By Afef Ayed
The short answer
On a small account, fix tracking first, then the defaults that spend outside your market (Search Partners, Display, presence or interest), then block clear waste with bars from your own conversion rate. Keep campaigns few, use Maximize conversions without a target until conversions are steady, and add sitelinks to real pages.
The order that works
Make sure conversions are real
One primary action per result, counted once for leads, with a value for sales. Everything later depends on it.
Switch off what spends outside your market
Search Partners and the Display network on Search campaigns, and 'presence or interest' for a local business.
Block clear waste
Searches past your own bars with no conversion, for things you do not sell. Add the plural of each negative too: negatives do not match plurals.
Keep campaigns few
One or two campaigns can learn. Ten campaigns of three conversions each cannot.
Let bidding learn without a target
Maximize conversions with no target until conversions arrive steadily, month after month.
Make the ad bigger, for free
Sitelinks to your real pages, callouts, and a call asset if calls matter.
Advice to ignore for now
- Hour-of-day bid changes. A small account has too few conversions per hour for the numbers to mean anything.
- Many ad tests at once. Most will never reach a winner on small traffic.
- Splitting campaigns by device or match type. It divides data the account cannot spare.
How Optizads treats small accounts
Start with the free tools, which need no account: the wasted spend threshold calculator says when zero conversions starts to mean something, and the search term analyser reads your own export in the browser. When the account grows, Optizads runs the same checks every week. Checks that need more data than a small account has stay silent and say why, instead of printing a confident number built on noise, and new campaign ideas arrive as tests one at a time, sized to what the account can fund.