📋 What you'll need: Your completed buyer research (Spreadsheet 1), your website or landing page live, your tracking set up (Step 00), and some uninterrupted time
⏱ Time: A few hours to set up your first campaign properly, then about 20 minutes a week to manage it
✅ Output: A clear understanding of your numbers, a live Google Search campaign catching buyers at the moment they search, and the ability to read and improve it
⏱ Time: A few hours to set up your first campaign properly, then about 20 minutes a week to manage it
✅ Output: A clear understanding of your numbers, a live Google Search campaign catching buyers at the moment they search, and the ability to read and improve it
Google Ads works in the opposite way to Meta, and that difference is its whole strength. On Meta, you interrupt people who weren't looking for you. On Google, people come to you — they type exactly what they want into the search bar, and your ad appears at that moment. That makes Google Search the highest-intent traffic you'll ever buy: you're not creating demand, you're capturing demand that already exists. This module walks you through choosing the right search terms, writing ads that earn the click, and sending people to a page that converts — step by step.
💡 Is Google right for your business?
Google Search works best when people actively search for what you offer — a plumber, a photographer, a financial advisor, a specific product someone knows they want. If your product is more of a discovery or impulse buy — something people don't know to search for, but will buy when they see it (a new candle scent, a jewellery design, a coaching approach they've never heard of) — Meta (Module 3) will usually serve you better. Many businesses do both. If you haven't yet, the "Meta or Google — which first?" guide back in Module 3 helps you decide. If you're here, let's build.
How Google Search Actually Works
Getting three things straight before you spend makes everything after it easier.
Intent is everything. Because people come to Google already looking, your job isn't to convince anyone they have a need — it's to show up clearly at the moment they're searching. But not all searches are equal, and telling them apart is the core skill of this whole module. Someone searching "how does vitamin C help skin" is curious but not ready to buy. Someone searching "buy vitamin C serum for oily skin" is close to their wallet. The same budget spent on that second search will always outperform the first.
You pay per click. Unlike Meta, where you pay to be shown, on Google you pay only when someone actually clicks your ad. That's why sending clicks to a page that converts matters so much — every click costs you whether or not it turns into a customer.
You're in an auction — but relevance beats budget. Every time someone searches, Google runs an instant auction among advertisers who want that search. It isn't just about who bids most: Google also weighs how relevant your ad and landing page are to what the person actually searched. This is the good news for a small founder — you don't win by outspending big competitors, you win by being more relevant than them. Tight, specific keywords and ads that genuinely match the search can beat far bigger budgets, and cost you less per click while doing it.
💡 The whole game in one line: get in front of people already searching for what you sell, with an ad and a page so relevant to that search that Google shows you cheaply and the right people click.
Everything in this module — your keywords, your ads, your landing page — is in service of that one idea.
Know Your Numbers
💡 Already did this in Module 3 (Meta Ads)?
Your numbers are identical — the calculator works the same for any paid channel. Confirm your figures and skip ahead to "Turning these into a Google number" below. If Google is your starting point, work through this section in full — it's repeated here so you have everything you need without going back.
Before you spend a cent on Google, you need to know what a customer is actually worth to you.
Most founders look at a cost-per-click or cost-per-lead number and react emotionally — "that's too expensive" or "that seems cheap" — without actually knowing whether it's true for their business. The only way to know if a number is good or bad is to compare it against what a customer is actually worth to you.
Once you know that, the whole conversation changes. A $40 cost to acquire a customer sounds expensive in isolation. If that customer is worth $400 in profit, $40 isn't expensive — it's one of the best investments available to you, and you should be pushing as much budget into it as you can while it keeps working.
Use the calculator below to work this out for your business before reading any further in this module.
📊 Download the Unit Economics Calculator
Two tabs depending on your business type (Service or Ecommerce), plus a Budget Guide tab. Fill in the blue cells (replace the samples with your numbers), everything else calculates automatically, including a live "within target / above target" check once you start running ads.
Two tabs depending on your business type (Service or Ecommerce), plus a Budget Guide tab. Fill in the blue cells (replace the samples with your numbers), everything else calculates automatically, including a live "within target / above target" check once you start running ads.
How to use the Service Business tab
STEP 1 asks what a single sale actually pays you, after direct costs — your real profit per sale, not your sticker price.
STEP 2 asks whether clients typically rebook or refer, and how many times they buy in total. This builds your LTV — short for lifetime value, the total profit one customer generates for you over the whole time they buy from you, not just their first purchase. Be conservative here — use 1.0 if most clients are one-and-done.
STEP 3 calculates your Maximum CPA — short for cost per acquisition, what you actually spend to win one paying customer — based on a healthy percentage of their lifetime value. The default is 25%, which sits comfortably within a healthy range for most service businesses.
STEP 4 is for after you've started running ads. Enter your real spend, leads, and customers, and the sheet tells you automatically whether you're within target or above it.
How to use the Ecommerce Business tab
STEP 1 asks for your average order value and every real cost tied to fulfilling it — product cost, shipping, and payment processing fees. This gives you your true profit per order, not your revenue per order.
STEP 2 asks how many times a customer typically orders from you in total. This is what builds your LTV — lifetime value, the total profit one customer generates for you over time, not just their first order. Use 1.0 if you don't have repeat purchase data yet.
STEP 3 calculates your Maximum CPA — cost per acquisition, what you spend to win one paying customer. The default is set at 40% of LTV — roughly a 2.5:1 ratio of lifetime value to acquisition cost, which sits safely within the healthy range for small ecommerce brands. Some larger, established DTC brands deliberately spend closer to their full first-order profit margin, betting that repeat purchases will make up the difference — but that's a higher-risk strategy that depends on proven repeat data, not an estimate. Stay conservative until you have real numbers confirming customers actually come back.
STEP 4 works the same way as the service tab — enter real results once you're running ads.
⚠️ Be honest with these numbers, not optimistic
It's tempting to inflate your repeat purchase rate or margin to make the math look better. Use your real numbers if you have any sales history at all, even a small amount. If you're pre-launch and genuinely don't know yet, use a conservative estimate and treat your first test as a way to start finding out the real numbers, not just the marketing numbers.
This matters even more for ecommerce. Spending up to your full first-order margin only works if customers genuinely come back — if they don't, you lose money on every single sale. Until you have real repeat purchase data, keep your target closer to 30-40% of LTV, not higher.
Turning these into a Google number - From customer value to cost per click
The bridge between what you pay per click and what you pay per customer is your conversion rate — the share of people who click your ad and then actually become a lead or sale.
Here's the chain, using a personal trainer as an example:
- Your Maximum CPA — the most you can afford to pay for a new client — is $40 (straight from the calculator)
- Roughly 1 in 10 people who click your ad and land on your page book a consultation — a 10% conversion rate
- So 10 clicks should produce 1 client
- Which means you can afford to pay up to $4 per click ($40 ÷ 10) and still hit your target
That single number — the most you can afford per click — is what tells you whether Google is working for you. If the searches you want cost $1.50 a click and you can afford $4, there's healthy room to profit. If they cost $9 a click, you'll need a much higher conversion rate or a higher-value offer to make it work — and it's far better to know that now than after you've spent.
You won't know your exact conversion rate until you've run some traffic, so start with a rough estimate (5–10% is reasonable for a well-matched landing page), then replace it with your real number once you have data.
💡 This is your whole scoreboard.
Every decision later in this module — which keywords are worth bidding on, which ads to keep, when a campaign is winning — comes back to one question: are you getting customers for less than they're worth to you? Work out your max cost per click now, write it into your Google Ads Planner (Spreadsheet 4, Keyword & Ad Group Plan tab), and Google stops being a gamble and becomes simple maths.
- link to sspreadhsheet 4
⚠️ This is a target, not a guarantee.
These numbers tell you what should work based on what a customer is worth to you. Real results depend on your offer, your landing page, your market, and how competitive your search terms are. The point isn't to predict profit to the penny — it's to know your ceiling before you spend, so you never pay more for a customer than they're worth.
Budget — What to Set Aside
You've worked out the most you can afford to pay per click. Now the question is how much to put behind the campaign each day so it can actually gather enough data to learn from.
How much to start with, and why the number matters: On Google, your budget has to do two jobs: buy you enough clicks to get results, and give Google enough data to work out which searches and which ads are worth showing. Too little, and you get a trickle of clicks that never adds up to a clear picture.
A realistic starting point is around $10–$20 a day — roughly $300–$600 a month. That's enough for most small businesses to gather meaningful data within the first few weeks, without betting more than you can afford while you're still learning what works.
Your own number depends on two things:
- What clicks cost in your market. If the searches you want cost around $1–$2 a click, $15 a day buys you 7–15 clicks daily — enough to learn from over a couple of weeks. If your terms are expensive (some competitive service terms run $5–$10+ a click), the same budget buys far fewer clicks, and you'll either need a bit more budget or tighter, cheaper keywords to gather data at a reasonable pace.
- How patient you can be. A smaller budget still works — it just takes longer to reach the point where the numbers mean something. A candle maker spending $10 a day will simply take a few weeks longer to learn what a personal trainer spending $20 a day learns, than one spending more.
Start at a number you're comfortable running for at least a month, because that's the window where the data becomes useful. Google, like any ad platform, needs a little time and volume before its results settle — judging a campaign after two days of spend tells you almost nothing.
⚠️ Set a number you can run for a month — not a number you'll panic about in a week.
The most common budget mistake is starting too high, getting nervous at the spend before there's enough data to judge, and switching everything off mid-learning. It's far better to run $10 a day calmly for a full month than $40 a day for five days and pull the plug. Consistency is what lets the data — and Google's optimisation — actually work.
The most common budget mistake is starting too high, getting nervous at the spend before there's enough data to judge, and switching everything off mid-learning. It's far better to run $10 a day calmly for a full month than $40 a day for five days and pull the plug. Consistency is what lets the data — and Google's optimisation — actually work.
💡 Your budget and your max cost per click work together.
Your daily budget is how much you'll spend; your max cost per click (from Know Your Numbers) is what you can afford to pay for each visitor. Keep both in view: the budget controls your pace, and the max CPC keeps every click profitable. If your keywords cost more per click than you can afford, that's a signal to find lower-cost, higher-intent terms — not to raise your ceiling past what a customer is worth.
What You'll Build in This Module
By the end of this module, you'll have a complete Google Search advertising system running in your business — reaching people at the exact moment they're searching for what you offer:
- A clear read on your numbers — what you can afford to pay per click and per customer, so you bid with confidence, not guesswork
- A researched keyword plan — the actual search terms your buyers type, grouped into ad groups and tagged by intent, so your budget goes to the searches most likely to convert
- Search ads that earn the click — written to match what people searched for and pull them to your page
- A live Google Search campaign — set up properly, with your tracking, budget, keywords, and negative keywords all in place
- The ability to read your results — knowing each week what to keep, cut, and scale, so your spending gets smarter over time
This is the same paid search system most small founders pay agencies thousands to run — built by you, owned by you, and running in your business.
✅ Before you start:
- Your website or landing page from Module 2 is live and working end to end
- Your Messaging Brief from Module 1 is finished and easy to reference
- Your Unit Economics Calculator is filled in, with a Maximum CPA and a max cost per click you can compare results against
- Your tracking is set up (Step 00) — conversion tracking especially, or none of your results will mean anything
- You've set aside a realistic test budget — around $10–$20 a day to start
Ready to start?
All the documents in this module are listed below. Start at the top and work down — each one ends with a link to the next, so follow the chain from there.
Keyword & Intent Research
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