Google Ads – Enable and Maintain with Bobby Machado
Instructional Series 1 Episode 4 of 4
Bobby is the CEO and Lead Strategist at Signa Marketing, CEO at Sector 7 Apps, and a partner at Quick Job Products with his brother Cesar Machado.
As a kid, Bobby always had an interest in business such as providing landscaping services, training horses, or reselling “Tang” back to his parents during 5 grade. His experience in the digital world began when he taught himself how to code websites in high school, which turned into a way for Bobby to make money on the side while racing motocross, which remains as one of his passions to this day.
After he stopped competitively racing at the age of 22, Bobby decided to focus his full-time efforts in web development as a freelance web developer, which then introduced him into the digital marketing world. Being the analytical and creative type, Bobby developed a passion for digital marketing and data.
After working at an automotive digital marketing agency as a paid media specialist, managing a little over $300,000 per month in Google Ad spend for several auto dealerships in the United States, Bobby combined my passion for business and launched Signa Marketing.
Signa Marketing currently makes up about 70% of Bobby’s time and he enjoys hosting a Signa Marketing show named “Blueprint”, in which he answers any and all user-submitted questions on how to market their business online. New episodes are released on Signa Marketing’s YouTube Channel.
Overall, Bobby enjoys being immersed in anything “digital” that has a positive impact on people and humanity.
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Full Transcript Below
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast (00:02):
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the business of business podcast. This is Roy, your host. Of course we are the podcast that brings you a wide variety of guest. On a whole diverse set of topics. Uh, this is our mini series that we’ve been doing. This is actually going to be our fourth and final one on Google ads. I’m lucky enough to, uh, Bobby with, uh, Cigna marketing is back with us again, Bobby, how are you doing?
Bobby – Signa Marketing (00:29):
Oh, I’m doing great, Roy. How are you doing today? I’m
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast (00:31):
Doing awesome. You know what? These, um, these little short segments have been great. I mean, you’ve been given the audience a lot of actionable items, uh. You know, to try to put into practice every week without overloading everybody and just walking them through. So I appreciate you taking time out of your day to, you know, help us out with this. We look forward to doing some other different ones.
Speaking of which, if you’re a listener, you have some topics that, you know, on marketing advertising, things like that. Reach out, be glad to, uh, you know, try to put together a series to help you out. But anyway, so today we’re going to go to the fourth subject. That we want to talk about, and that is how to enable. And of course, how to maintain our Google ads that we’ve put up.
Bobby – Signa Marketing (01:16):
No, this is great. Yeah. So this is definitely a topic where I have a lot of fun with. To be honest, just because they’re there, it can get kind of granular, but what we’re going to discuss here today is more of the approach because if I could teach their approach, then any type of scenario, you’ll, you’ll be good for it. Okay. Okay, great.
So, uh, so with the context that. You know, we’ve, you’ve done your keyword research. You’ve built your campaign from mapping it out, and. Now you’re about to, to enable it and click that, that button just to enable that campaign. Um, now when you enable it previous to that, you’re going to want to set up obviously your, your budget. Um, this would have been determined from doing your forecasting and your keyword research. But say in this case you have a $500 a month budget.
Bobby – Signa Marketing (02:00):
Uh, you can set this budget as a, a, you know, reoccurring monthly budget, um, or sometimes because, because of the fact that Google doesn’t actually honor daily budgets, they honor 30 day windows of, of budgets. Um, it, sometimes you can have a campaign that overspends one day, I didn’t understand the next stage just depending on search volume. Okay. So, um, what we do is we do you utilize daily budgets.
Um, we set that campaign to daily budget and we just do the simple math of 500 divided by 28 days in this month. And we say, okay, this is the daily budget. Um, now the way we maintain, uh, these, these campaigns is that we actually are inside, uh, an account at least three times a week. Okay. Um, and the reason why is because we, we definitely want to stay away from the whole set it, forget it, campaign type of thing, where, where you build everything.
Bobby – Signa Marketing (02:56):
And then you’re like, okay, I’ll see it in two weeks to up a deal. Um, I mean, for us, I mean it’s money on the table. That’s why we’re we like to be in there every other day, making sure that, uh, that it’s being invested in, in the right way possible.
Right. So some of the main things that you want to make sure that you’re doing after you launch is say, you let two, today you launch on a Monday, you’ll go back on a Wednesday and you want to see how much like did it acquire impressions? Did it spend if it did spend how much, um, and the system will tell you really quick quickly, if your campaign is limited by budget.
So this will occur if the, this will occur, basically if you reached your budget for the day, and there were still more opportunity to have people Googling the same keywords, which essentially is like missed opportunity now.
Bobby – Signa Marketing (03:45):
Yeah. Google will say, this is an increase your budget. This is a missed opportunity, but a lot of people will be saying, well, I don’t have more budgets 500 for the month or the deal. So what you can do is you want to go click into your campaign and sort by costs. You’re going to sort those ad groups, ad group ad groups by cost.
And you’ll have diff you’ll identify which ad group is actually spending the most. Okay. That ad group right there, you can actually decrease the bid because if you start to decrease the bids on ad groups that are hogging all your budget, then what that allows you to do is start to attain more traffic without spending more, without having to increase your budget. And that, that really is kind of like the magic there, um, because of the fact that it does take time to go in there and do that.
Bobby – Signa Marketing (04:32):
But the thing is that you can squeeze out a lot more opportunity with, uh, from your budget, if you weren’t doing that. Uh, well, we do see as a mistake, a lot of times is, uh, seeing that a campaign is Lim limited by budget and they have not been decreasing beds. And so, uh, that’s, that’s really just lost opportunity in terms of traffic by having overpay for that traffic.
So we’re definitely very fond of, of going in there, reducing beds, uh, where, where we can, um, another thing that we’d like to do to get a little bit more granular is when you are reviewing your ad groups sorta by costs, uh, there’s a button that’s that allows you to segment. And when you segment, you can segment by device. So when you do that, you’ll see how much spend was actually spending on desktop compared to mobile.
Bobby – Signa Marketing (05:17):
And over the course of time, say you keep going into your campaigns every other day for a couple of weeks, you’ll see, say you start getting conversions, you’ll see that maybe mobile is responsible for all the conversions so far and not desktop. Right. Um, and so that’s where you can start to make optimization bids down to a device level and adjust that and say.
Hey, you know what, I want to be bidding a little bit more aggressive on mobile compared to desktop or, or, Hey, you know what, I want to pull back on desktop. It’s not converting as much as mobile. So that’s where there’s a lot of opportunity. Okay.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast (05:50):
Yeah. And that’s important too, because, uh, speaking from experience, you know, we talked in the pre-show about, this is that I had an ad, uh, you know, my, my budget and my time length got kinda messed up to where, you know, for like two days I didn’t have any traffic or any, uh, there was no, this was a YouTube. So there were no, uh,
Bobby – Signa Marketing (06:11):
No news and an activity. Yeah,
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast (06:12):
Yeah, yeah. There’s basically they weren’t being populated. So anyway, it was a, I was able to get that worked out, but yeah, it’s always good because while it’s pretty good about running on its own, uh, for the most part, things do come up that you just need to be sure and catch, and then, like you said, to be sure and optimize, um, you know, optimize it based on the results that you’re getting.
Bobby – Signa Marketing (06:34):
Yes, yeah. A hundred percent. Exactly. And so, and these are kind of tactics to Jay again. Yeah. Basically get the most bang for your buck. I mean, every dollar counts, especially in these times, every dollar counts. And so that’s why these th this approach, um, will yield basically the, the most traffic within with that without having to increase your ad budget.
Um, and so the same as with video and display too, is if there’s opportunity to be craze and your campaigns limited by budget. Yeah. Absolutely. Taking advantage of decreasing your beds.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast (07:09):
My experience with Google is very limited. So, uh, helped me out with this, but I know on some of the skip ad campaigns that I run, what I was told is, uh, you know, like maybe one is not doing as good as another. So, uh, what I will do is the tendency is to go in and just get rid of that ad.
But there’s actually a button there that you can just deactivate where it actually leaves the video clip and everything up there, just in case you just have to go back and re add it. You don’t have to redevelop it. So my advice, and it doesn’t take up any more space, but just deactivate instead of remove, and it may help you out in the future.
Bobby – Signa Marketing (07:49):
Oh, Roy. Yeah. No, that’s, that is great. Great advice there because how many times have we seen that? They just deleted the whole thing and you’ll still have all the data there, but you still got to you can’t flip it on how you could before. So pausing ads, uh, is definitely something we highly recommend, but that’s an excellent point. Yeah. Yeah.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast (08:09):
All right. Anything else we want to talk about on the maintenance end before we go?
Bobby – Signa Marketing (08:15):
Yeah, so, so in terms of we dive, we dove into segmenting, which there’s a ton of opportunity there that we always find. Um, and this, this approach, um, uh, I would say a lot of people sometimes may say, Oh, well, if I decrease my bids, I’m going to lose traffic or I’m not going to attain anymore.
And what I, what I tell them is, okay, uh, most likely that won’t happen as long as your, your click through rate remains the same, or it gets even higher. Right. And so that’s why we’re running really good ad copy goes a long way, because say on, on the Google search network, there’s top four positions on desktop. And if you are reducing your bid to where you’re landing on position three or four, you’re, you’re paying way lower for a click and you’re still at the top.
Right. And if you have very persuasive ad copy where you’re beating the position, number one anyways, in terms of clicks, then you’re golden because you’re, you’re being able to attain that traffic at a much lower cost and being able to get way more for, for, you know, within the same budget. Yeah.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast (09:17):
Well, it sounds counterintuitive, but you would, you know, you’d said if, uh, you got one that’s eaten up into your budget, you could back it down. But I think the, what I took away from that is it, like, it can spread that out because some of the other positions that we really weren’t getting a lot of traffic on.
If we can increase that traffic, we may have higher click-through rates. So, I mean, at some point we still would go back and evaluate what that click through rates. But if we have little to no activity there, we don’t know anyway, so it’s a good experiment to run.
Bobby – Signa Marketing (09:51):
Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely. That’s, that’s where I see a lot of opportunity when we first, you know, do, uh, an account review or anything like that. Yeah. Those that’s, those are some of the low hanging fruit, um, adjustments that we, we, we start to complete right off the bat when we take over an account. Right. Um, and yeah, I mean, you’ll, you’ll see basically the costs to stay the same and just the traffic goes like the spread. Exactly. Yeah.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast (10:17):
All right. Well, that’s great. Well, Bobby, we appreciate you taking time to put this series together. This was the Google ad series. And if, uh, you know, this is the fourth verse, this is the fourth episode. So go back and give those others a listen, uh, what we do as it. And I think, uh, we will talk about doing another one in marketing and, uh, see if we can talk Bobby into coming back and helping us out.
But we think that this will break everything down into more bite sized pieces that you can implement, you know, over the next week. So, uh, if you’re too busy, if it’s something you just can’t figure out, uh, Bobby and his team are, uh, you know, they’re willing to help. So Bobby, how can they reach out and get some help from you at Cigna marketing?
Bobby – Signa Marketing (11:00):
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So everyone can find us@cignamarketing.com. Um, we actually do even offer free Google ad account reviews. So if you, if someone’s had an account and they’re like, man, I just can’t figure this thing out.
Or, or they’ve just been running for a while, more than happy to, to do a free review and then send you a report of where there’s opportunity. Um, and if you have just even like quick questions and you’re like, Hey, I just, I just want this type of, uh, this answer, or I have a question on something that is related to Google ads.
Um, you can find us on social media, just at Signum marketing as our user handle. And we’re more than happy to answer any questions in public forum, because if most likely someone else has the same question. So we’d like to answer a lot of, uh, questions in public form too. Right. Okay.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast (11:44):
And you’ve also got a, uh, a podcast that you do through Cigna marketing. It’s called blueprint. So tell us, tell the audience about that one as well. Yeah. So
Bobby – Signa Marketing (11:54):
Blueprint is something we started, uh, to be as a free resource to small business owners, marketing managers, and even it’s just anyone that’s getting into the industry. Um, and so it’s a, it’s a fun show. It’s a Q and a style show in with Jane and I basically answer any and all digital marketing questions that people have. So yeah, so people can submit them as a comment or even a direct message. And, uh, and then I just answer them candidly on the next episode.
Roy – The Business of Business Podcast (12:17):
Okay. Awesome. Well, y’all check Bobby out, uh, at Cigna marketing as well as on the blueprint. And, um, we will talk him into coming back and we’ll talk about some more marketing stuff. So, uh, until next time, uh, you know, you can find us thebusinessofbusinesspodcast.com. Of course, we’re on all the major social media, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and these, uh, episodes will go on YouTube when the episodes go live as well. So until next time y’all take care of yourself and take care of your business.
Listen to more episodes of The Business of Business Podcast here