Unlocking Google Ads Success: Expert Tips for Deck Builders with Alejandra Donaire

April Edwards 0:42 We are live deck builder marketers coming at you here we get some good tips. So for those of you listening, welcome back to we love deck builders, the podcast where decking professionals come to sharpen their skills and grow their business. I’m your host April Edwards, CEO and growth strategist at Deck Builder Marketers dedicated to helping you craft the business you deserve. Today’s guest is our brilliant Alejandra, our strategist here at deck builder, marketers. And she brings a wealth of experience in managing Google ads. So she’s the right type of person to talk to to help you guys better optimize your campaigns and maximize your ROI. So we’re going to dive into the world of Google Ads recommendations, and we’re going to kind of uncover the truth behind some of those tempting apply buttons. Alejandra, I’m so thrilled to have you. Thanks for joining us today.

Alejandra Donaire 1:41 Hello, I’m so happy to be here. Hopefully, most of my recommendations are useful for clients.

April Edwards 1:49 I’m sure they will be. So for anybody listening. We’re streaming live for the first time. So hopefully everything goes alright. And yeah, hopefully it does. So we can continue doing that moving forward. So for all of our listeners tuning in, tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your journey in marketing and how you became an account strategist here at Deck Builder Marketers.

Alejandra Donaire 2:18 Okay, so I’m from Nicaragua, I would like to start with that. I’m not in the US. And honestly, I’m so happy that I had the opportunity to be working with US companies, especially because that has opened this type of opportunities. And the reason why I’m here today with the program marketer. So I’ve been, I started doing digital marketing, I think in 2018, 2019. So I have a couple of years doing this. And the first thing that I learned was Google ads, like, that’s my core. And it’s where I started doing marketing as a whole. So after that, been exposed to SEO, Facebook, everything like paid ads, and also organic traffic. But I feel like Google ads is where I started. And that’s why I can say I have five years or more of experiencing Google ads. And I ended up hearing Deck Builder Marketers by a friend, actually, he knew one of your friends, which is Brad. And he introduced me to Brad and Brad introduced me to you. So I had the opportunity to jump in an interview. And he told me you were looking for strategies. And I felt like that was the description apply to what I was doing, and what I really liked to do, which is strategies, mostly, and just build that relationship with a client try to help them understand. At the beginning, I was really technical. And then through the years, I learned how to communicate in a friendly and non technical way to the clients, because I try to help them understand what are we doing?

April Edwards 4:10 Yeah, so I think that’s a really good tip to I mean, people sometimes ask me, you know, like, why should I join NADRA or, you know, like, I think maybe you stop getting out there as much as you evolve in your business. And it’s just so important to continuously grow your network, because you just never know. And so in this particular situation, I met Brad through a coaching group, and then you know, he had his network. And then fast forward to today, and I’ve, you know, we have an amazing account strategist that adds unreal value to our team. And she’s all the way in Nicaragua. I mean, I think that’s like, we’re kind of spoiled in the way that we can hire people anywhere so we can hire the best because everyone can work remotely from their computer which was great. Okay, so, um, let’s talk about Google ads a little bit. Um, I talked to a lot of prospects that, you know, Google makes it really easy for anybody to, you know, create an account and get some ads running. And I think that a lot of the people that I talked to they, they kind of just check that box, you know, they don’t, they don’t really know, they don’t feel confident, they don’t really know what they’re doing. Google definitely tries to make it easy. And then they’ll pair you up with the rep sometimes to really help you through that. They created smart campaigns. I don’t know how long ago, maybe it’s probably been a while now.

Alejandra Donaire 5:40 It’s been a while. Yeah.

April Edwards 5:42 So they created smart campaigns, which is just how would you describe it, I would describe it as quick and easy way to, you know, get some campaigns up and running. But, you know, you can’t really control a lot. So I’ll have all 100 give you the real deal on it. But I guess the last thing I wanted to say is that, you know, people don’t invest enough in the Google ads, and they’re not in there, you know, tweaking things and trying to get the best results. A lot of deck builders I talked to don’t have tracking setup. And that’s extremely important. I mean, I always like to use the matchmaker scenario where, you know, Google’s a matchmaker between your customers and you. And then, you know, like marketing is the matchmaker between your customer and you as well. But anyway, Google wants to know that if they’re gonna send people to your website, they’re searchers to your website that they’re finding what they’re looking for. So if you don’t have goal tracking, and conversion tracking setup, Google’s not going to know that and they’re not going to be as prone to want to send, you know, people to your website versus competitors. And there’s so much to it, there’s, you have to it’s like an auction, you have to bid and you have to understand the market so that you’re not over bidding and things like that. But in summary, I would say builders come to me. And they have started some smart campaigns, they literally don’t even know if they’re working. I mean, even if you’re only investing 500 bucks, which seems to be the number a lot of people use. Before, you know, working with us. You know, that’s still 500 bucks, you don’t even know if it’s doing anything. So I think that’s super important. Anyway, I’ll hand it over to Alejandra for her to give you her expert description.

Alejandra Donaire 7:37 So yeah, I mean, it’s my campaigns, they were created for people that want to start learning Google, like, I don’t have the time to optimize the account. I don’t have the time right now to hires, or the money to hire someone to manage my account. So I don’t know if I want to start learning about Google ads. Let’s do a Smart Campaign. So it can help you understand how Google performs like, Hey, okay, these are the themes that I can use. I don’t have full control over my campaign. But my complaints is pretty easy for you to play around, and try to understand the Google platform, the Google ads platform, what you can see, and what you have access to. But honestly, it’s a start, I’m not going to tell you that it’s bad. If you want to learn on your own if you if you are too afraid of doing the manual optimizations, the Manual Setup from the beginning and you don’t want to spend too much time doing that copy. Because what my campaign does basically, they take your themes, you can just give them small descriptions. And based on the keyword that the person is looking, they will build a ad copy like the headline. So if you’re that person that don’t have the time and don’t have the resources to to have someone doing demand optimizations for your account, it’s a way to start. But on the other hand, minority optimizations aren’t important because honestly, those allows you to have full control over your campaigns. By carefully selecting the keywords, you will craft a specific ad copy to the keyword that you’re targeting. And you’ll be able to adjust the beats based on the performance data, you can ensure your ads reach the right people, it’s a hands on approach that helps you get better quality leads because you can find tune to your campaigns to where you want and to the audience that you want. And you really want to focus on the most relevant audience that will lead you to a high return on investment. And that’s the full control that you want to have. So that’s why it is recommended.

April Edwards 9:51 I kinda look at it is like you can you can buy like a DIY kit. You know, for like building something or you can get it customized. And that’s really the difference. Like when you can customize something and you have full control, you can really get what you want out of it. So let’s take a step back. So smart campaigns pretty quick to set up, kind of runs on autopilot, right? And then what are what are the other nursing manual optimizations? Like? How would you describe that? And what does that setup look like?

Alejandra Donaire 10:28 So the manual optimizations, it’s where you set up the campaign from scratch, you tell the goal, this are the keywords that I want to use, I’m going to do in my keyword selection based on this themes or topics. So, let’s use an example for clients. I know that they want to rank for keywords such as, like builders, deck installation, screen rooms, patio builders, so I’m not going to put all the keywords in one basket. Because at the beginning, you need to make sure that you are selecting the keywords based on the topic that you want to show ads for. So if I’m doing deck builder keywords, I’ll make sure to build an ad group. That’s how we call it inside the campaign just for those keywords. Because my ad, it’s gonna be focused on deck builder keywords, not patio builders, not screen rooms. And that’s the way that we segment our keywords in the campaigns in Google ads, when we try do it from scratch, we tried to separate the keywords by theme. So we can do different ads for those specific keywords. And that’s going to help you with the ad ranking with the ad relevance. Because Google understands, okay, this person wants to show up for deck builder keywords. And this ad copy is relevant to that keyword. So, based on the budget as well, I’m gonna give you the opportunity to show up first, and it will show the force you have with manual optimization, I said at the beginning, when you start your campaign from scratch, you select the audiences, you select your location, and you can select your locations in a Smart Campaign too. But you can play in a play around with zip codes, CDs, have a segmentation of regions, and you can build all that from scratch. If you just want to show ads in computers or tablets, or mobiles, that’s something that you can build from scratch at the beginning too.

April Edwards 12:27 That’s great, because if you can customize it, if you want to get more leads in a certain area, then you could ramp up your budget there or get rid of the other areas so that more of the budget is going to where you want, right?

Alejandra Donaire 12:43 Exactly, you have full control over your top performing locations, your top performing keywords, you will have data to compare with. So let’s say I have five keywords in that group. And three of those are working really good. The other two are just spending money, I have full control to pause those keywords because they are not generating any leads and they are just spending my money. With a Smart Campaign. On the other hand, it’s different because you don’t have that data to validate what what you want to accomplish. You don’t have that data to tell you, Hey, this is a spending too much money that you should pause it, you don’t have that you don’t have that data to back up what you’re going to do as an optimization.

April Edwards 13:26 Yeah, you’re kind of relying on Google to figure it out for you. And I mean, let’s face it, they want to make money, right?

Alejandra Donaire 13:32 Exactly, I mean, the algorithm might not fully understand the specific needs of your business. So some recommendations that he will apply might not align with what your business goals, and they are just going to lead to wasted ad spend.

April Edwards 13:54 Yeah, and I think if you really, I mean, we really nerd out on the details here. And I think any agency or partner that you work with should be doing that. We it’s important to set up conversion tracking, call tracking and, campaign tracking. So that and if you’re using a CRM that will tie the lead to the closed amount, you will be able to see what deals were closed. I’m sorry, what keywords were used to close that deal. I mean, it can be sophisticated, and that’s important because, you know, I mean, paying for ads, it’s an investment and you know, it can be scary. It’s risky. It’s an investment, like if we knew what we were gonna get out of an investment, like if there was a surefire guarantee we would all be you know, we’d all be invested in in all kinds of things. We’d all be rich, but it just doesn’t work that way. I think that, you know, just being able to look at the data And from a high level will get you to feel more comfortable investing more. And so some examples are, well, we have one client right now he knows that July is a slow time for him normally. So we’re ramping up his ad spend now. And he can do that condfidently, because we can go to him and say that your cost per lead is X amount. So we can project how many more leads he needs to get and what his spend should be in order to get there. Some other situations are really understanding the value of the deals you’re closing from different lead sources. So again, you have to have the right tracking and, you know, software in place, we use sales jumpstart, in order to be able to tie that together. So we have one client where, you know, leads were kind of slow, honestly, with Google ads. And it’s, we’ll talk about that, and these fluctuations and what you need to look out for when managing your ad campaigns. But we also found out that they were closing the highest value projects, like an average $250,000 projects with Google Ads alone. So even if the leads are slow, like obviously, you know, you do what you can to, to always improve and get better. But if you can look at it from a higher level perspective, it’ll help you, I think, feel more comfortable is what I’m trying to say and just get a little bit harder with growing your business. So what are some? What are some fluctuations that people need to understand? So that, you know, let’s say they try Google ads for a month and it doesn’t, you know, they don’t feel that it works, what are what are some things that they kind of need to to know and to consider so that they don’t just try it, you know, once or for a short period of time and throw it out?

Alejandra Donaire 16:54 So the things that I always say to our clients is that seasonality, it’s really important. Like if you know, your season, the busy season, it’s not in December, especially for deck builders, like no one is investing a lot of money in December, I will not recommend to start running ads on December, like if you have a short budget to using all that. Don’t waste it on your own your slower months. I mean, you want to start building that data for Google, but let’s wait to be closer to your busy season. And then another thing that I recommend.

April Edwards 17:28 Hold on, I want to interrupt you. So with that, because I know what you’re talking about. But uh, but let’s go back a little bit. So, okay. I think you’re kind of talking about the learning phase, and feeding, like, basically, you’re teaching Google what, you know, you’re teaching it to work how you want it to work. And so if you’re trying to do that, like if you start your campaigns during slow season, it’s not going to get enough data, because there’s not enough searches to properly optimize the campaigns off the bat. Right? Did I explain that?

Alejandra Donaire 18:03 Yeah, pretty much. So that’s what you want, you want to give Google the data of your busy season and also closer to your busy season. So it’s better to look out for that seasonality. And if you want to, or if you have a short budget, let’s make sure to use it wisely. Another thing that I always tell them, is it will depend on the location, you will see locations that have a higher conversion rates or because the audience that you’re looking for, it’s it is higher, they’re like you, you know that that location has a high income audience, the audience that is willing to pay the type of projects that you offer. So it will be location, it will be audience, like, be aware that sometimes, with the keyword selection and the audience selection, you can be too broad. So you need to look out for that. Because you don’t want to be too broad, you want to make sure that you’re spending your money and the keywords in the audience that you know are going to bring the traffic and conversions that you’re looking for. So for me, seasonality, audience, location, those are the things they need to look out for and also competition. So as I said, there are some clients that they used the busy season to start running that. And you know that in busy season, you might get a higher cost per click, because there’s more people running ads on that season. They know that if they run ads they are going to be above their competitors or competing with a lot of deck builders that are deciding to start running ads at that moment. So competition is something to really look out for. And now Google has a lot of things to compare to the competitors that are in your area. You can do research and what they’re doing if they’re doing search ads, they’re doing display ads. So that’s something, that’s another thing to look out for. And competition, you need to be aware of what they’re doing. You know that, how much budget you need? How many deck builders are running ads at the moment. Okay, so and also the keyword research, you need to be careful with the keywords that you are going to use.

April Edwards 20:19 Yep, that’s a lot. Everyone listening, you can do this all on your own now, right? Yeah, um, in terms of, you know, the fluctuation, so just so I can recap. Market demand, seasonality and understand that you’re going to be paying more when there’s demand. Right?

Alejandra Donaire 20:48 Exactly, yeah.

April Edwards 20:50 And then what your competition is up to. So you don’t always want to just outbid your competition, right? There’s kind of a sweet spot there. Isn’t there, you want to talk about bidding a little bit?

Alejandra Donaire 21:03 Yeah, so there’s a sweet spot, like, it’s not afraid to show up. And you don’t want to show first all the time. Because you know that there are keywords that are more relevant to you, or there are keywords that maybe we are not targeting because we don’t want to. Such as deck builders, not all the clients want to have to rank higher for like repair service, because they might offer it. But that doesn’t mean that I want to spend budget on that keyword. So it’s about having a good impression share. Keeping that impression share. And good numbers, just so you can have a piece of the pie. And you don’t need to show up in the first decisions all the time, because you’re gonna have really high cost per clicks. And sometimes those people are not even in the face that are ready to convert. They are just looking for information. So you want to be careful, and it’s okay to not show the first position all the time.

April Edwards 22:02 Yeah. And then when you’re starting your campaign, I believe that, you know, there’s kind of some different phases that the campaign goes through. And that, you know, you’re doing from a management perspective, can you talk about that at all?

Alejandra Donaire 22:18 Are you referring to the visibility stage?

April Edwards 22:24 Yeah.

Alejandra Donaiore 22:26 Okay so, there’s the first phase, I would like, I really like to call it visibility, because it’s a phase that you’re really showing up. People is learning about you. You’re doing brand awareness like, “Hey! I’m here, visit my site.” That’s the visibility stage, it’s a stage that you know that you’re you’re building that traffic or building those impressions. And after that stage, there’s the engagement stage, where you focus a lot and clicks like, Hey, okay, I know my ads are being shown to the audience. And maybe I have a lot of impressions, but I need engagement, I need that clicks, I need those clicks, I need that traffic to go to my site. So there’s what you try to be more specific, like, Okay, I have broad keywords. But I also want to be as specific in my keywords, because I want that engagement. And after getting that engagement, after getting those clicks, I’m going to move to this next phase, which is the acquisition where you focus a lot more in the conversions. So you already know people is clicking on your on your site, you already know which clicks of what keywords are bringing those conversions, because you’re getting clicks, and you’re also getting conversions at the time. But then you can tell Google, okay, let’s go into into an acquisition phase. I’m gonna touch base right now in something that we haven’t discussed. But I would like to talk about being in strategy, but I’m gonna talk about it later. So it’s the next phase. It’s about acquisition, which basically, it’s a phase that you focus a lot more on, on the conversion. So you want to tell Google, hey, focus more on conversions. I’m good with the clicks, you already understood what I wanted to have a clicks on what keywords I wanted to use, what’s my ideal cost per clicks? Now, let’s focus on conversions. And lets focus to the cost per lead. So you will start gathering that data to understand what’s the ideal cost per leads for you, and how much conversions and what’s the ideal conversion rate for your account?

April Edwards 24:43 Yeah, that’s amazing. It’s yeah, I mean, the whole thing is about, you know, it’s almost like you have this long-standing relationship with Google and you know, exactly what makes Google happy and how communicate with Google. And, you know, you can’t go too fast, you got to take it slow and feed it things here and there and, you know, hold its hand, sometimes it’s so interesting, but it’s basically, like, in a nutshell, kind of what you’re doing. And then, I always like to say, it’s like a DJ that’s, you know, tweaking the knobs, like, you’re just optimizing one in there and like, you know, or you’re in a sound booth or something, and you’re just adjusting it, making it right. So, how long does it usually take to get an account to a good place?

Alejandra Donaire 25:40 So I like to play it safe, I’m gonna say, three to five months, I mean, sometimes it can be sooner because of your location, you don’t have a lot of competition there. You’re offering a service that’s actually on fire at the moment, and you know, that people is looking for that a lot. So it can be easir. So that’s when it comes like and seasonality, location, audience. So at the beginning, even Google takes two to three weeks for the learning phase, because they still need to learn how to how to optimize for you on what you’re looking for. So if we can say like it’s a sweet spot.

April Edwards 26:23 It’s like, they get comfortable with each other phase.

Alejandra Donaire 26:25 Exactly, so they need to get comfortable. And I will think that in three month, it’s a moment that you already have information about the traffic about the click, how people is interacting with your ads, how much impression share you have, and you have data to compare it with. So you need that data to understand how your campaigns are going to perform moving forward, and what are the things that you want to change? So we start with manual optimizations since the beginning, because you need to do the reviews, and you need to look at the account to understand what’s going on. It’s not just Google. So it’s all also on us as experts trying to make sure that we understand what’s going on in the account. And what’s best at the moment and do the competitor analysis and research.

April Edwards 27:15 Yeah, and looking at the full picture. So I mean, you brought up the news. I mean, you know, if if you have an ad showing up in the map pack, you know, which is where the Google business listings typically are in organic search, the reviews show right and basically looks like an organic listing when an ad is there.

Alejandra Donaire 27:36 In the search bar, it’s going to show us a small ad at the top “sponsor”.

April Edwards 27:45 Well, in the map pack, though, when they show up in the map pack. They have the reviews there.

Alejandra Donaire 27:50 Oh, like? Are you referring to the guarantees?

April Edwards 27:54 No, I thought that you could have ads show up, like sponsored ads show up in map pack?

Alejandra Donaire 28:01 Oh yeah, Yeah, yes, you can.

April Edwards 28:03 In the review. So if you’re doing and you don’t have good reviews, there’s nothing, you know, like, there’s nothing we can do or you can do to try and improve that other than getting better reviews. And, you know, as far as trying to tweak the knobs on the account level. And then after, you know, you paid to get the traffic to your website in terms of conversion rates. You know, if your website looks terrible, it’s a bad experience, or it’s just not impressionable, or it’s not clear, you know, how you’re different and compelling enough to get people to fill out your form or call you then, you know, your conversion rates going to be low. So I’m curious. I mean, you talked about slow season, I mean, what are your thoughts with having ads all year round, and, you know, having them up during slow season.

Alejandra Donaire 29:00 It’s important, I’m not gonna say, to not run ads in your slow season. Like if you have the budget to keep your ads running, go ahead and do it. Because you’re building that data. I mean, you’re understanding your seasonality through the ads. And at the same time, people might not be ready to close deals in the slow season, but they know you’re there. So it’s like they might go back to your site. And it’s going to be super helpful at the moment that we want to retarget that audience because those will be past visitors on your site. And another way of using that information, that data of your slow season, it’s to do retargeting. So at the at the end, that’s going to be information that’s going to be helpful in your in your busy season because we’re going to be retargeting all that people that didn’t convert back then, and you keep that brand awareness and if you stop and it’s like When you play around on pausing, activating, pausing and activating, you mess up with the Google algorithm. So if you had a good impression, or if you had a good CTR, if you were in the sweet spot with Google, you will miss all that. Because Google will be like, Who are you like, and you’ll start, again, from the beginning. And the learning phase is going to be with the outdated data, because it’s not going to be with the most recent data, like, it’s going to be with the data that of ads that were running three months ago, how am I going to use that data to this month. So it is important to keep that that active momentum, because you lose the momentum with Google ads if you pause them. So and also, they are always super helpful to, to match it with with SEO, like if you’re doing SEO, or you’re doing Google ads, it’s gonna boost your SEO faster. So it is important to keep to keep running Google ads, but if you if you’re really short and budget, maybe you can just keep running a small campaign with a couple keywords. So with a 500 budget, because you know, that’s what you have for demand. That’s okay. And you’re gonna invest more in your business season. That’s okay. But when you pause the ads, you lose the momentum, and you need to go back.

April Edwards 31:26 Yeah, right. Consistency is always key, isn’t it? And anything marketing related? And, you know, there’s just so many people that I talked to that, you know, they’re looking for a silver bullet, or, you know, they throw spaghetti at the wall and nothing sticks, and, oh, marketing doesn’t work?

Alejandra Donaire 31:46 Yeah.

April Edwards 31:47 You got to stick with it. And you have to be strategic. I mean, everything that you just said is brilliant, like, there is a different strategy at different times of the year. And there’s a different strategy for how you utilize different channels. So I always tell people, Facebook ads, completely different than PPC, you know, Facebook is where everybody’s at, but they’re not ready to rock and roll yet. And they might show interest, but, you know, they need sold, you know, so they nurtured and primed for sales. And you need to approach that differently. You know, Google ads, the cost per lead might be more, but they’re qualified leads, they’re people that are actively searching for deck builders. So you have to approach how you handle the leads differently to and have something in place to, you know, really lead them down the funnel and then marketing in general to if somebody’s in the research phase of even trying to figure out how they want to like, you know, right now I’m in my sunroom in my house and my outdoor for any deck builder that wants to do a pro bono here at the Edwards. You know, like, like, I could see, do I want to pool? Do I want pavers or do I want a deck? Do I want an outdoor kitchen like, all of these things people will be researching and your marketing needs to support them through that entire journey, not just when they’re ready to rock and roll. But Google ads is a good place for when they’re ready to rock and roll. But the retargeting ads, as you mentioned, is such a great strategy to build up your audience so that when they are ready, you’re in front of them. Um, what about do you want to speak? Actually, let’s speed it up here a little bit. Let’s talk about some of those Google Ad recommendations. What are we even saying? What am I saying? Can you explain to our listeners what, what I mean, when I say Google Ad recommendations?

Alejandra Donaire 33:44 Yeah. So when you start doing your campaign, like, instead of using the smart campaigns, and you manually go into optimize your campaigns, Google will always have Google recommendations. So that’s your job. I mean, basically, they want to give you ideas of things that you can do on your account. But honestly, it can backfire. So I’m going to try to be as specific as I can. Let’s say that some of the Google recommendations that we have, are towards keyword selection. And you know what keywords works for you, you know what keywords you want to you want to show up for. So some of the things that you might encounter when you blindly follow the Google recommendations. It’s if you don’t review those carefully, you might end up targeting too broad. As I mentioned, at the beginning, you might be targeting too broad, an audience, which can lead to irrelevant clicks and higher costs. I’m going to give you an example of a keyword that shows up a lot for the deck builders. Sometimes they recommend to have decks. Just decks as a key word. But you know that that can be a composite deck, that can be a custom deck, but it can also be a deck of cards. Do you really want to show up for a deck of cards? No. So you’re gonna be.

April Edwards 35:17 Or a slide deck or a skateboard deck?

Alejandra Donaire 35:22 Yeah, exactly. So do you want to spend your budget on those keywords? No. So you need to review carefully the recommendations that they’re giving your because sometimes, they might not be aligned to your strategy. And sometimes they can. If you automatically apply the recommendations, you might start implementing changes that will increase your budget unnecessarily. And it will prioritize keywords that don’t convert to well. So essentially, without a tinder approach, you might risk spending more money without seeing better results.

April Edwards 36:03 It’s kind of like using ChatGPT for coffee and not editing it or doing anything with it, and just solely relying on that.

Alejandra Donaire 36:14 Yeah. Yeah.

April Edwards 36:17 Do you want to? What about? If you get those phone calls from from the reps? And they want to talk to you. What’s their advice? Like? And you know, what do you need to know about that?

Alejandra Donaire 36:31 So again, I mean, they will provide a lot of suggestions like, and they will tell you that those are suggestions to improve the performance of your ads. And that includes ideas like adding new keywords, changing your ad copy, adjusting your beats, changing your b2b strategy, their recommendations can be helpful sometimes, especially because they use this Google recommendations as well in those phone calls. And the recommendations are generated by algorithms like, but those algorithms not fully understand the specific needs of your clients or your business. So those recommendations might not align with your business goals or to target audience. So they might be leading to wasted ad spend, because they want to do recommendations of a Google rep. And I’m sorry, if a Google rep is listening, it’s to spend more budget, I mean, that’s going to be the first like, they’re going to tell you that your competition is spending more. But maybe that’s not a local competitor, maybe that’s a national competitor that has a lot of budget, because they do have the budget to do it. Do I really want to bid higher to be on top of that competitor, if it’s a national competitor, and not a local now, so I feel like that’s one of the recommendations that they give you straight forward. And sometimes I’m gonna say they do have good recommendations. But maybe it’s not that moment that you want him to work, because you’re testing something for your client, I might be testing a different strategy compared to the ones that they are telling me to use. They might be telling me to use a value, a bit of strategy towards value, and maybe I don’t have value in my conversions, because that’s information my clients have. Not me. So you need to be careful also, on those phone calls. They really use the Google recommendations. It’s basically the same conversation, and the same suggestions. But you need to be careful, because you know, what are the things they want to do on your account? And what’s the strategy they want to focus on? And what are your business goals?

April Edwards 38:53 Well said, Is there? Does does Google give you like, more credibility if you actually apply their recommendations and weird of those show? Tell our, our listeners, like, where are we getting these recommendations from? And kind of how do they work in? And do we get more credibility? If they see that we applied them?

Alejandra Donaire 39:20 No good recommendations, data and apply to your rank. I mean, Google doesn’t care if you apply to recommendations, it’s not going to affect your rank. Rank is decided by something else. It’s decided about your beat, it’s decided by your relevance. And also it’s decided by your landing page experience. So the optimization score does not affect your ranking. It does not affect your click through rate, which is the how many clicks you get out of all the impressions. It doesn’t affect anything of that. It’s just suggestions and recommendations. You can have an optimization score of 40%, and that doesn’t mean, it’s going to affect your ranking. And your account might be performing really good. Those suggestions are coming from an algorithm. But you’re the one that better understand your goals, your business goals. And you’re the one that understand what’s the strategy you want to focus on at the moment. So optimization score, it’s different from ranking.

April Edwards 40:29 How much time should you be spending every, like, how much time does it take typically, to set up an account and then manage it ongoing.

Alejandra Donaire 40:37 So to set up an account, it will depend on the size of your location, and how many keywords how many services, it used to take me two hours at the beginning for small accounts. And now it can take me an hour, or an hour and a half, if it’s a small client, but if it’s a bigger client, it can take you a week, because if it’s a national client, you want to build specific campaigns per location, you don’t want to put all your basket, all your all your things in the same basket. So you want to you want to make sure that you’re doing tailor ads for their locations. And sometimes they don’t even build the campaign, the same day, it will take you some time. Like maybe you can take a week, two weeks, it will depend on how slowly you want to, it can be gradually, you want to make me start doing 10 ad groups having 100 keywords, but you know that you need to target 200 viewers. So you don’t want to do that from the weekend. And you want to understand how the algorithm performs with those 100 keywords. And then you can start slowly adding more keywords based on your budget.

April Edwards 41:56 Interesting. And I have to imagine if it takes you a couple of hours, it would probably take a deck builder, you know, triple that amount to get it all set up, banging their head on the table trying to figure it all out as they go. What and then ongoing. I mean, how how much time should people be spending on going making adjustments and optimizations?

Alejandra Donaire 42:19 It’s the same if it’s a small account, it can take you 30 to 45 minutes, because you need to review the search trends like the search terms, what people it’s using to get to your ads, make sure that you’re adding negative keywords, make sure that you’re optimizing your ad copy, looking at the keywords performance, analyzing the data, what are the new things that you want to do? Sometimes we even do competitor analysis, just to see what’s going on. Because you do want to focus on cost per click because it increase and you do want to focus on the conversion rate because it decrease, what do you want to do. So when I optimize the account, I always try to have a goal. So my goal for discipline session, it’s going to be XYZ. Because if I don’t have a goal, it can take me longer, because I’m going to be everywhere, I’m going to be looking at all the data instead of focusing on what I want to do for that optimization. So it’s better when you have a goal for data optimization. And let’s say I want to decrease cost per click for this optimization. And then you bill your next steps because you know that you need to also check the conversion rate, I decrease my cost per click. So in my next optimization, I’m going to focus on the conversion rate. And by doing that, it can take you 30 to 45 minutes. And then if it’s a bigger account, it can take you an hour and a half.

April Edwards 43:43 Yeah, and that’s every time you’re getting your pause in there too. Well, um, for a deck builder that’s kind of interested in, you know, approaching all this what, what words of wisdom would you would you give them just starting out?

Alejandra Donaire 44:03 Approaching from scratch like them doing everything on their own?

April Edwards 44:08 What should they do? What would be your recommended plan of attack on their own.

Alejandra Donaire 44:15 So, first thing first, you need to take the time to understand your audience, and what keywords your competitors are using to find services like yours. So and also what keywords your audience is using to find services like yours. And also, you need to regularly review your campaign performance and be prepared to make adjustments. Every time you review your account, you need to be prepared to make adjustments because you’re not going to keep the things as they are. You have the data to analyze what’s going on and what’s what’s working, what’s not working. So you need to kind of work into your accounts and make those changes. And then just don’t just set it and forget it. People just tried to think that they just need to set up the account. And that’s it. No, you need to you need to actually invest time and the Google apps require ongoing attention. So you need to be cautious with the Google’s automated recommendations, and only implement changes that makes sense for your specific goals. And lastly, I consider starting with a smaller budget to test what works before scaling, scaling up.

April Edwards 45:29 Okay, I think these were amazing tips. We’ll, maybe we’ll try and figure out like, we’ll have Natalia here next time, and you can check out the live feed to see if anybody has any questions, and then we can answer some questions live, which would be amazing. But this has been really helpful. I really hope that anybody listening got some juicy nuggets out of this deck builder marketers. This is you know, this is Alejandra here. If you ended up working with us, she’s the wizard behind the curtain. I’m the growth strategist. So, I help steer everybody in the right direction in terms of what marketing they should be doing based off of their goals and where they are in their business. But Alejandra is the one that makes it all happen. So if you guys have any other questions, always ping us you know, at the Deck Builder Marketer, socials, you can email text call set up a strategy session with me. And, as always, keep pushing your business forward.