Boosting Salon Success: Unlocking the Power of Google Ads with Belinda Irvine

Unlock the secret power of Google Ads and revolutionize your business with insights from our special guest, Belinda Irvine. As an accomplished Google Ads manager with a rich background in analytics, Belinda shares her transformative journey into digital marketing, providing invaluable tips on strategic keyword selection and dispelling myths about ad spending. Learn how the right keywords can connect potential customers to businesses effectively, using relatable examples from the hair and beauty industry to illustrate these points.

Discover how to maximize your return on investment through a deep dive into conversion rates and ad spend, particularly for service-based businesses. With real-life scenarios, Belinda breaks down the cost per click and conversion rates, emphasizing the significance of good web design and proper conversion tracking. By analyzing a hairdresser's business model, you'll see how a $1,000 monthly ad spend can result in a spectacular 325% ROI, proving that thoughtful planning and realistic expectations are key to succeeding in digital marketing.

Lastly, we explore the nuances of optimizing Google Ads for conversions, from understanding keyword costs to setting up Google Analytics for precise performance measurement. Belinda offers practical advice on managing budgets and expectations, ensuring you set up conversion tracking before spending any ad money. Engage with us and the community as we invite listeners to share their experiences and questions, fostering an interactive dialogue aimed at enhancing everyone's advertising efforts. Tune in and learn how to elevate your business to new heights with Google Ads!

Contact Bel:

💻 https://belindairvine.com

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Transcript

Uncovering Success

Jodie Fielden 0:00

Welcome to Beyond the Mirror with your hosts, adri Varga and Jodie Field. In this podcast, adri and Jodie take you on an intriguing journey beyond the surface, deep diving into the world of business in the hair, skin, beauty and wellness industries. From business success tips and marketing hacks to industry insights and trends, it's all here. They leave no stone unturned. So get ready to unlock your full potential. Evaluate your business, leave behind the limitations and embrace the endless possibilities's great to be back. I'm Jodie Fielden and I'm joined by my work, wife, bestie and business partner, audrey Varga.

Adri Varga 1:00

During these podcasts, we share how you can leverage your passion into profit. Whether you're a budding entrepreneur, a seasoned business owner or someone who's just thinking about starting out, you're in the right place, because we've just about done it all and we're here to share with you that you can too, because it's time to believe your business can be everything you ever wanted.

Jodie Fielden 1:18

Hello everyone and welcome back, and it's great to be back for a brand new episode, and this time we will have our guest. Today we are diving into the world of Google Ads with Belinda Irvine, our seasoned expert in the field. Bel, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, ladies.

Adri Varga 1:39

So, bel, why don't you start off with telling us a bit about yourself and what it is you do as a Google manager? Google Ads manager, a bit about myself.

Belinda Irvine 1:51

So I actually had a whole other career before this which really helped me transition into digital marketing. I had an analyst background where I used to actually prepare and calculate contract information for a health insurance company, amongst other things. So I've spent a lot of my career analysing data and then transitioned into digital marketing and that analyst background definitely helped me, you know, be able to crunch the numbers. So today we're going to talk about a whole pile of numbers and my background certainly has helped.

Belinda Irvine 2:27

What I do on a daily basis if you, you know, have never heard of a Google Ads manager before is I basically treat my clients money as my own, and I have a portfolio of clients that I do their Google Ads for them, because they're either got no interest, no skills or no time to do it for themselves. So I say to people if you've got a burning desire to learn it, then go for it. Otherwise, leave it to somebody who lives and breathes it every day. I set up accounts on behalf of clients. Help them get their conversion tracking sorted out so that we can measure what it is that we're doing and then manage the account on an ongoing basis. So we're constantly making changes and just when you think you might have it right, google will go and change something on you.

Jodie Fielden 3:18

Absolutely, it's so true and it's so nice to hear a little bit about your background. So how about if we start with the basics? How do Google Ads actually work?

Belinda Irvine 3:31

All right. How do Google Ads actually work? So we get a series of keywords that match what it is that you do. We write ads and we connect them to a website. You don't actually need a website, but it's highly recommended that you have one. Then the hope is that those keywords match the ad copy and resonate with the audience. They then take action by clicking on the ad. It then goes through to the website and hopefully they like what they see when they get there and then they convert, and a conversion might be purchasing a pair of shoes. It could be making an appointment with a hairdresser. It could be sending a quote form off to a mowing company to say I don't really feel like mowing my lawn anymore. Could you please do it for me? So there's.

Belinda Irvine 4:15

Each business has a different um outcome in terms of their conversions. Can I just um? Anyone who doesn't know, google Ads are those. I say to people Google Ads are those really annoying little things that show up at the top of a Google search, because some people don't actually know even what they are. Don't be like my husband, don't report them.

Adri Varga 4:37

They're there for a reason and they work. Just when you mentioned keywords, can we just explain what keywords are, because most people wouldn't even know the term of what a keyword is sure and look, let's use the example, because I understand your audience.

Belinda Irvine 4:52

There's a few hairdressers in amongst us, so let's use that as our example today, because it will be really easy for everybody to understand. So a keyword is the phrase or series of words that someone types into google and they're looking for a particular service or product. So in the case of a hairdresser, they will potentially type in hairdressing salon near me. They might type in hairdress hair stylist. They might type in hair colour specialist in Brisbane, wherever their location is. There's a pile of different ways that people will put in words to Google, looking for a particular service, and we put those words into a Google Ads account and we say where these words show up, please show the ad to those people.

Adri Varga 5:38

Okay, thank you. What I also was going to ask when the Google Ads. Sorry I've gone off. I know I had some questions, but for people that haven't understood what Google Ads are and I think we need to sort of clarify it, what's the biggest misconception that people have about the Google Ads?

Belinda Irvine 6:03

Biggest misconception One big one which we might get to a little bit later, but I'll touch on it now is the more money you spend, the more Google will reward you, and that is not correct. You don't get rewarded for buying in bulk or for spending more money, and I'm not going to delve into the real technical, deep elements, but just to say quickly that the more you buy, the more costly it actually gets. Because we can afford, if you've got a tiny little budget, we can afford to go looking for the cheaper clicks. If you're like my mower guy and you want to dominate an entire corner of a state, then he is fully prepared to spend whatever it takes in the. And the higher you up sorry, higher up you appear in a google search, the more costly it will actually be. So that's one of the biggest misconceptions.

Belinda Irvine 6:58

The second one and they're not in any particular order is that google ads works for everybody. So people will come to me and they will say, oh, I want to do Google Ads and I'm like woo-ah, even if someone's got an account. I say to them let's calculate whether or not you should be doing it in the first place, because there is no point being a charity to Google or, worse still, losing money. There are some rare exceptions, but there's no point losing money if there's no profit to be made because Google is no longer 10 cents a click or 50 cents a click. You'll be hard pressed to find clicks under a dollar, and for some industries lawyers is one example it's 30 to $100 a click. That is per click, and then we can work through some of the conversion percentages which are reasonably small, and we we can work through some of the conversion percentages which are reasonably small, and we'll get to that in a minute.

Adri Varga 7:52

Okay, We've kind of answered one of our questions there. So what is it? How do you know if the Google ads are going to be good for you, like if they're working for you?

Belinda Irvine 8:05

So I have an entire exercise that I go through and I call it my viability calculator, where we take information out of the Google ads planner and information business metrics from the business owner, plug them into the calculator that I've formulated over the last decade of doing this in business and it is a bit of a guide. I say to people this is not a promise, don't come back to me in three months and saying but, but. But we didn't get exactly what was in the calculator because it's based on information the business is providing me and that Google is giving us. And often I find that the information Google gives us is conservative and sometimes it can be more expensive in real life. It's also location dependent. Some areas you know in my experience sometimes Sydney is more expensive than, say, queensland, not for all industries and not for all products or services, but it does vary depending on the area. So we go through that exercise as a guide to whether or not you should be doing Google Ads.

Belinda Irvine 9:11

And I give the example that I had a lady come to me who sold little tiny bottles, piccolo bottles of wine, and I made it's the lesson you learn along the way I made the assumption that she should have an account because she had an account. And after I got off the phone, I made the assumption that she should have an account because she had an account, and after I got off the phone from her I realised that she was in fact. It was costing her $20 to secure a purchase and she had a 25% profit off an $80 average sale. So it meant that she was handing every bit of her profit to Google and was making no money. I promptly rang her back and said listen, keep your brand ads on because there's a reason for keeping them on, but you need to turn your other ads off. They're wasting. You're not making any money out of them. Um, yeah, there is one other reason that we would consider leaving those ads on, but it's probably, yeah, too much.

Adri Varga 10:00

Um too much depth. Um, I think a lot of people people make the assumption that if they pay for marketing, that it's going to work and they're going to get new clients, or there's this big misconception I know we had it when we first started, when we went on our marketing journey is that marketing, just because you pay for it, doesn't mean it's going to work.

Belinda Irvine 10:24

No, that's right. And look, I can give you a decade worth of my best experience and knowledge and I have an idea of what industries may or may not work. But at the end of the day, I say to clients or potential clients all the time I don't own Google and anyone who and you see it all the time in this industry and various others, like marketing across the board, where we guarantee you 30 leads, you know, or dah, dah, dah. And I say to people the only way that a company can make that guarantee is if they're prepared to give you a refund.

Jodie Fielden 10:58

Yeah.

Belinda Irvine 11:00

So we say, let's, let's do this for three months, let's see how we go. It can be a rocky road in the three months because all the best practice in the world you know and experience in the world doesn't mean it's going to behave like you think it might, because the geographical area might be slightly different. Or I've had cases where I've had health-based telehealth accounts behave the same in Sydney and Melbourne but we then had a regional Victorian area and people in that area behaved completely differently, Like you could have been you may as well have been an entirely separate company with an entirely different service, yet it was same service, same company, same everything, except for the geographical location.

Adri Varga 11:44

Thanks, Belle. So you were just talking about the calculating viability. Can you give us an example of doing that for someone?

Belinda Irvine 11:54

Sure thing, I have an example here. I'm going to share my screen just because it's easier, so I hope that those listening can maybe jump on and have a bit of a look.

Adri Varga 12:08

Which they'll be able to go and do on our website and YouTube channel.

Understanding Google Ads Conversion Rates

Belinda Irvine 12:13

Here we go. All right, so we're going to use the hairdresser as an example and I've de-identified this, but it is actually real information. That's not to say that any hairdressers listening are going to get exactly the same thing. Some of these figures 50% of these figures are based on the business and not every business is the same. So let's go through it In the case. I do start with a $1,000 ad spend. That can vary. That's sort of, in my mind, a minimum there is, generally speaking, because of the average cost per click that you're going to pay and the various conversion rates. There is no point paying someone to manage ads if you're going to have them under $1,000 for the ad spend and I'll explain further why that's the case because it's related to the number of conversions you're going to get in a month. In the case of this particular hairdresser, the average cost per click was $4.67, which was very specific.

Belinda Irvine 13:10

Normally, if I was doing this exercise out of the keyword planner, it wouldn't be this detailed, but I just happened to have this information. We know, in the case of this business, that their conversion rate was 5.2% and I've got some benchmarks for different industries or like. I can tell you that service-based businesses 5%, maybe up to 10%, and I have a few rare exceptions that sit at 15 to 20. They are very much the exception. So I work on 5% if the people or the client doesn't have this information and this is one of the metrics that businesses frequently don't know because they don't have their conversion tracking set up. So we have a bit of a benchmark guess, which is why this is just a guide.

Belinda Irvine 13:57

So we're saying in this scenario that if the hairdresser spent $1,000 on ads, they're going to get roughly 200 clicks or 215 clicks, that's people going through, clicking on their ad and actually ringing directly off the ad or going through to the website. Off that, for every hundred people that go to the website, roughly five are going to make an inquiry. That's where we get the 11, because they've got 200 clicks in the month. And then, in the case of this particular hairdresser and this figure changes according to the different businesses I've had another hairdresser tell me that their conversion rate was actually 90% if the owner answered the phone. So you've got to be really careful who answers the phone. He said to me this particular day oh, if I answer the phone, it's 90%.

Belinda Irvine 14:46

If my junior answers the phone, then it's like 60%. I said to him well, if you do anything else, please answer the phone.

Jodie Fielden 14:54

Yeah, that's extremely interesting.

Belinda Irvine 14:56

Yeah and look. There's just no point Like it's the job of the website to convert. Only business owners will hold me to how many conversions they're getting. My job is to bring decent traffic based on those keywords through to the website. It is the website's job and the business owner's job to convert their lead into a paying customer. So that's why I'm very, very careful not to take on businesses that have less than average websites and I encourage them and work with a variety of people to improve websites or rebuild them before we start sending ads to them.

Belinda Irvine 15:34

So in the case of this hairdresser, they converted 70%, which means out of their 11 potential new customers, they're going to probably get seven to eight appointments for the month. Now this is where it gets interesting. Actually, I'll just leave that there. This is where it gets interesting. You look at the figure of $5,500 and think, gosh, that's like the most expensive hairdresser in the world. That's not the case.

Belinda Irvine 16:02

What we've done here is because a hairdresser is a repeating service and you are going to get the odd person that hates the service and never comes back, and you're going to get what I call lifers who might stay for a decade.

Belinda Irvine 16:17

So we've worked out for this particular hairdresser that the average they're going to spend over probably the average lifetime of about three to five years is approximately five and a half thousand dollars. And that's what we have to look at. With repeating services like hairdressers and beauticians and mowing guys, anything that's repeated, we must look at the lifetime value because if we look at it as a one-off, then you'd never do Google Ads and I'll show you why the one I skipped over up here. The raw cost of an inquiry is going to be 90 and 50 cents approximately. By the time we lose a few, because not everyone's going to make an appointment. It's going to cost us roughly $130 to land that new client. And this is where we must look at that lifetime value, because I've had this exact conversation with a number of hairdressers and one guy nearly fell off his chair. He's like $150 to land a new client. Like that's ridiculous, that's so expensive.

Belinda Irvine 17:19

And I said to him yeah you're making five and a half grand off the person. Are you now, you know, happy to do it now? And he's like now I get it. So the extra bit here that we've added in is this particular hairdressing salon had a profit margin of 10, because no point really looking at that five and a half grand, it's all about profit. Yeah, the profit out of that one client is $550. We're now going to give Google 130 of it to get the client, but we're still going to make $420. So this is where we get to that one final green figure down the bottom that says that we're going to make 300%, 325% on our money and it's clearly explained. I just tacked this on in the last 12 months because people were interested to know the overall total and benefit of spending $1,000. And in this case, for every $1,000 this salon spends, they're going to come out of it with their $1,000 back and $3,200 profit.

Jodie Fielden 18:24

Yeah, that's absolutely amazing. Just to confirm, Belle, the $1,000 spend is a monthly spend.

Belinda Irvine 18:32

That is a monthly spend. Yeah, and that was what I would recommend as a minimum. Once we know that the job, once we've got it going and it's working and everybody's happy, the conversions are being measured, things are humming along. The decision then is how many chairs do you have and are they full? And once we prove it's making money, obviously it takes you.

Belinda Irvine 18:56

Don't get all your money back in the first month. It's going to take the lifetime of that customer for you to make that profit. That's when we decide okay, we need more than seven appointments in a month. In fact, we're chasing I'm going to make numbers up for the purposes of this we're chasing 20 new customers for the month. Mm-hmm, that's when we can play around here and say right, if that's the case, then we need, roughly speaking, to spend $3,000 on ads and roughly speaking, that means for this seller, we could reasonably expect 20 appointments. Okay, yeah, but I caveat this and I repeat myself endlessly to say that this is a guide. These are real figures, because I have hairdresser clients. That does not mean that somebody sitting up in Cairns is going to have the same outcome.

Jodie Fielden 19:52

Yeah especially because you mentioned before that it's really relevant. You know, like, where is the business located. You know, like what you mentioned, Queensland and New South Wales is very, very different, so it's very interesting to see these numbers.

Belinda Irvine 20:08

It's also, it depends on the service that the actual hairdresser offers. If they're a specialist blonde, you know, like I'm their actual ideal client then people will be prepared to travel further. Um, then what if it was just a standard hairdresser? Those people are like, literally, as we know, there's a hairdresser on every corner, in every suburb, so people are less prepared to travel. And that's where it's my job to balance the budget we have with the volume of search in their area or the volume of people who are chasing for a hairdresser, and try and keep it as tight as I can so that we have a better chance of those people converting. There's a real thing with Brisbane. I had one hairdresser who was just on the south side of the river and I had to really make sure that we didn't advertise on the northern side of the river because no one ain't crossing that river. Can I tell you, wow, there's a real thing in Bristol crossing the river, and I think it's the same in Sydney.

Adri Varga 21:06

We have the different sides of the bridge.

Belinda Irvine 21:09

Yeah, yeah. There's just no point in me advertising on the north side because, like there's one service, I live slightly on the north side, I'm only 5km from that river and there's one service I go to on the south side that's so interesting.

Jodie Fielden 21:25

That's like human behavior and customer behavior. It's so interesting. And who would think you know like someone who is a google ad specialist has to think about this kind of things also, when you are putting your keywords or your Google ad together. It's very interesting.

Belinda Irvine 21:44

And look, I say to people all the time I spend a lot of my time profiling and I feel really terrible because I have to make and I won't mention them now, but I have to make all sorts of assumptions about human behaviour, and one that I can speak to is that people come to me and they're like, oh, should we not go?

Belinda Irvine 22:02

I want to search for, probably should have come up with an example before now, but they come up with more general keywords. So my job, if you think about a funnel, is to make sure that we buy the keywords that are very, very specific. We don't want new hairstyles because that's probably Pinterest and a pile of pretty pictures. What we need is the person saying hairdresser near me, and even to the point where I've made assumptions because of budgets in previous hairdressing accounts where we excluded haircuts, because that's probably my husband looking for a $20 haircut, not me who's looking for blonde and whatever, and I know it's not going to be a $50 job. Um, so we have, we very much have to look for those transactional purchasing related keywords, not the I want a new hairstyle and I'm doing research.

Adri Varga 22:55

that's right up here and I think it's really important that these conversations that we're having, that people have them with whoever they're working with as a google ads expert or any kind of marketing, is that you need to be able to look for someone like yourself that is open, honest, transparent and it's going to give you the bad news. You know, like I think a lot of people get taken for a ride because they promised everything and then it can't be delivered. So being able to like have a bit of knowledge about you know, like that calculator that you've made is an amazing tool. That you know, and it just gets to the cruts of it and sometimes it's really good news and sometimes it's heartbreaking news, like, even when it was ours, we had you do ours and we're just like, oh my God, it's just not going to work.

Belinda Irvine 23:46

Yeah, that's it. And look, I've only ever had one lady take offence you can go and read my one-star review.

Belinda Irvine 23:52

Go and have a giggle to yourself reading my one-star review on my Google.

Belinda Irvine 23:58

Most people in my list of verbal feedback via email, via my google reviews, really appreciate the no nonsense like, honestly, the one of the big reasons it's it's just too way stressful for me if I didn't calculate that viability on the way in and we get two months into it and you're not getting any conversions, sure as eggs, you're going to be cranky, you're going to be stressed, you're going to be sending me emails at midnight being all sorts of you know annoyed, and I'm going to be stressed trying to get the conversions, and then the relationship's not going to end well.

Belinda Irvine 24:30

So I say to people who have ads running and or are thinking about doing ads if your agency or person didn't, at least they may not have a brightly colored, red and yellow um calculator, but if they didn't even have a conversation with you about whether or not you should be doing ads, or if they're not talking to you about your roi and whether you're making money even if there's some industries where it's really hard to calculate but if they're not even having those conversations, then for me that is the one of the biggest red flags. They're just churning and burning and just going through the motions to um, to, to take your money, basically yeah, and we experienced exactly the same before we ended up contacting a video.

Optimizing Google Ads for Conversions

Jodie Fielden 25:17

You know, we spent on Google ads and it was someone who was a really well-known expert and we never had this conversation. We never had the transparency. We kept going for a while and we did not see results, and then we ended up with you. You showed us the calculator and you gave us the not so shiny and sugar-coated news that well for us, it's never going to work. And the one thing that I wanted to go back to you know, like, when you are saying buying keywords, you know like, what do you mean by that? Because most of the people they won't understand when you say you know like, make sure you're buying.

Belinda Irvine 25:59

What is it? Okay, so there is a bit of a misconception out there or a lack of sort of knowledge around. When do you get charged by Google? So you have referred to ads. Spend a number of times With standard search ads. There is some exceptions, but for the businesses we're talking to, for a standard search ad you pay when the person clicks. So we talked about those keywords going into the account and then matching with the ad copy. When someone types in hairdresser near me and then they click on our ad, that's when we pay.

Jodie Fielden 26:37

Okay, yeah, yeah.

Belinda Irvine 26:38

So when I talk about flying keywords, it's the words I have in the account that I'm prepared to spend money on. Okay, yeah, yeah. So when I talk about flying keywords, it's the words I have in the account that I'm prepared to spend money on.

Jodie Fielden 26:45

Okay, all right, thank you very much for clarifying that. How about if we do another example, like, say, a financial planner? And here's what I said earlier.

Belinda Irvine 27:00

All right, let's get rid of this one. All right, this is a good example because this shows I'm going to revert back to something here, All right, so this is a real-life example. Again, I've de-identified it. This came to me. I have a number of different referral partners marketing companies, marketing strategists, agencies, website developers who refer me work. I 100% just do Google Ads and I work with a pile of people who don't do Google Ads and they do everything else. So this was sent to me. A friend of mine said hey, Bill, can you have a look at this? This guy's complaining to me. He's a client, he's doing Google Ads with another provider. But can you have a look at this? This guy's complaining to me. He's a client, he's doing Google Ads with another provider, but can you have a look at his account? Because he's saying that he's not getting any conversions and he's not real happy. I'm like, okay, no worries. So these are his figures and we ran through it.

Belinda Irvine 27:56

He was spending $1,500 on ads. This shows you that different industries cost different amounts of money Tradies, lawyers, accountants there'd be plenty of others real estate reasonably expensive for Google Ads, because over the last, however long Google Ads has been running over 20 years those industries have worked out that it works well for them. They've all jumped in and they've all driven the price up because it's effectively an auction. Um, so financial planning 20 bucks, um. We estimated, because he did not have conversion tracking, that his conversion rate would be five percent. I actually think it could be lower because of the competitiveness in his industry. What that meant is that he was going to get roughly three to four inquiries for the month. And then here comes the challenge. So it's going to cost him roughly $400 just to get an inquiry. Because people shop around for financial planners, because it's a big decision and it's a lot of money.

Belinda Irvine 29:00

He converted 10% and because his conversion rate was so low, it meant, out of the three to four inquiries that he was getting, that he was not even converting one per month. Hence the reason I got the phone call. So he had great money, great profit, like he. When he, when he does land a client, he turns over $17,000. They're worth that to him. His profit's bigger than a hairdressing salon at 35%. So his profit's roughly six grand per client and the maths of this actually works. It's profitable for him.

Belinda Irvine 29:38

The problem we have with him is this 10 versus what it's costing up here. And so I said to him look, I'll be very happy to work on your account. I understand you have a contract, so you've got to see that through, but I actually don't want you to come back to me until you have a budget of about five thousand dollars, because the last thing I want is a client, not to land a client, a new customer, at least every month. Wow, that's the name of the game. There's money in this.

Setting Expectations and Tracking Conversions

Belinda Irvine 30:09

It's all totally fine, but I want to be able to get him some and, keeping in mind this is a guide like we might not get 12, we might get eight, or we could get six one month and 15 the next. We need some room to move in here and the ability to get some conversions, because of the way that the bidding works these days. Google works on getting conversions and then goes and looks for more of the same and if you're only getting like, let's go back to the 1500, if you're only getting three, it's very easy to go to one or potentially, or potentially none. So I said to him when you've got five thousand dollars to spend, come back to me, because then you're going to get sort of 10 to 15 inquiries.

Jodie Fielden 30:53

You're at least going to land one of them yeah, and this is what we really loved about you when we ended up finding you that complete clarity and transparency. You actually did the exercise with us. We were number crunching and everything, because we just wanted to make sure you know like we squeeze out everything what we can from the numbers.

Jodie Fielden 31:18

And we went from every single different angles and you tried everything and you still told us well, it's just not going to work. But it's just really amazing to know that you know like that. This, this calculator, is going to give you a complete clarity, even if you just need to spend a little bit more money to get results, or if it's not going to work whatsoever.

Belinda Irvine 31:46

Yeah, it's also about expectations. With either of I've closed it down now, but with either of these two examples, because the next thing here it is here, the next thing I have is that I send to new clients and I even tell them it's coming, like it's not a surprise when they get it. Um, I have a questionnaire and I say to and I say to people um, as part of that questionnaire, how many leads do you want a month and how many are you expecting to get from Google? And it is like I tell them's coming. But it is designed to be a little bit of a test to see whether they understand.

Belinda Irvine 32:25

Because in this case well, both of these cases it's interesting that you've got to spend $5,000 as a financial planner to get roughly the same amount of conversions as what a hairdresser does for $1,000. But you're talking 10 to say 15 for both of them. The amount of people in that questionnaire who say, oh, I'm expecting to get 50 and I need and I'm and I want 30 of them to come from google ads. So that's literally when I pick up the phone and say hey, listen, do you remember the calculator?

Belinda Irvine 32:55

the bright, red and yellow one, like it's the most brightest hideous colors, but but people, people remember it and they're like yeah, and I'm like right, remember, for your thousand dollars roughly 10, you are not going to get 30, and so that is just again about setting those expectations on the way in, because google ads is not 10 cents anymore and I don't want you cranky in two to three months where you're like this is costing me a fortune, like yeah, and remember we went through it yes.

Adri Varga 33:29

So, um, I've got a question. A lot of um smaller businesses and that they've um only just sort of starting out with google ads and and this is like a big conversation for someone that's new what would be the first steps that you would have someone do if they were thinking about running Google ads?

Belinda Irvine 33:51

Okay. So the first step has got nothing to do with Google ads. If you're a new business and you have no budget to do anything, or you have a tiny little budget, it's going to cost you less than a thousand dollars. I don't care if you do no paid advertising. I want you to set up your conversion tracking, because, okay, what's that that? So conversion track? So everyone? Well, not everyone. I shouldn't say that either. I was gonna say a decent website developer will give you google analytics, right. So if you don't have Google Analytics, then don't even ask your website developer. Just get somebody who can do conversion tracking and what that is.

Tracking Conversions and Business Metrics

Belinda Irvine 34:30

And if you do have Google Analytics, what you probably have is just the basics of an account that tells you how many people are coming to your website, what countries they're coming from, what pages they're going to, how long they spend on your website, tells you all this demographics, which is really amazing. But what it doesn't tell you because it's more complicated to set up is it doesn't tell you how many people made a booking, how many people did quote forms. What it will never tell you is actually the phone calls. That's a bit of a challenging one, but there's a pile of different. If you sell red I always give the example of red shoes if you sell shoes, then it's going to tell you how many purchases you had and how much money was associated with it. And look, I don't think I've probably had three clients and there were big multi-million dollar companies that actually had that, that conversion tracking component, set up when they came to me. And I've had it plenty of times where even the big ones that think they have it set up it's set up wrong or incorrect.

Belinda Irvine 35:30

So I would highly recommend getting that conversion tracking set up when we set it up for Google Ads. We set it up in Google Ads and in Google Analytics because if something's going to break, it's most likely going to be that due to website updates and changes to websites and the like. So if something does happen in Google Ads, we can reference back to Google Analytics. The other big thing is that for some of the junior burger businesses that come just getting their head around marketing and how things work and they're like, oh, I understand for my industry that Google Ads will work for me. I'm like, yes, and then three months down the track they'll be like so, belle, you know how come I can see. You know, I can see the conversions in Google Ads and, like I can see how many people are making a booking at my salon, I'm like yep, they're like how many are coming from socials, and that's when I can say remember we set up that conversion tracking right from the beginning.

Belinda Irvine 36:24

Let me go and show you where to find it in Google Analytics, so it tells them not just for Google Ads how many conversions they're getting, but for all of their sources SEO, the organic stuff, social media, people directly all the different places that people can come from. It will show you how many appointments or quote forms, or whatever your thing is how many are coming through, according to the platform that they came through from. So that would be the first thing that I would do, and even if it's six or 12 months down the track before you engage a professional to do some paid ads or anything else, at least you're measuring things right from the get-go.

Jodie Fielden 37:06

Yeah, that's very, very interesting and I'd really like to hear from our audience. You know, like, if you are working with Google Ads or an agency, you know, like, did your current agency chat with you about the Google Ads viability? And if you want to share your experience and if you have any questions with us, you can share those questions with us on our social media or even you can drop us an email. It would be very interesting to hear other business owners salon owners' experience with Google Ads agencies with Google Ads agencies.

Adri Varga 37:45

Yeah, be good to hear what people have said, because we were one of those that we came to. I don't think we had Google Analytics or had any understanding. So, belle, just to finish it off, any final thoughts, specifically for hair and beauty salon owners about Google Ads so we've got the conversion tracking set up, so you understand yeah, probably the final thought is the amount and I've.

Belinda Irvine 38:10

This is why I'll get rid of this one now. This is why I've highlighted these in red. Um, this one an agent hairdresser can be forgiven for not knowing, because if you're not measuring your conversions then you won't know what your conversion rate is. There's some manual ways of calculating but it's not fun, so that one we can estimate. What I would really encourage business owners to know is these three figures. And I say to people for every 10 phone calls you get how many people book in and I don't care if you record that for a day or a week on a piece of paper beside the phone Get a figure for every 10, like, mark off the phone calls you get, how many appointments did I get. It can literally be a tally and that gives you your conversion rate within the business after I hand you the lead.

Belinda Irvine 39:01

Calculate, and the way to do this is to add up your turnover for however long you've had your business, if you can, but at least probably two to three years. Add up how much money you've made and divide it by the number of clients, not not the number of appointments but the number of people. And one of the best ways to find the people in a database is their mobile number, because it's fairly unique and it doesn't regularly change. So we're going to add up the total turnover for the year or for the couple of years and we're going to divide it by the number of people. That will give you your lifetime value.

Belinda Irvine 39:37

And then, as a business owner, I am absolutely astounded at the amount of people who do not know how much profit they have in their business. So not just for Google Ads, but for running a business generally, these three figures are absolutely vital. So if you're new, you can totally be forgiven for not knowing, or not knowing that that's a thing you should know about. Write those three things down, stick it on the wall and aim towards it over time, if you have, then you can make just really good decisions sorry, we'll just restate um what those things are.

Adri Varga 40:13

So one is the new customer acquired, so that's the phone call one.

Belinda Irvine 40:18

I'm going to change this for the purpose of this conversation. So that's the business conversion rate. That's how many, um, how many new appointments do you get? If someone was, if you got 10 phone calls, how many would? How many would book in? If seven book in, then your conversion rate is 70.

Adri Varga 40:38

So 10 phone calls of new clients, so 10, not just 10 phone like out of all the phone calls of the day, how many new ones and how many book in.

Belinda Irvine 40:46

Yeah, that's it. So not the ones that come all the time. You're right, we have to distinguish between them. The second one is lifetime value. Now, if you're a brand new business who's only been operating for less than a year, you won't have that figure yet, or you will, but it will be really small. And then the margin. So this is I'm going to change this for these businesses the business margin, or business profit margin. After all of your expenses and after tax and after all of the things, how much profit is in your business?

Adri Varga 41:26

Yeah, and that comes back to something that we're always saying to people is that to understand it, you need and to improve it, you need to track it and to be able to grow your business, you need to know these numbers from every angle, and I think that's the one thing that a lot of business owners shy away from is that they're not number nerds like us that love all the data, or they are, once they they do start loving the data, once they understand what the data can do for them.

Belinda Irvine 41:54

Yes, sometimes it's just a case of actually having had no exposure and don't even know that they should like, have never heard the term average lifetime value or the you know of their customers. It's a concept. They may have never heard the term um, average lifetime value or the lot you know of their. It's a concept they may have never come across. And I see light bulbs go off when I explain this to people and say, look, you're totally fine that you don't know this stuff, but now you do. It's your job to start keeping an eye on it and and know your figures.

Belinda Irvine 42:22

Um, my mower guy, oh my gosh, like you can go to my website and have a look at his case study. That man knows his figures in his sleep. Yeah, I was able it was so easy to do his um case study because I was like right, what's the average lifetime value? It's like two thousand eight hundred dollars bill and banged it out just like that. Um, yeah, because he knows his margins, he knows his conversion rates. He's. He's like so I've designed a new page and ied it out just like that. Yeah, because he knows his margins, he knows his conversion rates, he's like. So I've designed a new page and I think it's going to be better for conversion. Can we try that out? I'm like yes, we can Dylan.

Jodie Fielden 42:52

Yes, we can yeah yeah, and it's very lucky when someone is so numbers driven and you know, like a very logical way of thinking. But see, you know, like for hair descent and hair dressers and beauty therapists, uh, we are creative people, so the numbers are sometimes we can't.

Belinda Irvine 43:15

We cannot even imagine what we should measure and not even you know how we should call them, and in that case, I would just say my final kind of point that's just come to me is that you can't just throw money at a person or a thing and then disappear. So my big sister lecture to potential new clients is to say that in the first instance we're going to chat a lot or there'll be a number of emails that will come your way. Your ads will be as good as your participation. I am not sitting in your cell and I am not sitting in your office. I can learn about you from your website.

Belinda Irvine 43:52

I can learn about you from various other documents, but I don't need you to spend eight hours a day or even one hour a day on this. But if I send you an email, if I ask you a question, I need your participation. If I recommend to you that you need to make xyz changes to your website, then it's for a good reason. So I had a client once who attended a one 30 minute meeting in the discovery call type phase, never attended another it was through a marketing consultant but never attended another meeting full stop. Our men wasn't willing to make an offer, wasn't willing to spend an appropriate amount of money for the industry. It was hard going and it was like pulling teeth. And so I say to people your ads will be as good as your participation, and I think we need to manage there.

Adri Varga 44:44

Just on that final thought is the expectation that it doesn't just work straight away just because you turned them on and you put money to it. It doesn't just Look some can.

Belinda Irvine 44:56

I've had some accounts that just like bingo, from the 24 hours after you turn them on your first conversion. Do I tell people about that? No, I don't, because it can take time, and it can take time to optimise the account and work out what's working and pause the things that aren't working. The other misconception about Google Ads is that leads come consistently and they do for some businesses but they don't for others. You can get four leads in a week and then none for a week, and that's something that I know, but I had actually forgotten to tell people because I just knew it to be true and didn't understand that. Clients didn't realize that until you get the odd cranky email where they're like I haven't heard anything for a week and I'm like, okay, just letting you know that Google doesn't send you three a week because you're spending a certain amount of money.

Jodie Fielden 45:49

Yes, yes, yes, and I think it's really just to close with this thought People need to understand that you work with data, what they provide and you do your magic and your knowledge is the knowledge that you always use. But if the data is not right or if they don't spend time to fill out that questionnaire, what you're sending out, and they don't spend time to get the accurate data, you are going to start to work with wrong data and you're going to deliver your result based on that data.

Jodie Fielden 46:26

So it's very important that they have to put their 50 percent into the success also, yeah, and the more that a business.

Belinda Irvine 46:34

I say to business owners when they're filling out that questionnaire I don't need a five-page novel, I need bullet points. Tell me about your, the only way I'm going to learn about your points of different. What makes you special, what I can sell you in your Google Ads is if you tell me. You know, are you a blonde specialist or do you specialise in red-headed people, or whatever your thing is that you happen to do? I need to know about it. Unless it's on your website, I'm not going to know.

Jodie Fielden 47:04

Absolutely, absolutely. And thank you, belle, and for our listeners, what I wanted to say, just be sure to check out the resources, what Belinda mentioned and you freely and we truly can recommend her to consider her services if you are looking for or if you are looking to boost your business with Google Ads and we will leave you a link below how you can contact Belinda.

Adri Varga 47:36

And remember, for next podcasts, please reach out to your topic requests and feel free to follow us on our social media platforms. Adri, you will need to share our socials, so I don't ham them up, as usual.

Mirroring Success Beyond Boundaries

Jodie Fielden 47:51

Yes, our handles are at FocusJDT in all platforms. And if you like to know what's the bottleneck holding your business back from the growth you desire, you can head to our website. We're going to put growth you desire. You can head to our website. We're going to put the link here and you can fill out the quiz and that's going to get you started. And thanks for tuning in and we will see you next time in our podcast Beyond the Mirror.

Jodie Fielden 48:24

Well, that was Beyond the Mirror. Thank you for being a part of this exhilarating adventure. Join Andrea and Jodie next week as they continue to help you unlock the true potential of your business so you can leave your limitations behind and embrace the endless possibilities that lie beyond the mirror. And if you have a burning question that you'd like to feature as a guest on this podcast, just leave us a message at the podcast page at focusgdtcom. So until next time, keep pushing boundaries, keep thriving and always remember that your success is right here, right now, beyond the mirror.