Small budgets need tight control. Google’s defaults are built for advertisers spending lakhs per month, and applying them to a ₹40,000 budget is how you end up paying for clicks on searches that were never going to convert.
Broad match needs data you do not have
Smart Bidding on broad match keywords works beautifully once the algorithm has hundreds of conversions to learn from. Before that, it is guessing with your money. Start with phrase and exact match, gather thirty conversions, then expand.
Separate brand from non-brand
Mixing them makes your reporting meaningless. Brand searches convert at 20%+ and cost almost nothing; non-brand converts at 2% and costs ten times more. Averaged together, you cannot tell what is working.
Negative keywords are not optional
Review your search terms report weekly for the first two months. Add negatives for “free”, “jobs”, “salary”, “course” and every competitor name you do not want to bid on.
Send traffic to a page built for the ad
Your homepage is not a landing page. One offer, one form, no navigation to wander off into. This single change routinely doubles conversion rate.
Written by
Sakshi Bajaj
Head of Content
Writes about SEO, content strategy and everything that makes a website rank. Ten years in the trenches of Indian digital marketing.
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