce churn? A higher LTV gives you more room to spend on acquisition.
• -> Platform Expansion: Once you've truly started to max out the high-intent volume on Google Search, that's the time to look at other platforms. This could be Meta Ads, LinkedIn Ads (if you're B2B), or even YouTube. This allows you to tap into a different audience pool. But this shouldn't be your first move; it should be a deliberate step once you've proven your model on your primary channel. For one software client, once they had proven their model on their primary channel, we helped them scale by expanding across Meta, Google, Apple, and TikTok ads, which resulted in over 45,000 new signups.

Below is a simple calculator to illustrate how your CPA might change as you scale your daily budget. It's not a perfect prediction, but it shows the principle that you need to budget for rising costs as you grow.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

So, to bring it all together, here is the roadmap to get you from where you are now to spending £1-2k per day profitably on Google Ads.

As you can see, scaling ad spend isn't really an advertising problem; it's a business problem. It forces you to get incredibly sharp on who you serve, what you offer, and why it matters. Getting these foundations right is hard work, and it's very easy to make expensive mistakes along the way. Spending £1,000 a day the wrong way for just a week can cost you £7,000 with nothing to show for it.

This is where expert help can make a huge difference. An experienced agency or consultant has already made these mistakes on someone else's dime. We've seen what works and what doesn't across dozens of accounts and can help you build these foundations correctly from the start, accelerating your path to profitable scale and helping you avoid those costly learning curves. As I mentioned, we've taken clients from a struggling £100 CPA down to a profitable £7. For another client selling online courses, applying this same focus on core strategy on Meta Ads helped them generate over $115k in revenue in just a month and a half. It all comes down to getting the foundations right before you turn up the ad spend dial.

If you'd like to have a more detailed chat about your specific situation, we offer a free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy session where we can take a look at your business and give you some actionable advice on how to prepare for this kind of growth. It's often the most valuable 20 minutes a founder can spend on their marketing.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh