What happens before a single peso is spent
Tracking first. Conversion actions defined, call tracking installed, and a way to tell later which campaign produced which customer. Accounts that start spending before this exist in permanent guesswork, and it is the single most common condition of accounts we inherit.
Then the negative keyword list, built from what you do not sell rather than discovered later from wasted spend. Broad match will find traffic; without negatives it finds traffic for adjacent things you cannot serve.
Then the landing pages. If the ad promises a specific service, the click should land on that service, not the homepage. This is boring and it moves conversion rate more than bid strategy does.
Only then does spend start, deliberately small, until the data says which queries convert.
How much budget it needs
There is no universal minimum, and any agency quoting one before seeing your category is quoting from habit.
The number is set by two things: what a click costs in your industry, and how many conversions the account needs before automated bidding has anything to learn from. A category with expensive clicks and a long sales cycle needs more runway than one with cheap clicks and same-day decisions.
We work it out from your numbers on the call: what a customer is worth, what share of enquiries become customers, and how many customers you can actually serve. That last one matters and gets skipped. Spending to generate demand you cannot fulfil produces complaints, not revenue.
If the arithmetic says paid search does not work at your customer value, we say so. That is a real outcome and it is cheaper to learn on a call than after three months.
When Google Ads is the wrong answer
When nobody searches for what you sell. Paid search captures existing demand; it does not create it. For a genuinely new category, Meta or content does that job and Google does not.
When your capacity is full. Buying more enquiries you cannot serve generates waiting lists and irritated prospects.
When the phone goes unanswered during business hours. You would be paying to generate calls for your competitors, and the platform will still report those calls as conversions.
When the margin cannot absorb the click cost. In some categories the auction is priced by advertisers with better unit economics, and no amount of optimisation fixes a structural gap.