Every month I get the same question in different wrapping: “should I run ads?”. Online advertising for small businesses works. What almost never works is the order it's done in.
I'm Nico, a freelance digital marketing consultant in Seville. These are the criteria I apply before a client puts a single euro into Google or Instagram. I'll walk you through them with the figures from a real campaign.
The problem is almost never the channel
When a campaign doesn't deliver, everyone looks at the channel. Google Ads is too expensive. Instagram doesn't reach anyone any more. It's almost never that.
A campaign is a chain: ad, click, landing page, contact. The chain almost always breaks after the click.
I see it often in service businesses that advertise on Instagram. The ads are well made. The link goes to a generic home page, with no form in sight and no tracking. They pay for visits they can neither convert nor count.
Before paying for traffic, fix the destination
My rule: no money goes into ads until the destination is ready. Ready means three things.
First, a page that keeps the ad's promise. If the ad offers a “quote in 24 hours”, the click lands on a page that talks about that and nothing else. I explain how to build a website that converts on my web design page.
Second, a way to get in touch that works. A short form or a WhatsApp button, tested on a mobile. In audits I find more broken forms than you'd imagine.
Third, tracking. How many contacts come in and from which channel. Without that, deciding is guessing. The indicators I look at are in the digital marketing KPIs that matter for a small business.
A real case: €12 a day and 4,330 clicks
Inventos Eureka helps turn an idea into a patent. It had a live Google Ads campaign that was spending without tracking conversions: with no consent mode, Google couldn't see the forms. The budget was €12 a day, half of what the platform asked for.
Before touching a single bid, I fixed the tracking. Google Tag Manager, consent mode and enhanced conversions. Then a competitor analysis and two core keywords, monitored daily.
| Metric | Result (January–June 2025) |
|---|---|
| Budget | €12 a day, about €2,170 over six months |
| Clicks | 4,330, up to 882 in a single month |
| Average CTR | 5,89 % |
| Cost per click | Between €0.41 and €0.49 (average €0.46) |
| Device | 93% of clicks and 77% of conversions from mobile |
| Tracked contacts | At least 17 form submissions plus 5 other contacts: about €100 per contact |
Source: Google Ads and GA4, client report from June 2025. The full case study, with the process, is in Inventos Eureka: Google Ads on €12 a day. The cost-per-contact calculation is my own, based on those figures.
The lesson fits in one sentence: it can be done on a small budget, if you track first and keep watch afterwards.
Google Ads or social media: choose by intent
With the destination ready, it's time to choose a channel. The choice is about intent, not trends.
| Google Ads | Social media advertising (Meta, TikTok, LinkedIn) | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | Captures demand that already exists: someone searches for “accountant in Seville” and you show up | Creates demand: nobody was looking for your product, they see it and they want it |
| Choose this if | Your customer searches for you when they need you (services, emergencies, professionals) | You sell something visual, bought on impulse or that needs explaining |
| What you need | A landing page per service and keywords you keep an eye on | Creatives that hold up for two weeks and a clear offer |
| Cost benchmark | Average search cost per click of $5.42 in the US (WordStream, 2026); €0.46 in the case above, services in Spain | No benchmark of my own I can publish: it depends on the sector and the format |
| When you see results | Weeks, if there are searches | Needs more testing and more assets |
If in doubt, look at where your profitable competitors are, not the noisiest ones.
The market is pushing costs up. According to IAB Spain and PwC, the Spanish digital advertising market closed 2025 at €6,211 million, up 11.2% on the previous year, with search engines and social media in the lead. There are more and more advertisers in the same auction.
And free reach is shrinking. Metricool's 2026 Social Media Study, covering almost 40 million posts, measures a 35% drop in Instagram video reach in one year. Brands make up for it by paying. Paying can make sense. Paying without a plan only speeds up the spending.
What this really costs
Let's talk money. The maths I do with every client comes down to four numbers: budget, cost per click, website conversion rate and the value of a customer.
With €300 a month and €1 a click, you get 300 visits. If the website converts 2 or 3%, that's between 6 and 9 contacts. If you close one in three, that's 2 or 3 customers a month for €300. The deciding question is how much each one earns you. If it's €500, the campaign holds up. If it's €60, no budget can save it.
And one more rule, one of my own: if you can't keep up the spend for three months, don't start yet. Campaigns need data to optimise, and data needs time. In the Inventos Eureka case, the best month came after the tracking was fixed, not before.
When not to invest in advertising
This part loses me sales and wins me clients. There are four situations where my advice is to wait.
- Your website doesn't convert: you'd be amplifying a broken system, and breaking it faster gets expensive.
- You can't measure results: without contact events in GA4, you won't know whether it's working.
- Your margin can't absorb the acquisition cost: run the numbers with the calculator before spending.
- You want to make up for a weak offer: advertising multiplies what's there. What's there has to be worth it.
If you recognised yourself in any of these, your next step is to sort out the foundations. The campaign comes later. That's the work I do in digital marketing consulting for small businesses: diagnosis, priorities and a plan your business can carry out. And if your destination is ready, we set up the campaign with my online advertising service.
Sources
- IAB Spain and PwC, Digital Media Advertising Investment Study 2026: https://iabspain.es/estudio/estudio-inversion-publicitaria-medios-digitales-2026/
- Metricool, 2026 Social Media Study: https://metricool.com/es/estudio-redes-sociales/
- WordStream, Google Ads benchmarks 2026: https://www.wordstream.com/blog/2026-google-ads-benchmarks
- Own data: Inventos Eureka's Google Ads and GA4, client report from June 2025, published at https://auvenico.es/caso-inventos-eureka/
Freelance digital marketing consultant in Seville. I work on the digital presence of professionals and small businesses with one simple principle: your website as your operations hub. Building websites, doing SEO and running social media with my own hands since 2018.
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