Watch the video above or read below.

Jack Heald: Thanks for joining us folks. Rather than simply writing an article, I wanted to talk to my partner Luis Castaneda, about what he in particular brings to the table as a Wizard of Ads partner. And I’m delighted to say that he is joined today by his business partner and son, Daniel. So Luis and Daniel, thanks for doing this with me.

Luis Castaneda: Oh, thank you for having us.

Jack Heald: So my focus as a Wizard of Ads partner is on what we call the creative side. I’m a writer, I create ads. But there’s a whole lot more to helping our clients build a powerful business. Grow from little to dreams fulfilled. And one of the most important parts of that is the digital side. There’s a million people out there who will claim to be digital experts who will offer our clients their services as SEO Professionals or Digital Marketing Experts. And our experience in the Wizard of Ads is that those people — they kind of all do the same thing and none of them do it quite the way that we go after it. If there were headlines for the types of tasks that you guys do, what are those headlines?

Luis Castaneda: Well, the headlines will be bottom line is we want to help you get more leads to generate more revenue using Google Ads. That will be the bottom line of what we do. We specialize on Google Ads and Bing ads. We don’t do any social media. So we don’t get distracted. And that’s what we are trying to bring to the table.

Jack Heald: One of the questions that listeners should be asking themselves is, well what about search engine optimization?

Luis Castaneda: SEO and search engine optimization, I see it as part of the content strategy, as part of the website strategy. And as a specialized person, the decision for Daniel and I is that we just focus on Google Ads. Obviously we have some partners that do the website and SEO, but in our case, me and Daniel, we don’t get distracted by anything else, social media, SEO or whatever. We want to be the experts and have the depth of the knowledge to really make Google Ads work for you.

Jack Heald: Let’s talk about why Google ads don’t work for people. We’ve noticed, especially over the last year that cost per click has skyrocketed and effectiveness has plummeted. What’s going on?

Luis Castaneda: Yes. Well, the big advantage of Google is the intentionality. Okay? People searching on Google, they are in need of a product and services, so that is the big plus. This is not social media where I’m trying to entertain myself or trying to waste some time. No, I’m going after Google because I am in need.

Now the challenge is Google is an auction system. I’m not sure if you have ever been to an auction, but usually the winner ends up paying more than be needed to buy that product somewhere else. And what complicates the matter with Google is that all competitors are bidding for the same keyword, the same product or services.

And some people really don’t pay attention to the details, or some people it’s just ego like, “I just wanna show up on the first place.” That’s what makes Google really expensive. When the auction goes wild it becomes more like ego or passion-oriented rather, than a business oriented, and that’s what we come into place. Because we have the experience not only with advertising, but also with sales and marketing. So we understand, we try to look at the whole picture. It is not just how many clicks you’ve got, how many leads you got, it’s how much revenue you got out of your Google campaigns. So our focus is on trying to help you find those spots, those keywords, those areas where Google is helping you with your profits. It’s not just like, “Oh, I’m in Google because you know I wanna be there and I just wanna get leads.” No, we wanna get leads that are making your business grow.

Daniel Castaneda: And to compliment that, I think there’s a problem with incentives, right? The client’s incentives is to get more traffic, get more sales, get more revenue. Google has the same incentive, but on the completely opposite side, right? So Google’s just trying to get as much money from the advertiser as possible. You’re trying to minimize your cost while driving that growth and that traffic into your website, right?

Jack Heald: Wait a minute, Daniel.

Daniel Castaneda: Yeah.

Jack Heald: Are you saying that Google isn’t just simply operating as a a beneficial middleman just trying to do the best job connecting people who want something with people who have something?

Daniel Castaneda: Man, I wish that was the case.

Jack Heald: My experience is that people are, if they think about it, they’ll realize that Google is there to make money. But there’s kind of this aura around the whole Google thing. Like there’s still this disinterested third party who’s providing a set of services for free because they just want to connect people.

Luis Castaneda: Yes and no, Jack, because, one of the problems that I see where I think Google is not really helping the clients the advertiser is because they have a bottom bid. Okay? So it’s like your brand, you should pay 1 cent for your brand, which is the lowest bid. But Google algorithm can increase that lower limit.

So you may end up having to pay 10 cents rather than 1 cent because Google algorithm defines that as the minimum bid to advertise with that keyword. So from that point of view, I don’t think Google is working on your benefit, it is working on their benefit. But on the other side, to be fair with Google, I think part of the problem are the competitors.

The competitors going wild and bidding hugely on keywords that may not be worth it. So I think those two scenarios kind of makes this a complex situation, and that’s precisely what, when we try to come and help the clients reach the optimal point, do not waste a lot of money on keywords that are not really translated into revenue.

Jack Heald: What are the most common mistakes that you see people making?

Luis Castaneda: The biggest mistake I see is ego.

Jack Heald: Talk about the specific actions though.

Luis Castaneda: I’m not seeing my ad on the first place. I am on the second or third place behind a competitor. Okay? For me, that is a big mistake. You don’t have to fight for the first place on the ad results. I have seen some clients that they wanna be in the first place and they end up paying seven times more than when they were not fighting for the first place. So I think that is the big one of the biggest mistakes.

The second biggest mistake is the infamous set it and and forget it. I set up the Google Ads campaign. But then I use all the automatic tools that Google offers and then I leave it.

And I don’t know really what is behind, how is my CPC, how is my conversions and things like that. And I don’t manage it. And I think a lot of agencies do that. They just set up your account and forget about it. And obviously that is gonna work in benefit of Google. Because if I tell Google, I want a lot of conversions and I am not controlling the cost per click, obviously, it’s just gonna keep increasing and increasing.

Jack Heald: If I recall correctly, with the little bit of work I’ve done with Google campaigns, you can set a maximum. You can say, I don’t want to pay more than X.

Luis Castaneda: That’s correct. But many people don’t use that option. Because again, it is dynamic. You may have a new competitor. You may have a change in, like, now it’s the winter and furnaces are more in demand than air conditioners.

So it is really an ongoing activity that you have to do with Google. Because even for if you set up a maximum. Maybe that maximum is no longer necessary. The crazy competitor that was beating a lot is no longer beating and you can lower your max CPC.

Jack Heald: Yeah. What about you, Daniel? What do you see as the most common problem or one of the most common problems?

Daniel Castaneda: I mean, I totally agree with what Luis just said there, and I think it all boils down to. over-bidding. It’s overbidding because you want to be on the first spot. It’s over bidding because you forgot to set your max CPC or a good target CPA based on what you’re looking for. And if you let Google run wild, they will.

Because they love that and they keep coming up with new ways do that, right? That’s where new match types come in. They’ve come out with broad match keywords where even if the user’s search query is not exactly what your keyword is, they’ll still throw your ad in there. Even if it’s not exactly the same thing. And they can get very creative with the interpretation of what people are searching.

Jack Heald: You got an example of that?

Daniel Castaneda: Yeah.

Luis Castaneda: Telephone numbers, I am starting to see searches where Google is showing your ad when someone is searching for your competitor’s telephone number, if you can believe that.

Daniel Castaneda: That’s a crazy one.

Jack Heald: Wait a minute. I want to, I wanna follow through this idea.

I’ve got the phone number of Bob’s Air Conditioning Service and I type in Bob’s Air Conditioning Service’s phone number because I’m doing it on my phone. And I think it will call Bob. Instead I get Frank’s Air conditioning as an ad.

Luis Castaneda: That’s correct.

Jack Heald: I click on that thinking I’m calling Bob and I call Frank.

Luis Castaneda: That’s correct.

Jack Heald: Frank pays for that though.

Luis Castaneda: Obviously.

Jack Heald: What’s gonna happen is I’m gonna answer the phone, Frank’s Air conditioning, and then they’re gonna say, Frank’s, I’m trying to call Bob’s. This isn’t Bob’s. No, this is Frank’s. Okay, bye. Paid for that

Luis Castaneda: Yes.

Jack Heald: Alright. That is not good. I think we’d call that suboptimal.

Luis Castaneda: Yeah. But that’s one of the wild, crazy things we are seeing.

Jack Heald: Overbidding. Letting Google run wild. What are some of the other things that we that when we bring in you guys on as, as the digital ads experts, I know for a fact you guys have to clean up other people’s messes. Talk about the messes that you’re cleaning up.

Luis Castaneda: Some of the message have to do with what we call conversions. And for us in the Google Ads environment, conversion will be what you are paying for. You wanna have more online sales? That is your conversion. You wanna have a telephone call? That is your conversion. And some of the message we see is probably double counting on conversions.

Probably, not really having a strong, well structured conversion tracking. So you may be counting some conversions, but not counting others. Going more in depth, and Daniel has a lot of experience on this, is account structure. Campaign structures where you have keywords repeated among different campaigns.

Like, you have an air conditioning campaign and you may have their HVAC repair, but you may have another cooling campaign and you may also have an HVAC repair in there. You are competing against yourself and that’s when the bids go crazy, because it’s not that you’re competing against your competitors.

You are competing among your HVAC air conditioning campaign and your cooling campaign.

Jack Heald: Wait a minute. Wait. If I’ve got two campaigns set up and they both happen to have similar keywords and I’ve got a bid limit set up either by the day or by the individual bid or whatever on each of them, and there is somebody doing a search that either of those campaigns could provide an answer for, Google will ratchet both of those as if they were competitors.

Luis Castaneda: No, Google will try to pick between the two campaigns. Okay.

Jack Heald: Okay,

Luis Castaneda: But obviously Google is gonna get the one with the combination of what they call the best ad rank. Which may translate to the higher bid.

Jack Heald: That sounds fairly complicated.

Daniel Castaneda: Account structure is a pretty big deal. Not just for the reasons that that Luis mentioned. This also comes into play as why we think having proper Google Ads is so essential. When you’re working with the Wizard of Ads is because we wanna make sure that, the great ad copy that the writers and everyone else does is translated into the digital landscape. And to do that, you have to have a good account structure where the ad that ends up showing up is relevant to whatever the user is searching. and makes them wanna go into your website and hire you, right?

Jack Heald: I think we assume that our digital people, and by we, I just mean businesses hire an agency to take care of this stuff. The assumption is, hey I sell roofing and guttering services, so create Google campaigns for me so that people who are looking for google, for roofing and guttering services will find me. And we just write ’em a check every month and we trust that’s what’s happening. And it sounds to me like, what you’re describing is that oftentimes when you come in behind one of these other agencies you’re seeing a lack of attention to these particular kinds of details.

Daniel Castaneda: That’s correct.

That leads to a lot of wasted opportunity, a lot of wasted budget. It can be tricky to see, especially from the client side because, Google in a lot of ways operates like a black box. You don’t really know what’s going on unless you take a very close look. We then we come in and try to find those inefficiencies in the campaign in order to maximize, you know, what you’re getting out of what you’re of your spend into Google.

Jack Heald: On average how much overspending do you see happening, maybe, as a percentage of digital? Or how much savings are you normally able to find?.

Luis Castaneda: We don’t see it that way, because usually most of the campaigns are limited by budget, so we transfer the the bad spend into a good spend. But it is not like we are saving you money, it’s just that we are bringing you more for your money.

Jack Heald: Is there a number that, we can always come in and we can at least do x.

Luis Castaneda: Yeah, I will say a decent manage account, probably 10 to 20%. But you will be surprised, there are some cases that it could go up to 80% if it is really bad. But I will say 10 to 20%. Because I wanna mention something else, and this is really bad for the client. This is the worst mess that you can find, and that is when you don’t have access to your own accounts.

The agency controls your Google Ads account, your local service ads account, and even worse, your Google Analytics or your Google My Business account. So that when you decide to change and leave them, they hijack your accounts and we have seen cases where they ask for a lot of money. We’re talking a hundred thousand dollars if you want your own accounts.

So that’s also a big mess that we see in a big issue.

Jack Heald: Well, that sounds like just from a standpoint of being a good manager, we can tell everybody whether you’re using us or not, you need to absolutely make sure that you have a hundred percent control of your Google Ads account and all the little bits and bobs that are related to that.

Luis Castaneda: That’s correct. And a lot of agencies or some agencies don’t allow that.

Jack Heald: All right the takeaway from this, at the very least, make sure that your agency, your digital agency doesn’t own your Google account. That you have 100% complete access to all things Google that, that are supposed to belong to you. Let’s talk about some of the metrics that people get obsessed with that don’t really matter.

One of the things I’ve observed watching digital agencies talk to my clients, not Wizard of Ads agencies obviously, but other agencies, is they talk about a lot of different metrics that I don’t think really matter. Let’s talk about that. Which metrics do people focus on that they don’t need to, and what should they actually be looking at?

Luis Castaneda: Well, one of the metrics we already talk about is being on the top position of the Google ad results, right? That’s really that is it could turn very expensive. At the end of the day. I am a firm believer that every campaign has its own objective. Not all campaigns are the same.

So the main question is, okay, Jack, why DO you wanna use Google Ads? What are you trying to achieve? And the key metrics should be based on that. Maybe you have a new product that no one knows. Maybe in this case, we are gonna measure how many people visit the website and watch the video. Maybe watch the full video because the objective is to get the people to know the product.

But talking about most of our clients lead generation. The basic metric will be qualified leads.

Jack Heald: How do you differentiate between a qualified and unqualified lead on the front end?

Luis Castaneda: Well “qualified lead” is made by the client. They are the ones that de decide if this is good or not.

And obviously to get to that level, we need the integration between the CRM and Google Ads, which is something that we have the knowledge and the expertise to do, but that is very important. Otherwise, if you don’t have that connection, there is no way for you to find out if this is really qualified or not.

So you have two aspects there. One is what is it that you are tracking and two, if you are able to track offline conversions going forward than just click to call or someone send you a form from the website. But again, what we see is qualified leads with some clients. We are working with bookings.

Not only if it was a qualified lead, but if it end up having an appointment and depending of the package that they have with ServiceTitan, we can go all the way down to revenue. Did the call generate any revenue. And for me, that is the end goal and that should be the most important metric, if you are making money or not.

And if it is profitable. Because it’s not only about bringing money, it’s bringing money that is gonna make the business grow. The bottom line shows the numbers.

Jack Heald: Yeah, exactly. I think it’s important to note here for listeners that there’s kind of a the border between where you’re tracking the effectiveness of your digital marketing, and the effectiveness of your sales. It’s murky. You could have digital advertising that is doing a brilliant job of bringing highly qualified leads to you. But it’s possible that you may have a sales problem that once that lead comes in, you’re not doing a good job of converting that into a sale.

That’s not a marketing problem. And then the opposite is true. You may be an absolute killer when it comes to closing sales, but your digital marketing team may not be bringing you good qualified leads and you wouldn’t know it because so many of the, because you’re great at closing. But the metrics, if you’re looking there at closing rate closing rate may be down because you’ve got terrible leads. So this is not something that digital can solve. It doesn’t matter how good your digital team is, if at the point where a lead is handed off to the salespeople, the customer relationship people, whoever that happens to be, you’ve gotta be bulletproof there too.

So this requires really deep integration between the marketing team and the sales team and the customer relationship team. Everybody’s gotta be on the same page. I don’t mean to stomp in on your territory here, but this is one of the things that I observe, it doesn’t matter how good your digital marketing is, at the point that the lead gets there, it’s no longer a responsibility of digital marketing. So that takes us back to some of the other situations that, that I regularly see people obsessing about the number of impressions they get. Correct. The amount of time on page, their bounce rate, the number of pages viewed talk about that a little bit.

Luis Castaneda: Just to close what you just mentioned, that is the key, the integration, the teamwork between marketing and sales. The ability that we have to configure your ServiceTitan and make sure that we have a common language between Google Ads and ServiceTitan so that we can really track all the way down to the closing and see, how Google ads compare to Bing ads or to any other campaign that you have on ServiceTitan.

That is something that we are doing and that we strongly recommend for everybody to do because, that’s where you’ve got the light.

Jack Heald: Yeah. It’s worth mentioning for those who are wondering, ServiceTitan is a customer relationship management package that is used by home services companies. If you’re not in home services. that’s not for you. But there’s undoubtedly some sort of application that is analogous to ServiceTitan for your industry. I’m sorry, go ahead, Luis.

Luis Castaneda: No problem. Following this line, impressions, it is worthless to have millions of impressions if you don’t even get a call. Let’s not talk about the closing, but if those impressions never turn into a call, so you know, what is the point? So it is a vanity metric. We need to track impressions, we need to see how are we doing there? But that’s not the end goal.

The end goal is how many of those impressions turn into a call and how many of those calls turn into a booking and how many of those bookings turn into a sale. So it’s the whole funnel. Looking at the whole picture to try to understand what is it that is bringing the best opportunities for your for your company.

And part of our job is try to improve what is not performing. We look at different angles, the cost per lead, the return on investment, the revenue per impressions. There are many different ways to try to dissect this and see where is it that we have a chance for improvement. Based on experience, we also have some goals, like, what is the cost of a call? $75 based on our experience, what is the call of a booking? $350. So we are also trying to make sure that we are aligned with those goals that we have based on what we see with all of our clients and start trying to optimize based on that.

But again, at the end of the day is what is it that makes the closing, what is it that makes good leads for the technicians to work?

Jack Heald: So it seems like it would be smart for the business owners who are listening to this to have a set of questions they can ask of their digital agency, whoever’s handling that to to be able to evaluate whether they’re getting what they should be be getting.

One of the questions that it seems to me like folks should ask, follows onto what you just said. What is our cost per call? What was the other one you said? Cost per booking or something like that. My guess is just being able to ask those questions will be really helpful. What are some of the other questions that business owners should ask of their digital marketing team in order to evaluate if they’re doing the job right.

Daniel Castaneda: That’s a great question and first of all, I would say that a lot of the responsibility falls on the side of the agency as well. The agency also has a responsibility to ask the client, what do you want to get out of Google? Because impressions, yes, can be a little bit of a vanity metric, but you know, if their goal in using Google Ads is to just have basic awareness of their brand or of their services, then impressions might be a good metric to follow.

Right? So it’s also very important for us to ask the client, what do you want to get out of Google?

Jack Heald: That would imply that if your digital agency hasn’t asked you that, you have reason to suspect what they’re doing, right?

Daniel Castaneda: And then, they can just, yeah. They’re not focused on what you really want and not giving you the value that, that you deserve.

But to answer your actual question, I think what you were saying is exactly right. “What can we expect to get with the budget that we have?” I think is a very important question. In terms of impressions, in terms of clicks, in terms of closed sales, in terms of revenue. Asking those questions is very important so that you have a certain expectation from what you’re gonna get back from what you put into Google. I think another question, and this goes back to what we were saying earlier, is “what are we measuring?” What are the conversion actions that we’re tracking? How much will they cost? How can we integrate this into our website?” I think is crucial.

Jack Heald: Alright. So somebody brings you guys on to take over digital marketing. What’s the ramp up period? What’s the handoff like? How long can folks expect to how long do you expect it to take for folks to start seeing the effects of how you’re working?

Luis Castaneda: Usually to set an expectation, I talk about 90 days, three months. Sometimes it is hard to get there because it depends on the interaction and the response that we get from the client if we need the integration with ServiceTitan. If they don’t have the capabilities of Marketing Pro, then they need to make a decision if they want to pay for that option or not.

If we don’t have that, then we are limiting our ability to be able to measure the bookings or or the qualified leads. And also it depends on in some cases the market. What is your budget and what is the market that we are going after. So it also depends on how competitive the market is.

And I will say for me, if we are starting from scratch, if this is a new Google Ads account, it’s gonna be different than continuing with your previous Google Ads account. Obviously, assuming that most of what happened on the Google Ads account is right, it’s not a big mess, but sometimes we just get accounts that are really complex and not well managed, and that complicates the situation.

But I will say it’ll be too much to us to expect to see huge difference in a month, but it is possible to do if we have the right coordination and the right actions. But I will say is more between two to three months.

Jack Heald: All right. So 60 to 90 days, you should be able to see a significant difference.

Daniel Castaneda: Yes. It depends a lot also on what we were talking about, right? How big of a mess you inherit because when you take the account, you don’t wanna blow it up and make radical huge changes from the get go. It has to be measured process. You need to analyze the data, see what’s working, see what’s not working.

And that can take a while. You don’t wanna just blow up the account and disrupt Google’s algorithms and everything that might be already working.

Jack Heald: Okay, a couple more questions and then we’re gonna wrap it up. 10 – 15 years ago, it was all about the content of your website.

Everybody wanted to make sure that their website had all the right content that would appeal to Google. How appropriate is that anymore? And I realize I’m asking a question that’s really more about search engines, but it’s related to the digital marketing side.

Luis Castaneda: No, in my opinion, content is as important as it has ever been.

And we talk about this on the previous blog with artificial intelligence, content will continue to be king because at the end of the day, content is related to your overall marketing strategy. What is the message that you are trying to pass? Do you need to have some message alignment? And obviously, you need to transfer that trust or that feeling to the client to work with you. So for me content is king and continues to be king, and it wouldn’t change. You need to treat your website as it is your best salesperson. Okay, so what are you going to allow to your salesperson to say, okay, what is the message that the salesperson is conveying to the prospect to this prospect?

I think content continues to be king.

Jack Heald: Alright. Is there any question I should have asked you that I didn’t?

Luis Castaneda: Well. Google ads is not easy. And Google has a bad reputation and there is a love- hate relationship with Google. But at the end of the day Google is still the major source of information for people using the the internet. Still, 80% – 90% of people, when they need something, they go to Google.

So as mentioned before, it is a necessary evil. But we are here to help you, to tame or to manage that necessity because part of our struggle is this mix between branding and direct response. You know how much you should spend between those two. And it depends on the stage of the company, but every company needs to keep in mind that they need to invest in both.

And branding is a long term strategy while demand generation is a short term strategy. You have to be careful with your money, okay? And the advantage that Google has is that it may take it may be faster to realize if you are having a good investment. That’s where we can help you. Our job is to help you make decisions on where your money is best spent for Google.

So for me that’s the value that we can provide. We care about your company. We don’t work for Google. We we work for our clients and our goal or job is to help you grow. Help you create wealth that is gonna make your company more successful. It’s not a matter of if you are doing Google or not, it’s also a matter of having the peace of mind that you are taken care of.

You don’t have to worry about what’s going on with Google. You know that it is in good hands and that you are taking the best results out of Google.

Jack Heald: I think it’s worth noting as we close here, that Wizard of Ads partners don’t operate the way the other agencies do. You guys aren’t taking a cut from what your clients are spending on Google Ads. Where with many agencies, if you’re paying the agency a dollar, 85 cents of that is getting to Google.

That’s not the way it works with the Wizard of Ads partners. Every penny of your dollar that is spent on digital marketing goes to Google or goes to Bing.

Luis Castaneda: That’s correct.

Jack Heald: We only make more money when you make more money.

Luis Castaneda: That’s correct. That’s absolutely true.

Jack Heald: Alright, Daniel Castaneda, Luis Castaneda. Thanks for spending a little time for folks to get to know you.

Luis Castaneda: Yes, thank you. We appreciate it.

Jack Heald: We’re the Wizard of Ads Partners. Give us a call.

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