Keep Learning With The Collective Clicks Podcast

Ever wondered why you're getting the same lead multiple times and if it's costing you a fortune? Brandon Bateman and Colby Zimmerman dive into the world of duplicate leads in PPC advertising. They break down when it's a problem, when it's not, and how to deal with it. Learn about click IDs and, the differences between Google and Facebook ads. If you're running ads and scratching your head over duplicate leads, this no-nonsense chat will clear things up and might just save you some cash.

0:00 - Introduction and Welcome
0:31 - Introducing Colby Zimmerman
1:21 - Topic Introduction: Duplicate Leads
2:47 - Understanding Click IDs
4:17 - Case Study: Multiple Leads from One Person
6:11 - Dealing with Problematic Leads
7:46 - Click Cease Software Introduction
9:20 - The Importance of Monitoring Duplicate Clicks
11:05 - Facebook Retargeting and Duplicate Leads
13:08 - Cost Comparison: Google vs Facebook Advertising
15:23 - Understanding the Funnel Differences: Google vs Facebook
17:36 - The Value of Retargeting Despite Duplicate Leads
19:24 - Addressing Concerns with Account Managers
20:17 - Duplicate Leads Across Multiple Marketing Channels
22:30 - The Impact of Market Share on Duplicate Lea

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Brandon: "Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by Colby Zimmerman, a member of my team. We're going to talk all about duplicate leads because it turns out in some circumstances you pay a lot of money for them and in some circumstances you don't. Understanding the difference between those tells you if you have to be stressed out about your marketing and change the strategy or if you just keep a course. Alright, what is up Colby, how are you doing?"

Colby: "Good, Brandon, thanks for having me. Yes, hey, I'm doing great, thank you for being there. I think this is a podcast episode number one featuring you, hopefully one of many. I think you should probably introduce yourself for all the people who have no idea who you are."

Colby: "Sure, yeah, my name is Colby. I started at Bateman about a month ago, and I'm working with our account managers, our front-end marketers. I've been in the digital advertising space since 2010. It's been a good journey, and I've done a lot of things with a lot of different verticals, managed probably over a thousand clients at this point, and I just love the niche space. I love the bigger wins that we can get, the faster results that we can get from using portfolio strategy."

Brandon: "Yeah, and I'm excited for you to be here. You definitely left your debt on this company so far, just in the month you've been here. I know you'll do a lot in the future. So today, the topic that we have, we're going through some really common questions and frustrations that we hear from clients, even people running PPC campaigns otherwise. And one of them that came up—it's not the sexiest of topics, but if you understand this, then you understand like when is it a problem, when is it not—it's the topic of duplicate leads."

Brandon: "I can tell you how this feels, right, because we, I mean you've talked to many clients in this situation, like I could tell you I certainly have, where they're basically like, 'I'm paying who knows how much money per lead, I'm paying 200, 300, 400, $500 per lead, and this person just filled out my lead form five times, and I can't believe that I just paid $2500 for this one lead.' It's like the initial reaction that people have. Now, the reality is, depending on what exactly is going on in the scenario, there could be different things that are happening. So, I wanted to explore duplicate leads a little bit, and like how do you know when it is a problem, when it's not a problem, when it's costing you money, how do you prevent it, all of those different things."

Brandon: "Yeah, so I'll let you start. Let's just say I told you that I just got this person five times, did I pay for them, did I pay for five leads to get this, what would you say?"

Colby: "Probably not. Most of the time, when a duplicate lead happens, the click only happened once, and we can tell because we can go look at our leads, and we can look at the click ID, especially on the Google side, and almost every case, those all have the same click ID, which means you only paid for that click once. So, your cost per lead might be $500, but in reality, those five leads cost whatever that one click cost, it didn't even cost the $500. So, oftentimes, that's what's happening. Either the form has a glitch, and they hit the submit button multiple times, or they might fill out the form and then call, and then it's up on their computer, and the next day they fill out the form again. There are a bunch of reasons why somebody might fill out the form multiple times, but in the vast majority of cases, it's not due to multiple clicks, and you're not paying for multiple conversions."

Brandon: "Yeah, let's talk about how this works because you just said a few words that not everybody might understand, right? So you said click ID, what is a click ID?"

Colby: "Yeah, good question. So every time somebody clicks on Google or Facebook—on Google it's called Google Click ID, on Facebook it's called a Facebook Click ID, it's clever nomenclature—every time somebody clicks, that click is given an ID. If you use robust tracking, you're able to utilize that ID. We use it to track conversions and opportunities, right? And so we're looking at these click IDs all the time."

Brandon: "And so basically, it just means every single person that clicked gets a click ID. Even if somebody clicks twice, they might have two click IDs; they will have two click IDs, excuse me."

Colby: "Yeah, when somebody only has one click ID on five leads, you know they only clicked once. And this is like a unique ID. If you've ever seen one of these, picture like an extremely long string of characters and numbers and stuff. I mean, because can you imagine how many clicks happen on Google? They've got to have so many click IDs."

Brandon: "So, so that's what it looks like, and what happens is it gets appended into your URL. So now, instead of going to whatever we call ourselves, homebuyers.com, I go to whatever we call ourselves, homebuyers.com? Google click ID equals, and then the string, right? And then we bring that into our form, right? So, when you see your leads, you could see the click ID is associated with them, and it's a telltale sign. So, what is every lead like, you have three leads from one person, they all have the exact same click ID. What that tells you is, it's not actually a problem that you're doing those because you only paid for a click once, and that click might cost you $50. Now you got three leads from it."

Colby: "Or was it, yeah, oh yeah, or one. So, practically you got one right, but like, yeah, like when we count cost per gross lead, we exclude duplicates from that calculation because they're not super relevant, but everybody kind of, that's one of those things where some people go different ways, some people count them, some people don't. I can tell you, I had a client once where they started getting a whole bunch of leads from one person. So, they said, 'I need to get rid of this person.' So, so we look, and they're getting a bunch of these from one person. It turns out they're actually different click IDs."

Brandon: "So we took action on that, and we tried to exclude that person from their ads, we did it by excluding their IP address."

Colby: "Yep, that's what I would have recommended."

Brandon: "Then, so then what happened is they continued to get a whole bunch of leads from this person—"

Colby: "Person, yeah, like what the heck is happening, like, were they coming from a different platform?"

Brandon: "Well, turns out they were getting different click IDs for each click. Then after we blocked their IP address, now all the click IDs are the same, so this is somebody like trying to spam them, and now they're just like holding on to the landing page that they had from last time because now they can't find the ad anymore."

Colby: "And so then, like, that's a situation where the problem shifted. Like, at first, we're paying for too many clicks when this person was the problem, the second problem was now they're filling out our form a whole bunch when they're only doing it based on the click that happened weeks ago."

Brandon: "So that's not continually costing us money. This isn't like, and were you able to, or were you willing to, were you able to look in the back end and see what the invalid click rate was, and if they were credited for that?"

Colby: "Because that's usually the case. Usually, if it actually is multiple clicks, usually Google is pretty good about picking up on it and refunding or crediting that amount."

Brandon: "I did not, although I can tell you, in my industry or in my experience in this industry, we don't have a ton of invalid clicks, even when we have pretty bad spam issues or something like that. But part of that is that sometimes people doing fraud are pretty sophisticated, and they're getting better. They can trick Google, different IP addresses, different click IDs."

Colby: "But yeah, that kind of brings up another action step that we can take if you are getting multiple leads from one person but they all have different click IDs. That is a sign that you're paying for each one of those clicks, and there's absolutely things that you can do about that. You can exclude the IP address."

Brandon: "They could always change their IP address. I think this gets rid of it like 90% of the time if you've got, we've had a few weird circumstances. If anybody's targeting the Dallas Fort Worth market, and you just keep on getting the same lead over and over again from Fort Worth, Texas, like, there's just all of our clients that target that area have the same problem. You just gotta like exclude the city, it's the only way to get rid of that person."

Colby: "I don't know what's going on there. So there's, there's like weird stuff like that, but if you like discount that weird,

if you take out that weird stuff, it's largely that you can get rid of it with IP exclusions, which is basically just blocking those people from even seeing your ads in the first place."

Brandon: "When it comes to like getting duplicate leads, a lot of people want to take it to the form, they're like, I just want to exclude their IP address from the form, or I want to block this person from filling out my form. It turns out that's not actually the problem that you're worried about. The problem you're worried about is that they click on your ad. Filling out your form doesn't cost you anything, it's the clicking on the ad that's the problem, right? So even if you can fix it by trying to not let them through your form, the real issue that you want to solve is you just don't want to spend all the money on those clicks to begin with."

Colby: "And that's where you can spend a significant amount of your budget on one person if you're not careful."

Brandon: "Totally. Yeah, so we were talking just before the episode about softwares that do that. It turns out there are some softwares that help. Do you want to share your experience with those?"

Colby: "Yeah, from what I've experienced and read, there's, there's really, they're all very similar, but the one that tends to be the most popular and have the best success is called Click Cease, and that's something that I was pretty happy to learn that from the onset, Bateman already, we already used that with all of our clients."

Brandon: "So yeah, what, how that works is, it's constantly monitoring for duplicate clicks because if somebody clicks twice, there's a reasonable possibility that was just somebody clicking twice. If somebody clicks three times, now you're starting, now you're starting to think, okay, there might be a problem here. The nice thing about Click Cease is, you don't have to monitor that. The software monitors it for you, and as soon as the right indicators go off, that IP address gets excluded automatically."

Colby: "Yeah, and there's something really powerful in what you just said that I don't want to skip past. You said Click Cease monitors duplicate clicks. What we're talking about here is duplicate leads, and this is one of those examples of where ignorance is bliss. Like, our clients get upset when they get like multiple leads from the same person, meanwhile that same thing's happening with the clicks dozens or hundreds of times, and they don't even know it because they don't get the lead form, right? One person comes on to your website 10 times and never fills out a lead form, it doesn't notify you about that. The moment in the lead form, you think there's a problem, but I can tell you, the problem with duplicate clicks is a 100 times the problem with duplicate leads. It's massive."

Brandon: "So that's the cool thing about Click Cease. Even if they don't fill out the form two, three, four, five times, you still are able to exclude them based on the IP address, based on saying this person, I think our criteria is, if they click twice within a really short period of time or three times within a week, we end up excluding them, which makes sense. There, you can submit it to whatever criteria you want. We also aggregate that data across some of our clients, so like if there's a really problematic person in one account, we'll exclude them from all accounts tagged in an area, which kind of makes it so you never even have to discover that on your own. It's just one of those advantages that you can have. Humble brag, Bateman can exclude fraudulent clickers from other clients before you even start with us, and you'll never know that it actually happened or that there was actually value with it. It's one of those crazy things, but yeah, that's what's really cool about Click Cease."

Colby: "And honestly, if I like, let's just say you're running your own PPC, should you buy Click Cease? My advice would be, it's probably not a big enough problem to do it. In our case, because we're doing it across multiple clients and it works, I think it cost us like a dollar per client for this software, like when you really work it out, it makes sense."

Brandon: "Yeah, if you're not, if you don't have a really big budget and a lot of clicks, it probably, you're right, it probably doesn't make sense to buy for yourself until you have a specific problem, like you're noticing that you have a pretty big duplicate click problem, but you can save some budget on those things. There is one last circumstance, and this is actually the most common circumstance where we see duplicate leads, and it's specifically from Facebook ads, and not just Facebook ads, but specifically retargeting on Facebook ads. In this industry, that's where we just get tons of duplicate leads, lead form submissions. What's your, like, help the audience understand, like, what's happening there, why is that more common on Facebook than other places, and what do we do about it?"

Colby: "Yeah, so I mean, think about the differences between Google and Facebook, right? On Google, if you're going to click multiple times, you have to go in and search multiple times. On Facebook, because as soon as somebody visits your website, we're going to retarget them wherever we can, because you've already paid the bulk of that click, so now we just want to show, if we know that they're interested. So on Facebook, now they don't, just to add some context to what you're talking about here, just some numbers, because I think it makes it real, like, you could pay $50 for a click on Google, not an unusual amount to pay, no, to get the person, and then now it's, reach them each time on Facebook, you're maybe paying somewhere between one and 4 cents each time."

Brandon: "That's, yeah, that's the massive discrepancy here, so you just paid $50 per a click, they didn't convert on your website, and now you can follow up with them for like, pennies on the dollar, and now we can show up in front of them 200 times for four bucks, and that's the strategy. So we don't exclude, we, once we're retargeting in Facebook, we don't decrease the frequency, we're not trying to limit the amount of time somebody can see the ad, we want to be top of mind, so like, let's say they're not ready to sell today, maybe they are in 30 days, they've seen your ad over and over again for 30 days, guess who they're going to look for, they're going to look for you."

Colby: "Maybe they'll click on your ad when they're ready, and yeah, they might click on it multiple times without realizing they've done so, and they might submit duplicate leads without realizing they've already reached out to you. And it's a little annoying, like, you looking at your leads and going, 'Oh, I've got five leads from work today, and three of them are duplicates.' Like, that's certainly annoying, and it's a reasonable price to pay to, you know, as often as it happens, make 20 grand. You know, that $4, I'm, I would totally be okay with $4 dollars and looking at a few bad leads to occasionally make 20 grand."

Brandon: "Yeah, here's the, I went, had the conversation like this with a client where they were just like, 'You know what, I'm sick of paying for the duplicate leads on Facebook retargeting, let's stop retargeting.' So I said, 'Well, do you think it's worth it to be in front of them outside of that? Do you think it's worth it to continue to follow up with them, to have your brand in front of them, etc?' They're like, 'Yeah, that's worth paying whatever it costs.' So then we added it together. I was just like, 'Okay, that's how many duplicate leads have you had from Facebook?' We got the number, I can't remember, it was one of our bigger clients, it was a lot of, it was a lot of them. So we added up how much it costs for them to reach the people that generated those duplicate leads, and we're talking like not even tens of dollars, we're talking like single-digit number of dollars that they had spent ever producing duplicate leads on Facebook."

Brandon: "And it might be helpful, it might be helpful to take a step back and explain the differences in how marketing works on Google and on Facebook. On Google, you pay a cost per click, and that click is based on part, like, like a floor click amount that Google has decided, and then an auction on top of that. So a live auction on the click. So you are, you are paying $50 for that click, if nobody clicks, you pay nothing. On the Facebook side, it's the opposite, you pay for the eyeballs, which is why on Google, you're only competing with other Real Estate Investors, on Facebook, you're competing with literally every company that wants to target your same demographic. The difference is, you're all, you're paying per view, and the cost per thousand views is somewhere around $20, 20, 20 to $30 typically, depending on your location. So that's why the duplicate leads on Facebook cost significantly less, because even if we've shown that ad a thousand times

, it's still only going to be $5."

Colby: "Yeah, person a thousand times, yeah. If you think of like, what is the game on Facebook, it's like a TV commercial or a billboard, you're like showing it so many times, which sounds a little bit less impactful, but like if you look at the funnel on Google, it looks like this, like it's very vertical, meaning like the number of people who see the ad versus click, or the amount of dollar per person that sees the ad is massive, we're talking CPMS in the small zones. If you look on Facebook, it's like this, like it's a very horizontal funnel, and what that means is tons of people see your ad, and of those, a small percentage click, and of those small percentage that click, a small percentage end up filling out the form. So, so it just like qualifies a lot more, you get a lot more brand awareness per lead, or um, a lot more activity in the upper funnel. So the reason that's relevant in the scenario is because usually that's because the targeting is just not quite as good as Google search because the people are like searching, um, however, if you apply it to retargeting, now you're paying that price for that like really top of funnel awareness building advertising."

Brandon: "Yeah, you're applying it to a really niche list, and what happens in that circumstance is the theoretical return on investment there is massive."

Colby: "Now it's, like, what if I got you a 100x return on investment on a dollar a day in marketing, how excited would you be, how many more dollars can I give you?"

Brandon: "Exactly, and that's the problem, it doesn't scale. To scale your retargeting, you have to scale everything else that to website traffic, because the size of all this is always going to be your biggest limiter, but it's so worth doing. Like, would it be worth it if you didn't have a relationship with an agency already? Probably not, because you're going to have to go pay someone, probably at the bare minimum, a thousand bucks a month to manage this for you, and they might be spending like a few dollars a day, they're going to have to work miracles with those dollars to make it worth you paying them to do that."

Colby: "But let's just say you already have a relationship with a company like us, and you're already doing like top of funnel on Facebook, you're already doing Google ads, and now you're just adding on this multiplier that continues to follow up with those people and increase your brand awareness and work them down the funnel for a very small amount of money, it's totally worth it, and duplicate leads are one of those issues that you're going to deal with, and it's, yeah, to totally a cost of doing business and a little nuisance at worst."

Brandon: "I understand that can be frustrating, like you have to figure it out if you have like round ring with your Acquisitions guys or something, and like getting the same lead they already had or whatever the case is, but it's, yeah, it's a, it's a I'd say a small price to pay for what you get."

Colby: "Agreed, yeah, if it were me, I would be willing, I would be willing to sip through 10 of those a day at the cost if it meant once a year I got a $20,000 spread, or a 10, or even a $10,000 spread."

Brandon: "Yeah, it's, it's worth it, it's at least like, if you're, if it's not worth it for you to make a decision like that, you have to wonder if maybe you're understaffed, because it should be worth it. Like a business should function in such a way that's, sub it's worth doing. So any thoughts on the topic of duplicate leads, what causes them, when it's a problem, when it's not, if you're working with us and you have questions, just bring it up with your account manager. Every single person on the team knows the information that we just talked about, some of them even know more than me. It's, we have an awesome team, and so when you have questions, just ask. Like there's no reason we can't have this discussion and look into the leads, make sure that they're not costing you a lot of money."

Colby: "And at the end of the day, in most cases, it it's not costing much, and we don't make a change, but we do occasionally uncover scenarios where we need to make changes, and we move forward that way. So, so by that logic, don't hesitate to bring it up, don't hesitate to bring up any concerns."

Brandon: "Yeah, I did just think of one other scenario that happens a lot. This is common with companies that are spending a lot of money across a lot of marketing channels, duplicate leads across their channels. So they might get a lead from us and get that same lead from a paper lead company, for example. And I actually think this is an interesting scenario to unpack, and I, I think different people would do this, view this different ways. Because on one hand, you're absolutely paying for that lead twice. You paid us for that lead, you paid the paper lead company for that lead. Um, on the other hand, it's, it's worth thinking about, how did you get what happened, because you got that lead because if you think about it, there's on, on Google this works different than like direct mail, for example."

Brandon: "So let's just say we're talking Direct Mail, and you live in the middle of nowhere, you're somewhere completely undesirable where nobody wants to buy your house, you might have zero postcards in your mailbox from people that want to buy your house. If you are on every list, and you're in the heart of a really competitive market, you might have 50 postcards in your mailbox from people that want to um, reach out to you. Now, Google's really interesting because you can search from the middle of nowhere, and guess how many ads are going to see on the top, four. You can go then into the heart of the most competitive market and search on Google, and guess how many ads you're going to see on the top, four. So it turns out on Google ads, there's, to the person, the amount of competition they perceive, there

's the same amount. Because if there's any more than if there's any more than four people bidding on Google, then it's just four that show up, there could be four or 500 bidders behind, there's just going to be four that show up to the end person."

Brandon: "Because it's just the four highest bids, right? So then if I'm a consumer, I have like a fixed amount of inventory I'm going to find on Google from an ad standpoint. Of course, there could be more organic results, but then we're talking two billion versus 1 billion pages that they could find, that irrelevant, right? It's like it's irrelevant because there's always going to be tons and tons of organic results. So, so you think about it from that standpoint, I might reach out to let's just say two companies to get a quote. Now if one of those companies ends up selling to you, and then you are the other company, you just paid for a lead twice. But what you really did is you just bought it out from under your competitor, so now when you go talk to that seller, you're the only person talking to them."

Colby: "Versus if you weren't the only like if you hadn't bought that lead from the paper lead company, for example, as well, or maybe from us as well, when you would have gotten it from the paper lead company, now you still have the same lead, but there's two people on it instead of one. It's an interesting concept, I just, I've never, there's no way that I know to really like test the true impact of that, like how much it affects your closing rates, but I would have imagined when you do that, you just increase your likelihood of closing, and you probably increase the spread because the price, you just don't get beat up quite as much when there's not as much competition there."

Brandon: "Yeah, so you definitely don't get into bidding wars in that scenario, yeah, less, less bidding wars is exactly what I'm talking about, but I don't know if you have any thoughts on that because like it's hard to say like to what extent is it worth it, but what you'll notice is the more channels you do that are similar to each other, like you'll get more duplicate leads from SEO and PPC than you would from others because like you'll show up in the PPC results and then also an organic results, if you're working with a paper lead company that's doing a lot of PPC, then you'll sometimes get duplicate leads with your own PPC and stuff like that."

Colby: "And I'm not talking a ton, if you're like a massive player, what you'll find is you probably end up having a lot of relations duplicated, like like we as a company, because of our market, like our market share and real estate investment, most of our leads come in multiple ways, it's a really common thing, it's just, it's what happens when you become a larger company in space, but it's something interesting to think about like is it worth it or is it not."

Brandon: "Yeah, and I would say that we don't have that conversation a whole bunch because those companies that are using all the marketing channels available to them or several, they're usually aware of it, it's happened even before PPC, and the question might still come up, can we eliminate this, and the answer is probably not, and I would argue that you don't want to just like you just mentioned."

Colby: "Yeah, because you could try to mess with it, like if you happen to know their IP addresses or something, you could exclude IP addresses from all your leads, or in Facebook top of funnel, you could probably do an exclusion list of all the leads in your database. But a lot of people would do the exact opposite, they would try specifically to target those people because there's a lot of value in it. I would argue there, there absolutely is a lot of value. So anyways, thank you for the conversation today, Colby, I appreciate your time."

Brandon: "For anybody listening, I will see you next week."

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Max Horenstein: Airbnb hustler to land flipping guru. He breaks down why he ditched the hospitality game for dirt deals and how he's crushing it with minimal effort. But this isn't just about real estate. Max dives into the mindset stuff that separates the winners from the wannabes. He talks about the pitfalls of chasing success too hard and why being grateful for what you've got now is key to leveling up.Whether you're into real estate or just want to build a killer business, Max drops some truth bombs you can't ignore. He keeps it real about hiring, scaling, and why sometimes slowing down is the fastest way to get ahead.

Brandon: "Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by Max Hornstein. Max owns and operates a land investing business. He also helps other people get into the land investing world. I asked him tons of questions about his journey from Airbnb arbitrage to land investing, why he chose that business, what his plans are, and we talk about all kinds of different things from the standpoint of how to keep a business simple and personal development and how that helps you grow your business. So, I'm excited to share this with you. Max, how are you doing today?"

Max: "Good, how are you?"

Brandon: "Fantastic! I'm excited to get to know you and learn about what you're doing. So for anybody listening who doesn’t know anything about you, give us the crash course. Who are you, where do you come from, what do you do?"

Max: "Yeah, crash course. So, essentially, I was selling roofs door-to-door, hated it, wanted to do my own thing, got into real estate through Airbnb, built that up, and eventually transitioned over into land flipping. Saw that right now is a really unique opportunity with not a lot of competition, and that's what I've been focusing on."

Brandon: "That's awesome. I'm curious, why—well, first, are you still doing Airbnb?"

Max: "No, I transitioned totally out."

Brandon: "Yeah, I had a multi-six-figure portfolio, so I was doing arbitrage, and this is what I always tell people: It's not that it doesn't work. I think it's a really good opportunity, but as I'm sure you understand in real estate, I think opportunities come and they go, and there's always a point in time where, like, when you get in, there's the least amount of competition, and like when I got in, around COVID, that area, it was perfect. And now there's just a mass amount of competition. So, my thought process was like, okay, I'm good at sales and marketing, so what if I just take what I'm good at, where I have like a level 9-10 skill set, and apply it to an opportunity vehicle that can match that, right where there's just less competition."

Brandon: "Yeah, that makes sense. So I'm guessing, so in some ways, you could say what you did in Airbnb and in land are more similar to each other than they are different, in the sense that at the time it was less—yeah, less competitive."

Max: "100%, and that's something that took me time to realize. That again, it's not that things don't work, it's that there's a point in time in every opportunity where it's like, hey, this is actually a good time to get in. And then, like not to crap on wholesalers, but like when you're wholesaling now, it's like in the 80s, it's like obviously, it's a lot harder now. And so, to win in those environments, you have to have great leadership abilities, you need to be able to do market spend, a lot of money, etc. But if you can get in earlier, you can establish yourself and build a moat, and protect yourself when more competition eventually comes in."

Brandon: "Yeah, I'm totally with you. I was talking to a friend of mine the other day, that's a well-seasoned wholesaler, he's probably been doing it for eight years, nine years, something like that. He was giving some advice to some people, like newer getting into the wholesaling space, and they were asking, 'Well, how much money did you have when you started your wholesaling business? How much did you have to put out?' And he said the answer, and everybody was like mind-blown, like how did you get it started with that little money? But then the reality of the situation that everybody knew was like, if that same person with that same amount of money today were trying to start that company, they probably wouldn't succeed."

Max: "Yeah, because then you could. His first year, he did a million dollars in revenue from $50,000 advertising spend."

Brandon: "Yeah, that's crazy. Don't do that these days. Like, not under normal conditions, right? That's like the absolute best of the best. So, it's so different. So, is it still a viable business model? I'd say it absolutely is, but not like you can just—it's a lot of the people who have the really successful businesses in that space today, they built it when they built it, and then now they can sustain."

Max: "Which, yeah, I think. Keep in mind again, it's like it—like everything works. It's not like, 'Oh, like this doesn't work anymore.' It's like, no, it works. It's just, it works differently now. Like to compare with Airbnb, like when I got in, you could just throw up a listing and have terrible photos and like no interior decorating, and like it would crush. But now, because a lot of competition, right? Guests care about those type of things like, 'Oh, I want the best blah blah blah blah blah,' and it's like you have to adapt with the times. So again, it just depends. Like when you're in an opportunity vehicle, if you're seeking a new one, you should think like, okay, like, with what's out there right now, like, where am I going to have an unfair advantage, right? Like if wholesalers took their skills—like listen, wholesale deals are way harder than land deals. If all wholesalers started doing land, even though I'm going to give myself more competition, dude, they would just make so much more money. They're just like, it's just—it's so much easier to get those deals. There's like no emotion attached to it. It's completely, completely different."

Brandon: "Sure, that makes sense. Sorry to go down this rabbit hole a little bit, but here's what I'm thinking. I want you to tell me why I'm wrong, and I don't know a lot about the industry that you came from. I don't know a lot about the arbitrage, although I have—how this might be true. What I'm thinking is, yes, that's what you choose to go after, but there's some advantage to having a business that's built up in a certain place, right? So, let's just say I started a wholesaling company 10 years ago, and then now it's a lot more competitive. I've got a working operation, it's making me money right now, it's good, like no reason to like abandon that and go somewhere else because I'm in a—because I'm in a good spot, right? Yes. Did something—two questions—did something happen in the Airbnb arbitrage space that was beyond that where it just got like insanely difficult? And the follow-up question to that is, like, what do you plan on doing with land investing, let's just say it does get really competitive? Is your goal a business that's—that's like, while it's easy, build the business and get all the found—down, and then as it gets harder, then you're just getting better, but you're on the top? Or is—is the plan to then find another niche that's less—like, what's—what's your—that's a really good question."

Max: "So first of all, I would acknowledge, you said—I think you're 100% correct. Like, obviously, if you have something that's working amazingly well, like it would be very dumb to just jump, but that's—like, a whole bag of worms, right? It's like, well, maybe you get to a certain level, and to expand, you realize, like, maybe it'd be simpler to bolt on this sex business. For me, what it was with Airbnb, it's not that it's like—it became impossible. It was just that the changes that I needed to make and at the level that I was at to—I think really become a great operator of the new conditions, there was things that I just—pally, like, didn't want to do in the business. The thing about Airbnb arbitrage, like what most people don't understand, is that, like, 'Oh, it's real estate.' It's like, it's actually really hospitality. That's what it really is. Like, you're in the hospitality game, and then it's like, combined with real estate. And to be frank, like, I hate hospitality. Like, I totally hate—I did that when I was younger. I like sales, marketing, I like making money, and so I did it as an opportunity to make money. And then when I realize, like, 'All right, like, this is getting competitive in a way where I'm going to need to become amazing at interior design, I'm going to have to like truly love hospitality to be a great operator,' I'm like, 'That's not what I enjoy. That's not what my skill set is.' It's time for me to pivot, right? And like, again, like this is a very personal decision for people because there's some people who like—and I've talked to them—like, 'Man, I love hospitality. I love interior design.' Like, well, I totally don't. So if you love that, you go do that. But you have to understand, like, who you are and what you enjoy, where your skill sets line. Okay, so that's what made me pivot. In

terms of land, what I see, candidly, I'll probably run this for 3 to 5 years as long as I can, and then probably shift more towards, like, investing. So, instead of doing my own flips, investing other people's, and then maybe doing larger value-add projects based on what I know about myself. I've had multiple businesses. It's something that I enjoy being able to do that. And so my goal is to build it in a way where if I do see another opportunity, that I can strike, right? But I see land investing as something that's a great cash flow vehicle. And so the way that I think about a lot of these opportunities, and obviously there's a variation to this, the way I see Airbnb, land, wholesaling, stuff like that, I call them level one opportunities, right? They're good cash flow vehicles where you can make a lot of money, and then you get to a point where you have the choice as an operator to decide, 'Do I want to make this the only thing that I do and just, you know, grow it to the moon?' Or do I want to take the money that I'm using and go after more difficult business opportunities that take more cash? Right. For me, personally, I will probably go do more difficult stuff because I like having novelty, and that's something I know about myself."

Brandon: "Yeah, that's fair. That—that's really fascinating. So, what is it about your personality that makes a land flipping business perfect?"

Max: "I mean, like I said, it—dude, it's really easy. Like, the closing deals is like—it's really, really easy. I've done much more complicated sales, high-ticket sales. Getting someone to sell a piece of real estate that they haven't used in decades, that they don't have any emotional attachment to—it's not that hard, right? Like, there's no big, like, mumbo jumbo negotiation of, like, convincing them. This is what I was saying, like, if you have the skill to close someone on a house wholesaling deal, which is going to be much more difficult, you—you just crush in land, you know what I mean? So for me, having the sales background that I do, and then realizing, like, like, this is just an easier sale. And like, this is the truth—it's an easier sale because you're making a better offer, right? Alex talks about, like, the offer is king, right? Well, think about the offer. If I go to someone, I'll give you an example of a deal—it was a buy for—he sold for 120. When that seller bought it, he bought it decades ago, so he probably spent like 20 grand on it. Well, if I offer him 50, and he nets 30, that's an amazing offer for him, and there's still enough room for me to make money on the deal, right? So like, I'm creating win-win scenarios, and I can do that just because the majority of people that own land, they're older, right? And they bought it so long ago. And so like, I think this is a thing that people, like, don't talk about. It's like, yeah, you can be really good at sales, but like, if you have something that you're selling, that's just easier to sell, or marketing is amazing, like, the whole thing is going to be smoother, right? If you have an amazing offer, it's easier to sell. I think land is an amazing offer."

Brandon: "Yeah, that's super fair. That makes sense. Well, let's talk about some—let's put some numbers to these things, Max. I'd love to learn, like, more of how your business operates, like, straight from the top to the bottom of the funnel. So, starting top funnel—marketing, what do you do?"

Max: "Direct mail. Straight direct mail. So I've done cold texting. This is my opinion on it. I think it works if you have a big team and you have people to sort through everything, but for me, my idea is like, let me be as efficient as I can, and I want the highest quality leads possible. So I do direct mail. I do blind offers."

Brandon: "Okay, okay. Obviously, what that's going to do, it's going to help me qualify on the front end, right?"

Max: "Alright. And then from there, I'm running a two-call close sequence, okay? So they come in, we have PatLive, which is a call center, I'm sure viewers know about that. If it's a qualified lead, it moves to me. I take the acquisition calls. I do a discovery call, then I do an offer call. What I found—I found this across industries—I don't do a one-call close because I find that splitting it up builds more trust and it builds anticipation. And like, what I'm trying to do with these people is like, I want to get them involved and invested, right? I want to be the driver's seat. And so if I split it up into two calls, what I find is, like, there's something that goes on—oh, like, 'Am I going to get this? Are they going to decide maybe they don't want to do this?' Like, it's just kind of part of the sales process. So that's what I do. I acquire the deal. I use CV funding to purchase it, and then my exit strategy, I'm like 50/50, double close versus actual flips. And then I don't do my own dispo in-house. I always use Realtors. My thought process behind that is like, why would I go build a giant dispo team when I can find someone who's a local land expert to sell it for me, and then I could focus my time on getting more deals?"

Brandon: "Based on what you're saying, it sounds like obviously with various supporting elements, it sounds like you're mostly doing this yourself, yeah?"

Max: "Yeah, yeah. I have a VA."

Brandon: "Yeah, okay. VA to scrub the data, right, to that. But I handle the acquisition, right? So like, the VA does like everything else besides like the acquisitions. And I think that's one of the biggest benefits to this, is like—I might go on a little bit of a rant, but a lot of people when they hire VAs, one of the first things they try and outsource is acquisitions. I think that is literally the worst possible idea, especially when you outsource someone overseas. It's like, dude, like, you can make 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 grand on a deal. Why would you put that in the hands of someone and pay them two grand a month when their living expenses are like 500 and expect them to be a killer? Like, why not either hire a US-based person or why not do it yourself? It's one of the most valuable, if not the most valuable position the business. I would say that should be the last thing you outsource. Even if you suck at sales, like, either learn to get good at sales, or you need to have big money to be able to hire someone to do it. So, I'm good at sales. I'm like, 'Why would I not take the calls?' Like, that would be stupid, you know what I mean?"

Brandon: "No, that—that makes sense. I like, I don't know if you've read Dan Martell's book 'Buy Back Your Time.' Basically splits things into different quadrants. Ying—some of the details—basically talks about how like you have your income-producing activities, yep, and you create this matrix, right? Does it—does it make me money, or does it not? And do I like it, or do I not? Does it give me energy, or does it not? Right? So, so what you're talking about is this is like a—it makes me money activity. Then maybe it gives you energy, maybe it doesn't. But like, if it's in that category, that's not the first thing you hire out. Yeah, hire out like the list—creating, or maybe even like lead follow-up or something like that, right? Like, reactivating old leads in the CRM, or like, you outsource like the initial touch with the lead to Pat Live, for example. And then at some point, yes, you get rid of that—like, high, high earning capability role that you're in, that—that's very important, even if you love it, because that was necessary to grow your business to a certain point, if that's what you want to do. But there's—there's where you just love this, and and you just go at it on—"

Max: "I—I—I be the first to say that building a team is not for everybody. It's a—it's a lot. It's a lot. It—it gets worse before it gets better, that's for sure."

Brandon: "100%. Yeah, someone—someone wise once told me, if you—if you want to—to be really happy with your business, either keep it very, very small or make it very, very big, and everything in between kind of sucks. And that's definitely been my experience."

Max: "Yeah. I just want to—T—I think it's important, I think a lot of people, they—they outsource things that are really important that they don't like doing too—like, I—I was guilty of that. Like, I—I'm very good at sales, but like

, when you're doing it day in, day out, like, you get burnt out, and I've had other companies that have ran, like, in the info space, that are like, very just heavy sales and marketing, and I outsourced too quickly, got like too many closers on when I should have been the one on the calls, right? And that really hurt. And so when I built the land business, I was like, 'Hey, listen. I'm going to stay on the calls for as long as humanly possible because that's what the business requires of me.' And that's where my core skill set lies. And like, the other thing I think people don't realize too is, it's like, if you suck at sales and you go hire an acquisition person, how are you going to train them and manage them? Like, how can you set proper KPIs if you haven't done it, you know what I mean? It's the hardest—like chicken or egg scenario, because like, you're right, unless you can hire the—the self-sufficient salesperson, which turns out is more like a sales director, and turns out that person doesn't want to work for you because they want to do something for them somewhere else, right? So, you're in this weird position where, like, I need a level of talent that exceeds what I can attract, unless—and fill the gap myself until I can grow to the point where I can attract that talent."

Brandon: "And yeah, yeah, it's a—it's a—I don't know how anybody does it, to be honest. But it's a hard—it's a hard place to be as a business, like making—like first hires for skills that you don't have."

Max: "100%. Yeah, but like, I think that's like—again, I—this is where people get caught up where it's—like, most people at the size, like, they're not that big where like, they even should be bringing in someone like that because they have to give too much away to that person. Like, they might want some ridiculous 20% or comp, or something crazy, where it's like, like, dude, just—just learn the core skill set enough at least where, if you bring in a rep, they can perform at 70, 80% of what you do, and you just backtrack the stats, right? Like, you should know, okay, if I close this many leads, how many deals am I going to get, etc. If I bring in someone to perform 70% of what I do, then the business will run smoothly. And then you just have to accept that, like, hey, this is where they need to go, right? And then you need to be aggressive. Like, when you hire salespeople, my plan is like, you always hire two, and then usually, just fire one. Like, and it takes time, and like, you need to have a very built-out filtration process of hiring. Like, it's not easy to hire salespeople. There's a ton of turnover. But like, again, this goes back to, like, I think you have to get good in sales because salespeople need a leader, right? They need to have something they can look up to and respect. And if, like, you're like, like, you like, suck at sales and try to build a sales team, like, it's going to go to—I don't know if I can curse on this, but it's not going to go well. So, I think it's important that everyone learns that fundamental skill set, and then eventually builds a team on top of that."

Brandon: "Yeah, I have—right now, I have the same person managing—that manages my marketing managing my sales team."

Max: "Really?"

Brandon: "And never done sales before, and believe it or not, under him, the team performs very, very well. He has another first sales, and you know what? I think the trick is, like, if you're a really good leader, you work like these salespeople respect him because he's an excellent leader, but he's not anybody with any sales experience. He couldn't close the sales, but he—but he's a really good sales manager. So, it's—it's interesting. But I think most people in that scenario, they don't have the leadership experience either."

Max: "Okay, that's—yeah, you—that—that is huge. That's, like, so important to understand that, like, being good at sales is different than being a great sales leader. And like, that's something I had to learn as well, the hard way. Like, I'm a chiller. Like, I can close a ton of stuff, but sales—they're two fundamentally different skill sets. Think about it. An amazing salesperson is often selfish in their interests, right? Not like they're a bad person, but like, it is a selfish type of thing. 'I'm going to close my deals as possible,' etc. Right? A sales leader is the exact opposite. They're selfless. It's not about them; it's about their reps, right? It's a completely different skill set. And so, it's often been said that, like, the best sales manager—it's actually probably not the top person on your team—be like the second or the third, right? So, that makes sense, like, if you have someone in your company who knows how to lead and manage, that they could do that, right? But they have to learn that skill, and I would say like, that's probably the hardest skill of all, to learn is how to lead and manage people."

Brandon: "Yeah, I—I completely agree with you, but it—it sounds like the way it comes out is, 'I can't teach my salespeople. I can't train them up,' or whatever, but like, if the end of the day, if you hire the right people and you lead them right, like, you'd be surprised what they—what a lot of people are capable of, a lot more than we—than we might think. So, yeah, that—that's fascinating. Jumping back to like what we were talking about just before though. So, so this is like—your preference is for you to be doing a lot of those more income-producing activities in the business, and it sounds like you're outsourcing some of the—some of the, for lack of a better term, 'dirty work' that you just don't want to do. What are you able to produce under that situation? Like, how far have you pushed that, and—and also follow-up question, what percentage of what you could produce do you feel like you are producing? Like, is that like, 'I'm producing because I'm maxed out, and my calendar is full all day, every day of sales calls,' or is that like, 'I'm still easing this, and I think I can make it farther before I hire a sales person?' That's great."

Max: "Yeah, we're doing about 30-50k a month, and I think I could take it way further. I work like five, 10 hours a week. Like, it's not that much time. Now, the reason I can do this is, number one, I've outsourced the most time-consuming, lowest revenue-producing tasks, right? Like data scrubbing, stuff like that, or like running due diligence on properties, things that, like, I don't need to do. So, that helps a ton. Okay, but I think the real secret of this is the way that I market because the way that you market affects the way you sell, right? Because I'm doing blind offers, and I'm getting the highest quality leads, and I would imagine that's similar when you do PPC, where you're getting inbound traffic, right? Like, I—I don't need to spend hours marketing or, like, cold calling or stuff like that because the conversations I'm having are people that are qualifying, right? That cuts down on the time a ton. I would say I could probably double if I wanted, on my own, right? It's not like I'm, like, drowning in stuff, but right now, like, I'm good with where I'm at. I'm holding it, and yeah, we'll just take it from there."

Brandon: "Okay, yeah, and that's—that's fantastic. It's impressive. It's a nice—it's a nice, nice business. Okay, very cool. So, but you're—but you're happy with that. You don't—you don't have a desire to—to triple down on your—your marketing and push that volume to the max."

Max: "Well, and part of this is probably also that you're building the—the other business too, correct?"

Brandon: "Yeah, 100%."

Max: "So, so there's kind of like—like, I imagine when you say you're working—I forgot what you said, 10 or 15 hours a week or something like that—that's on that business, and then you have the other business."

Brandon: "Yeah, yeah. So, I'm helping people do this. I'm not here to—like, pitch, so I'm not going to go like super deep into that, but the info side of this, right, like helping people do that, that takes a significant amount of time. And to me, that's more of, like, a passion. Like, I really like helping people. And so I'm able to do that. And so the way that I see it is like, well, I have a skill that I can make 30-50k a month

on top of, and I could scale that to the moon, obviously, or I could show other people how to do that, right? And to me, that's more fulfilling. And like, long term, for where I want to be in a few decades, that's more alignment. So, that's what takes up the majority of my time, is actually helping people do that, right? And then my own business can become a testing ground, where I can try new things and then help others with theirs."

Brandon: "So, where do you want to be in 20 years? Deep—that's a—that's a great question to—to think about deeply."

Max: "Ey, this is like totally, like, probably like, that come from left field. Very, very, very long term, I'd like to be in personal development. Like, that's what I really, really enjoy, right? Think like Tony Robbins stuff like that. With that being said though, obviously, like as a niche, personal development is like, you're being like a mindset coach, life coach, like, that—that does not work."

Brandon: "And yeah, it does not work unless you have a ton of traffic, right? Like, you look at Rob Dial, people like that. Part of the reason, like, they're able to do that is because they have such a big audience. So, like, very, very long term, my idea is this is like, if I can help people right now with tangible skill sets of, like, making money, right? Like, I know how to flip land. I can help you do the same thing, right? I think, in 10, 20 years, I can build like a large enough audience that I can start talking more about the stuff that, like, I'm truly, like, deeply passionate about, which is more mindset, personal development. But for that to work as a business, like, you have to have an insane amount of traffic. I imagine I would need like millions of followers. So, that's super long term, and I've got a long way to go. But that—that's the dream, that's the vision."

Brandon: "Alright, then I'm gonna pull an audible on you, Max. We're done—we're done talking about land investing, alright? You're going to talk about what you love to talk about right now. Yeah, I think that'll benefit people, if you—yeah, if you had one—one thing to share, that—that you think could have the most power from a personal development standpoint, with the—the people listening to this, what would it be?"

Max: "Yeah, dude, that's really tough. There's—there's a lot of things. I'm gonna have to pick something on my brain. I—yeah, that—that—that's like so hard. I—I think, one of the—so, not to get like super woo, but this is something I had a mentor tell me, and like, this was super helpful. So, there was a point in my career where I'm making a ton of money, I had a lot of nice things, I'm living like a million-dollar penthouse in Miami, like—like, crazy, like, cool stuff, making a lot—a lot of money. And I remember talking to my mentor, and he was like, 'If you can't be grateful for what you have now, like, you'll never be grateful for the things that you want when you get them.' And I know, like, gratitude is thrown around. I'm not going to, like, be like spiritual on this, but what I recognized—an issue that I had in previous businesses—is that I was in such a rush to get to a certain destination, right? Like, a lack of gratitude. It's like, wow, like, I'm—I'm this young, I'm making a ton of money, I have a very nice life, I have a team, etc., that it caused me to ignore—I would call them like check engine lights. And so, imagine if you're driving a car, check engine lights are on, you're like, 'I just got to get to—I got to get to where I'm going.' You just slam on the gas, like, you crash the car, you know what I mean? If I could have been more grateful in those times, like, wow, this is really amazing, and still had the drive to go where I want to go, I could have slowed down and learned the lessons that I need to learn and take to the mechanic shop, fix the car, and it would have gone more smoothly. Now, with that being said, I think everything happens for a reason, and even though I had those challenges, they led me to where I am now, and so I'm grateful for that. But I think if people can be more grateful for where they're currently at and still be hungry to get to where they want to go, I think they'll end up being more successful as entrepreneurs, especially like me and you, people listening who are like very driven, we're very aggressive, right? Like, we want to hit big numbers. It's very easy to get caught up in, like, not celebrating wins, not being grateful, and just pushing forward. But the problem is, like, when you do that, and you don't take the time to be grateful, what ends up happening is usually, people rush, right? And if you rush, you make poor decisions. Okay, if you make poor decisions, you get poor outcomes. When we get poor outcomes, bad things happen, right? As people that are very driven, right? If we could take a little more time—I'm not saying to slow down, but I'm saying, hey, like, let's be grateful for where we are compared to where we used to be—the business would run more smoothly. What's that saying, right? Like, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. It's the same idea, right? And so, like, what I would say, specifically, like when I was running an info business, I had lots of check engine lights, specifically with, like, just blasting ads. I spend, you know, 50 grand a month on TikTok ads, and like, the team I had the time was not performing as well as I needed to, the sales team, right? But I was like, 'More ads, more ads, more ads. Drive, drive, drive. Like, I want to get to a million a month. Like, let's go, let's go, let's go.' Whereas if I could be like, 'Hey, whoa, like, dude, you're—you're doing like, 188k cash, 200k cash a month. Like, that's really good. Like, slow down. Let's build the best possible thing we can here,' right? It would have been a lot easier. So like, that—that's the point because like, when you're—I think people, the—the podcast reson—resonate with this. Like, when you're surrounded by people that are doing four, 500, a million dollars a month, and you see these people, like, like, wow, this is tangible. Like, I could actually achieve that level of success, you compare yourself to them, which I think is good, actually, because it gives you something to shoot for, but the problem is, like, if you start rushing, it's like, dude, like, they're where they are because of the time, the skill sets, a lot of other factors that they put in, like, you're going to have your own journey, it's going to take your own amount of time, like, stop trying to rush. Like, you can get there, but it's not going to happen in a year. Like, that—not a million a month. That takes some time unless you, like, are a unicorn. But for most people, it takes time. Okay."

Brandon: "Yeah, that's—that's actually—let me tell you some random thoughts that come through my mind, just like—this is going to be—but—but the first thing I think is, like, is this a continuum? Like, is it like you can grow slow, or you can grow fast, and it's just for everybody. Then what it sounded like you're on some—client at the end there is, some people have an ability to go faster than others. It's like that concept of your business can't outgrow you as a person. You're like, if—if you're trying to get the business to that million dollars a month mark, but you're not the kind of person that runs a—a month business, and you're just trying to brute force your way there, you're not going to make it there. But you wait for you to grow there, then—then you can—you could always look at someone else who grew—grow—grw their business to a million dollars a month a lot faster than that, but maybe they were already that kind of person who can run that business before and—"

Max: "Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. And like, to tie this all back in, I think another—like, key lesson to takeaway is that, like, we all have our own journey in terms of how long it's going to take us, where we go, right? And like, horrible things can happen to you, but they happen for a reason. Like, if you want to become the type of person who can build a business to that level, like, you got to become that type of person. And like, it's—it I can't say for you, like, 'Oh, you're going to go through this, you're going to go

through that.' Like, I don't know. We all have our own different journey. Some people are born with innate gifts, or like, I had people that I looked up to that I think they hit a million a month in like two years, but they had things they didn't had, like, that's okay. And so again, like, I go back to, like, I think it's okay to compare yourself to others because they give you something to shoot for, but like, you can't get bogged down in that because it's like, it's irrelevant. It's like, you're—you're not them. And so, you talk about, well, you can go slow, you can go fast. It's like, yes, it's true, but I think it also, like, it switches because there's points in time where, like, if it feels really hard, maybe you should slow down. If things are going super smooth, like, why not go as fast as you possibly can, right? I don't think there's anything wrong with going fast. I think there's a problem when you rush because when you rush, that's implying that you're making decisions that are not well thought out, right? Like, that—like, the thing that switched for me is, I said, I used to really value, like, 'Hey, I make fast decisions, very fast decisions,' which helped me out at certain stages. Now, I value making good decisions. That's different."

Brandon: "I'm sorry, was the last part you said."

Max: "No, what I was saying is, yeah, I now value more making good decisions instead of making fast decisions. There's a big difference there, and somebody who's very skilled might be able to make equal quality decisions to you but faster, but main thing is, yeah, you got—yeah, you gotta do it right, and if that takes—it's going to take longer."

Brandon: "Yeah, that—that's super fair. I like what you said—slow is—slow is smooth, smooth is fast, and maybe I didn't—not—I didn't, although it—it feels almost like one of those things that's said so much that like, the original person who said it, nobody knows."

Max: "Yeah, we don't even know who it is. I—I don't know. I'd have to look it up. But that's—yeah, that—that's awesome advice. Thank you for—for taking the time to—to do this today, Max. Any parting words of wisdom before we wrap this thing up?"

Max: "No, have fun, scale, sell hard, make a lot of money. That's what to do. Help people."

Brandon: "Yeah, thank you, Max. I appreciate you. And for everybody else listening, I will see you next week."

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Ever wonder how the pros in real estate investing close deals like it's nothing? Jerry Green, a 30-year veteran in real estate investing tells you how you can do the same in this episode. He's not just talking theory - this guy's been in the trenches since 1994.

Jerry breaks down why your "rockstar" sales hire might be your biggest mistake, and how to turn average Joes into closing machines. He shares a neat trick called "price anchoring" that could boost your profits overnight. Plus, he gets real about overcoming personal tragedy and rebuilding his empire.

Whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, there's gold in this conversation. Jerry's not holding back - he even touches on some cutting-edge psychology stuff that's changing the game. So grab a coffee, hit play, and get ready to level up your sales game. Trust me, your future self will thank you.

Want to gain access to the REI Sales Academy? Reference this podcast and you will get a 10% discount.

Here's the link to get started: thejerrygreen.com/bateman

Here's what you can expect:

1. Insights and strategies from his REI Sales Academy program, which he acquired from John Martinez and has since expanded. The program includes:

• A 21-week training cycle
• Lifetime access for members
• The ability to add unlimited team members
• Critiques of actual sales calls
• Live role-playing exercises
• A combination of training and coaching

2. His expertise and experience from over 30 years in the real estate investing industry, including strategies for acquisitions, sales processes, and deal conversion.

3. Specific techniques like price anchoring and addressing deal killers early in the sales process.

4. Insights into the psychology of sales and recent developments in neuroscience as applied to sales techniques.

5. Personal anecdotes and lessons learned from his career, including overcoming personal tragedy and rebuilding his business.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

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Brandon: "Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by Jerry Green. Jerry is a sales wizard. We talk a ton about the strategies that are working for him and the students in the sales space. I think you'll get a lot of value from this episode. I'll see you there. Jerry, how are you doing today?"

Jerry: "Hey, what's up, Brandon? I'm doing well. Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you. This episode has been a long time in the coming, with the years that we've known each other. It's definitely about time to do this."

Brandon: "Yeah, I totally agree with you. It has been a long time coming. We talked and talked about that, so I'm excited to jump on here with you and try to share a little bit here. So, you know, I got a couple of years behind me, so hopefully, I can share some knowledge."

Jerry: "Yeah, it's to give people a little window into what we were talking about, literally just before we started here. I was telling Jerry, like, I mean, we've talked about sales here and there a little bit. I've been meaning to just suck all the information out of your brain for a while now. It's cool to have that opportunity to do that in the public setting, where, you know, everybody can benefit from what you have to say. So, before we get too deep, for anybody that doesn't know about the famous Jerry Green, who are you, where do you come from, what do you do?"

Jerry: "Well, that's a deep question. You can go as deep or as shallow as you want. The answer could be Ohio, and I do sales training. You can, uh, can well, you know, I'll rant. You know, just kind of sharing with you and, you know, all the viewers, and look, guys, I, my name is Jerry Green, and I'm actually from Ohio, and I was raised over in Springfield, Ohio, and currently live in Germantown, Ohio right now. And that's about an hour from my original birthplace there in Springfield, Ohio. I currently live there in Germantown, with my wife, and we have five kids now. My kids are, a lot of them have grown now, so, you know, it's, they're starting to kind of go out there a little bit on things, but one got married last year. We actually still have four at home, so, uh, so it's, yeah, so there's a lot of going on there, but, you know, they're doing a lot of cool things. The boys are getting involved in the business, and so, you know, great family, love that, and, you know, that's, that's all wonderful. Now, on the business side of things, Brandon, you know, I got started in this business back in 1994, so this is actually year 30, which is hard to believe, man. Want to know when I was born?"

Brandon: "Jerry, I get this a lot. What, '90, '94, '96?"

Jerry: "So, '96, yeah. I was learning how to use the potty when you were learning how to do real estate. So, yeah, so I started in this in 1994, and the way I got started in it was interesting, Brandon. I actually was, prior to being in this business, I was actually in an electrical contracting business with my father over in Springfield, Ohio, and I was working in that business, and then we had a large general contractor close his doors on us, and we couldn't recover from that. We ended up going bankrupt, and I was trying to figure out what to do, checking out maybe going in, you know, getting a job somewhere, and then next thing I know, I saw this advertisement on TV about an upcoming real estate seminar in Cincinnati, Ohio. Now, you got to remember, back then, we didn't have the cell phones, right? We didn't have any of that to, you know, have ads pop up or anything like that, so it was either on TV or the newspaper. And I said, man, I'm going to go check this out. And the gentleman I went to see, his organization was, uh, Charles Givens' organization, and I would say probably 90-some percent of our viewers here have no idea who that is. So, he's since passed, but he had built out, he was one of the granddaddies that really got this all started, kind of along the lines like Robert Allen and stuff like that. He was one of the ones that really built this out, the whole real estate investing side, training, and everything. And I went to that seminar, man, and ran in and sat there for three days, listening to him tell me about all these different strategies. One in particular stuck out to me, and one of the things they talked about was, and back then, they used a little bit different terminology, but they talked about retailing, retailing meaning flips, and then they also talked about wholesaling, okay, but wholesaling back then, nobody knew anything about it, nobody. Yeah, so I decided that's what I wanted to do. I came back, started applying things on it, and literally, I had to educate the attorneys, I had to educate everybody, and they had no idea what I was doing. None. So, I basically just tell them, show up to the closing, whatever, and this is what needs to be done, and, you know what, interesting too, to Brandon, on this is, back then, a lot of the ways I was paid, my assignment fee, I was paid my assignment fee the day I assigned the contract, not at closing, okay. About nice, yeah, yeah, it worked out really well on things. So, we would just check the title and then we would just assign the paperwork, and they would take and finish it, so, and we were done with it."

Brandon: "Yeah, so that's, it's interesting how things have changed over time, but that's how I got started in it. And then I went from there, I went into the Fix and Flip model, I started building out a pretty massive machine of doing renovations, really grew that up. We went into doing some multi-family, I started getting involved with some Family Dollar stores, General Dollar Stores. We've done, we actually had our own TurnKey rental company for a while. That was miserable, so I hated that. And so, we, I've done a little bit of everything over the years on that, and, you know, what was interesting was, I built this up to the point where I had this pretty big massive machine going on that Fix and Flip side, and one day, I realized I just really hated it, and I said, I'm just going to change all that, and I pretty well cleaned house and just kind of rebuilt over again. So, that's been over 30 years. You know, some other things happened too. Early in the early 2000s, my wife and I built the business up, and she got sick at the same time we found out we were having a baby, and the day he was born, we found out my first wife had cancer, that same day. And, and we fought, and fought, it was unbelievable. We just built a brand-new home, I ended up moving out of my home, I ended up living in the Ronald McDonald House over in Columbus, because even though she was an adult, it was a childhood cancer in her kidneys, and I ended up living in Ronald McDonald House for four months straight. And so we went, we went through a lot, we ended up battling through that, got her home, and then the cancer reoccurred, and she passed away 10 months after my baby boy was born. And so I was, you know, a widowed father, and, you know, she had worked with me in the business, and we went to high school together, and all this. So, you know, it's, it's crazy, Brandon. I look at that, it's like a whole another life. I built that up, and then next you know, that happened, and it took me about two years to get really functioning again. And I mean, fortunately, I had real estate that I had built up that kept me afloat, but then I had to rebuild all that, and that's why I went really heavy into the rehab side, and, but then after a while, you know, after many years of doing that, I, I, uh, I did end up getting remarried to my wife now, Joyce, and she had kids, I had kids, and then we had one together, and next thing I know, I had the Brady Bunch. Do you remember, do you know what the Brady Bunch is, Brandon?"

Brandon: "Only because I've heard Noah talk about it because also in your generation."

Jerry: "So, so that means he's old, right?"

Brandon: "Yeah, that's right, that's right, that's, I said in your generation to be kind."

Jerry: "I love that. Yeah, so, yeah, so that's how I got built, built this up, and then what I realized too, Brandon, was over the years, you know, I just kind of continued to develop this, and what's interesting is, you know, a couple of big things I really focus on is overall systems and operations in the business, and I

realized that one of the most scalable models, I'm not saying it's the model for everyone, is, we moved, we actually, after all what we went through through, we kind of navigated back towards more of the wholesale, wholetail model, and then, of course, we've added, you know, innovations and stuff like that, but that's kind of the model we went back to more on the real estate side. And the biggest reason was, just kind of give you guys a little quick tip here on things, is something I studied with Brian Tracy. You're probably familiar with Brian Tracy, Brandon, are you?"

Brandon: "I'm not, no."

Jerry: "Oh, you're not. Yeah, you got to check out his stuff, man. Okay, Brian's been around for over 40 years, teaching people in business and mindset, and just personal development. And one of the things Brian always talked about was what we call the law of complexity, and he says that most people start a business, and they build it on a high level of complexity, and that's like the government, anything with the government, very high level of complexity. So what he said on that was, you know, look at businesses you can build with low levels of complexity, and I realized that rehabbing, there's nothing wrong with it, but it was a high level of complexity. So I decided to make a change on that, and we streamlined it and created more of a production process. So, and that's what we've done. And now what I realized within that, Brandon, too, was that if you look at this, and you think about our business that we do in the real estate space, regardless of your fix and flipping, buying and hold, or wholesaling, whatever it is, it is a production line, and you have boxes for each position, don't you? And just like in your business, and what we have to do is we have to take that one box, and we have to really work on that. And one of the things that I realized was a key to all this was Acquisitions, right? That skill of how to convert on a high level and what I, 100 percent, because I always say this, look, without Acquisitions, nothing happens. And here's the, so, so if I play Devil's Advocate, you could say that about a lot of things, but here, here's the difference, if you really look at this business, it's not just, it's not the only thing that you can't Outsource in the business is Acquisitions. Marketing has to happen, right? Without marketing, nothing happens, but you can hire vendors, you can buy leads, like, whatever, there's different ways to get that done. There's no way to Outsource your Acquisitions. In your comp, you can even Outsource dispositions, but Acquisitions, that's like the, that's the bread and butter, right? It's the one thing."

Jerry: "It is, it is. And what I learned on this, too, bringing in, though, was, you know, when I first started in this, I went out on appointment for years and years on my own. Back then, it wasn't even really thought of, anybody else doing it but you, so, you know, and I've done it, and for over, for over 10 years, I've done it, all that myself. Over 10, it was probably closer to 15 years. I just went on appointment after appointment after appointment, and, you know, in the beginning, I came across like most of the gurus would teach you back then, you know, just go in, hey, you know, if I could pay y'all cash, close quickly, this is, you know, that type of thing, and it worked, but it got a lot of pushback, got a lot of Nos. And what I realized after a little bit of time, I started studying more and more, that it wasn't about going in and being hardcore, trying to make somebody an offer. What it was about was solving problems, solving problems. And then I realized something after many years of doing this, that, and this is a good little golden nugget for all of you guys, sales is not about selling. Sales is about assisting somebody in a decision-making process. So what you really want to do is focus on how you can navigate somebody through that decision process that they're going to make regardless. You just got to get good at navigating them through that process, so they work with you."

Brandon: "Yeah, yeah, it's fascinating. I'm 100 percent with you. One thing I told my sales team before is, you know, when you've done your job really well, when close to the end of the call, the person asks you for your opinion on if they should hire you or not."

Jerry: "100 percent, because they don't put it in the position of like, of course, they're going to say yes. They know that you're on their side of trying to figure it out. And you actually have to be genuine to that, too. You know, like, if you talk to, like, in any situation, like, if you're not the best solution for somebody, but you should be upfront about that, and then also do everything you can to make yourself the best solution for as many people as you can. But that's, yeah, that's super insightful, although, and I'm sure you have a fantastic answer to this, I think I think a lot of people would agree with what you just said. I don't think a lot of people would say no, Jerry, that's not true. I think where it gets really hard is actually fulfilling on that promise, and 100 percent, that's especially hard when you know you're training a team, for example, and all those things, because what you just described is a heck of a lot harder than going into the house and saying, you know, what, I'm going to get you cash in this amount of time. I'm going to pay you more than somebody else, and whatever, right? That very transaction form of sales we just talked about is so much harder. How do you train somebody to actually do that, because that's a high-level skill?"

Jerry: "Yeah, well, I think, first of all, I think we have to start from the big myth that we hear. I hear this a lot from a lot of people I work with and in the industry in general. This common thing people say, I need that Rockstar sales pro. Okay, guys, that really doesn't exist. What you have to focus on is a rockstar sales process that an average person can follow that has the proper drive, that has the, what I call, Big Money energy, and has, you know, overall, the right attitude on things. If you have that person, I can take somebody that's delivering pizzas, and in 90 days, have them closing on a high level. It's about the process. It's about the process, and it doesn't matter if you're an extrovert, introvert, it doesn't matter when it comes to that, you guys. That's the big thing that people have to think about, and some of your listeners, the guys when you're listening to this, you might be building out some of your teams and stuff like that, and you're hunting for that salesperson, that perfect salesperson. Stop doing that. Focus on the sales process side, and obviously, you're going to bring the right person in, but you don't, they don't have, you know, people are trying to bring the salesperson they, hey, they sold cars and stuff, guys, this is a whole different ball game. And I think, Brandon, that's, that's another big thing that we see all the time, too, is people, and, and I just, personal experience, my own team, anybody that I've ever hired before on our sales team that has had a lot of sales experience, is usually the ones that I end up firing."

Brandon: "Okay, yeah, that's, I have a hypothesis. I want you to tell me if this is true. My hypothesis is that often times, the companies that are the best in the world at a particular thing, they can't hire experienced people. I've seen it happen with digital marketing. We specifically usually try not to hire really experienced digital marketers, because all that means to me is that you've been tainted by the standards that other people have with this industry, and our standards are different, and I'm going to spend two years trying to jam into your head that what you did before isn't good enough, or I could find somebody who's fresh out of college, doesn't know a thing about what's expected of them anywhere, and convince them that our extremely high standards are normal."

Jerry: "And exactly, Brandon, I, dude, I totally agree with you on this. I've seen salesperson after salesperson come in, and I just realized that I, I, I just kind of shy away from that anymore because a lot of them come in, they go, oh, I know, I, I'm really good at selling. Me, then all of a sudden, we expose them to an actual sales process, and they go, well, this is, I, I, I know this. I know this, but then what happens is, they go in, they don't follow the process, they don't use the tools, okay, and then they see their results tank, and then somebody else that doesn't have any of that past history comes in, say, I'm just going to follow exactly what you're training me on,

Jerry. I'm going to apply that, and not only am I gonna apply that, I'm gonna do self-study. That's, people that sell, that's what you want, y, yep, someone nice and hungry."

Brandon: "Yeah, total Game Changer, bro. Yeah, one of, yeah, one of my, just to give an example, like, one of my, one of my best salespeople, he shows up to his first day of the job, and he's already really, really good, and we can't figure out why. We come to find out he listened to every single episode of this podcast. At the time, there were more than 50 of them. He listened to every single episode of that podcast before he showed up to work for his first day because he wanted to learn the industry and understand what he was selling, and then he just mirrored all the things that he heard there about what we talk about digital marketing. Like, that go great because he's hungry, right? And he's willing to like put in those, although I want to challenge you on something, this challenge isn't for me, but let me just tell you about a conversation I had with somebody earlier today, and I'm curious what you would say about it. So, so I was talking to this person, somebody that we, that we both know, although I, I don't know that he would want me to share, share what he said. I'll just leave out the name, just, just, just in case. So, he had recently acquired a company, and, and we were just talking about like how's that going, and he talked about how, like, you know, it's, it's a little bit of a mess in the sales team, and we're trying to figure some of that stuff out, and I asked him, what do you learned from it? He said, well, the thing I learned that I've always kind of known is that salespeople, great salespeople, aren't created, they're born. And I have never found a way to train a salesperson. They're just, they're good, or they're not, is what he said. He then, so, and so, so I have two questions for you. Number one, to what extent is that compatible or not with what you're saying? Maybe that's true, and what you're saying is true, or maybe you disagree, and then, and then number two, um, if you do disagree, what then, why has that been his experience, and, and why, for anybody who's listening to this, that maybe feels that way, or has had a similar experience, what could they be missing? What is it they, that they should understand that they don't understand, would change their perspective?"

Jerry: "Yeah, I mean, great question. I, I guess, you know, first part of that, is that I, I believe that people do have to have some of that DNA in them, okay, so it's not, you know, I, I look at that, they got have some of that DNA, but it's not so much the sales portion of, as it is, what the drive on that, Brandon, the drive, the building, and, and here's a big component, I hit on this just briefly a few minutes ago, and a lot of people don't think about this, but a big thing is called Big Money energy, okay, because you find a lot of people in there that go into sales positions, and guess what, and sometimes people put them in those position where money really is not that important to them, and guys, those conflict, those are two conflicting values there, okay, so it's like, oh, I'm not really worried about, if I can just make whatever, I'm cool, and then you put a person in a sales, that doesn't work, yeah, okay, you're gonna have, you got to have somebody that really drives that. So I think part of that is true in regards to the, the DNA study of things, so, but, you know, it, it's, it comes down, though, to understanding that if somebody has those key components, like, say, the drive, I mean, when we look at someone to come in on our side of things, we want someone with that, basically, never give up attitude, okay, that's very consistent, that is very heavily driven, that is, u, a big, a big thing is not a whiner, okay, that is open to being in a position where they got to humble themselves, even though they maybe studied some in sales, they realize that we are basic going to retrain them completely, okay, and if you have someone like that, and just overall enjoys talking to people and things, we, you know, we find them be very successful. Now, another component to this, Brandon, that we, we actually started testing on this, in the last about a year and a half, and that is critical thinking, okay, we actually started testing people on critical thinking."

Brandon: "It was interesting, how do you do that? Sorry, to, to ask the tangential question, but how do you test?"

Jerry: "We actually create, we've actually got a whole test that we built out on that, interesting."

Brandon: "You created this yourself, or you found like some, some, like assessments?"

Jerry: "Well, I'm working with someone on this, on things, but yeah, we set this up, and it's, it's basically critical thinking, and it's interesting on this, Brandon, because what it does, it's, it's critical thinking, and we look at problem-solving, because if you look at this, and sales, what are we really doing, solving problems, okay, and the, and think about average salespeople, what do they do, average salespeople, they go in, you know, we're in our business, oh, hey, what do you, you know, what are you asking for the property, well, I can't give you that, here's what I can give you, and all this stuff here, that's, you know, that's how you get very poor and below-average results, you assume, it's, what's that, they assume it's a fixed-sum game, versus, yeah, they do, right?"

Brandon: "It's like, it's like binary, like either my price is going to work for you or it's not, rather than there being a thousand possible directions the conversation, 100 percent, yep, so what we, you know, it, it's interesting on that, because what we learned on that, was, you know, when you get somebody that's understands some of the critical thinking, some problem-solving, then you can start plugging them in, and they can take the sales process, and then they can start applying it. Now, what's cool on this, too, those are the people, too, that understand how to apply different programs with a seller, okay, so, for instance, okay, if I'm working with a seller, and let's pretend you're a seller, on things, Brandon, I might be running through things, and I'll say, you know, Brandon, wow, you know, Brandon, I'm so sorry, based upon what you're telling me, it doesn't sound like your property is going to qualify for our cash-out program, but, you know, Brandon, I do have another program that I can probably get you some more money on, but I, I'm just not sure if that's something you're even interested in hearing anything about, okay, so you notice I just took, took away, and then I opened in, I, I laid the door out, but they were the ones that are going to say, yeah, let me open that, okay, and see, critical thinkers, problem solvers, will apply that."

Brandon: "Yeah, that, that, that makes, that makes a ton of sense. Oh, man, you talked about so many things, so you're basically talking about like, they're hungry, they're humble, they're able to think critically, which, I don't even know what that correlates with, is that an intelligence thing, or is it more of like a, like a creativity, it is, it a big part of it, bringing in, is an intelligence factor?"

Jerry: "Okay, and, and I'm, look, I say some of you might be listening to this, and I'm not, I'm not trying to slam anybody, but when you hire dumb people, it will affect your business, okay, so you've got to look at this, and that critical thinking is really important because think about this, too, Brandon, people got to understand how the good Acquisitions reps should have, have the ability to explain contracts and have people understand what process looks like going forward."

Brandon: "Brandon, okay, I mean, like for us, we take, anytime we bring somebody on, when it comes to Acquisitions, there's three components to onboarding them, three components, number one, operations. They got to understand the operational side of Acquisitions, how does it flow, what steps are involved, if you're working the CRM, what do you need to do in here, what are you supposed to say to the client of what is their next steps in the journey, right?"

Jerry: "Yeah, and then, and then we look at the next component, we look at is, obviously, sales process. Now, sales process, they have to learn foundational things before they can even get on talking the clients, but then also we do continued training every single week, and

I do that a lot by training people, uh, you know, with the sales Academy, people come in, and they all, my students across the country come in and learn from the on that, but also we do additional training every week. We're doing it, average of three times times a week on sales training, okay, and then the third component is contract execution, or what I, I like to refer to is contract presentation. So, how do they really know how to present a contract to a seller? Can they explain the tax pro rations? Okay, yeah, so, if we, we learned that onboarding those three areas has cured up a big chunk of problems for us."

Brandon: "Yeah, that's fascinating. I mean, I think that, yeah, decreases the problems that acquisition solves. I think the stereotype in a lot of companies is the salespeople cause all the problems, and everybody else is just like running around in circles trying to find a way to solve them."

Jerry: "Yeah, you can't find anybody to close deals that doesn't cause a lot of problems in the process. It's just, you know, it's a stereotypical, like, operations versus sales thing. It sounds like your solution is, if you have the right training and the right kind of people in sales, then maybe that's less of a factor."

Brandon: "Yep, 100 percent. Yeah, you know, I think about, you know, Brandon, with, with that, like the lead, you know, obviously, you're in the lead generation business here, and you know, one of the best out, out there, you know, that do an amazing job. You know, what's interesting, and I'm sure you hear this a lot, too, people get leads all the time, they say the leads aren't any good, right, or they, they, it's easy to blame the leads, is that true?"

Jerry: "Oh, 100 percent, not only do we see that across our clients, we see that in our own team, like everywhere, right, like no, yeah, it's, it's like the standard, like, the leads are week, no, you're a week kind of, well, let me share something with you, guys, on this, is it okay if I can share something with you? Okay, see, Mo, think about it, in sales, in general, okay, now this, I'm going to put it into our world, when it comes to working with sellers, but it can go, anything across the board, it can apply to, see, most people, you think about it, on our world, what's the, what's the best type of seller that we'd like, in our world, Brandon, what, what's the best one?"

Brandon: "Distress, look, motivated, distress."

Jerry: "Okay, so it's the one that has the multiple peppers, right?"

Brandon: "Yeah, that's right, we talking about our database, where we have the number, the number of Chili Peppers, pre, yes, okay, highly distressed, right, that's what we look at, but here's the thing, Brandon, on that, it's really hard to build a scalable business around those leads, only, fa point. So what happens is, most leads come in, and this is something we, we, we train people on, what we call the seller Continuum, and on the seller Continuum, leads come in, most people put people in, they say, hey, they're highly distressed, they're very motivated, great candidate, and then other people come in, in the middle, and they look at them, and they say, they're Tire kickers, right, we hear a lot of, they're Tire kickers, but I want you guys to start thinking things differently, because what we do, and what we're really good at, at training people to do, is take Tire kickers and convert them to Deals, and the reason that we're good at that, and I train people on that, is it doesn't matter, this is really important, everybody understand, it does not matter where your seller sits on the Continuum, they could be highly motivated, they could be neutral, okay, it doesn't matter where they said at, the key is, how do you figure out where they're at now, and where do they want to be, and that's done, what, with the best salespeople in the world, Brandon, on this, okay, and this is what I train people on, the best salespeople in the world understand something, and it's called The Gap, and the Gap is, for where somebody's at now, to where they want to be, and this applies, in our world, in your world, any world, when it comes to sales, when you can understand where somebody's at now, and what, what they want to be, what happens on that, is you create what we call the picture-perfect scenario, and when you can do that, it creates urgency to act, without that, it doesn't happen on things, okay, and it's, that's why most people lack at closing things on a high level, and that's why, like, a lot of our students, we work with, typically, when they apply the sales process, and they start really learning, over and over again, and build it as a skill, we will see the conversions increase 20 to 50 percent."

Brandon: "Yeah, that, that, that makes sense. I, it's always, honestly, a, a red flag to me, when, when someone, like, like, say, we're talking to a client, or, you, their salespeople, this, this would, the most common scenario here would be someone who does their own Acquisitions, which would be some of our smaller Cs, and they say, like, if they're motivated, I'll close them 100 percent of the time, it almost makes me feel like they're probably not going to close a lot of the leads because, like, the best person, like those who are best of acquisition, they look at every lead, it's almost like you're, there's a level of like delusion there, because the reality is, like, if you, if you look at, if you look at 10 leads, let's just say, let's say you're doing a highly, even the highly motivated lead channel, like PPC, for example, you're going to end up with, say, 15 leads to a contract, so if you look at every individual League, you can say, chances are, I'm not going to close this lead, then you can be right, but those who are really, really good, they just, they, they have this, like, belief, everyone, this is going to be the one that I close, because if you're, if you're like, if you really look at each one of those and say, I have a one in 15 chance of closing this, then you might close none of them, right?"

Jerry: "Exactly, it's, Brandon, it's when you start understanding like a process, and you constantly work on your skill, what happens on that, it becomes to the point where you can almost create your predictable results for this, okay, yeah, I mean, it, it becomes a, a pattern that you will see, and that's the only way that you can truly get to this point where you say, hey, this makes sense, I can just keep ramping this machine up."

Brandon: "Yeah, and, and that's really the key on this, and understanding that, is, is, is just a GameChanger because, see, it's just like, I, I'll share something else here, for you guys, too, a lot of people, what they do, in this, is, one of the techniques that I train people on, is to get the best deals ever, is stop asking price, okay, because what do we tell our clients, too, because it's a huge red f, for me, when I, when we're talking to a client, and it's like they, they are marking a lot of their reads as retail, my, my team asked the other day, like, what percentage of the, of a client's lead should be retail, as marked in the system, they said the answer is 0 percent, %, but we just put it there so we can find out who's, who well, and Brandon, you know, when you think about this, is something, guys, that, so this is, I, and I see a lot of people do it this way, they train their salespeople, and they go in, and a lot of times, they have a script, they'll go through, ask some questions, and then, then we'll go in, and they'll say, hey, you know, Brandon, what, any idea what you're asking for the property, you know, or what, what are you trying to get out of it, now, I want you to think about this, this, Brandon, this is one of the things that we teach on, is it's probably one of the most powerful things you'll ever learn, when it comes to getting the right number, and that is what we call Price anchoring, and think about this, before I talk about how we apply it, think about, anytime you've ever been to a store before, to buy something, and maybe it's, maybe it's some sneakers you want to buy, right, some cool tennis shoes, and you're going to the store, and you see this sign that says, value, 300

bucks, then it was marked down to $150, but today, or this weekend, it's $89, right, well, guys, they're doing a price anchor strategy with you on that, well, think about this, can you do the same thing with a seller, 100 percent, so, instead of what I do is, the way I train my people, and the way I train all my students, is I train them, stop asking the seller what they want for the property, what's the common thing that we hear, Brandon, whoever names the price first, what, what's the thing we've always heard, right, and that's complete BS, okay, because price anchoring works like this, here, and when it comes to sales, if I'm working with a seller, and I'm going along, and I say, hey, you know, I'm, I'm, and I know my number, think, think, when it comes to this, if I, if I ask you, Brandon, what you're wanting for the property, in today's world, everybody's a real estate expert by looking on Zillow, right, and then, Brandon, you give me a number, you just price anchored me, versus me price anchoring you, okay, makes sense, so you hold, you hold more power in the negotiation if you can draw the first number, is your, yeah, suggestion, but what we do is, we don't make it as an offer, okay, this is the, what we do, it's nothing more than a comparison, so it might sound something like this, you know, hey, Brandon, you know, based upon what you told me here today, and it just sounds like, sounds like there's quite a bit of work needs to be done on the property, and, Brandon, look, you know, me, for me to feel comfortable, and for me to know that I wouldn't lose money on this at all, you know, I would love to buy it for $150,000, and, but I know that's some, something you would never consider, and by the way, that's not my offer, so you said it without being evil in the, the seller's, act, so what I did is, I dropped it as an anchor tool, now the cool thing about it, Brandon, when you do it that way, you don't piss the seller on what, okay, because when, ing, green, I, I picture like losing trust with the seller, is it effective, often, yes, but you could boost trust with the seller because, yeah, if you're going to, if you're going to drop 150, and then come up to 200, can they really trust you, right, exactly, so, heads at, without reference, it, but I know that's something you would never take anyways, never consider, now, here's the thing, Brandon, when you do that, you just go quiet, you don't say a word, now what they'll do, there only two options that going to come out of that, one, they'll confirm that, oh, no way, I would never do that, okay, now you know, second thing, the second thing they'll do, is they'll come back and correct you, okay, and they'll say, no, I would never do that, I would at least have to have 170, well, this, imagine you were in the position where you were willing to pay up to 200 on that, okay, now 170 is on the table, yeah, so, and now if you come up more on that, then you look like a winner, okay, on this, you're helping them out, and then they start thanking you, so, guys, the price anchor tool, I, I always think about one gentleman that recently joined in at my Academy, he's like 70 years old, Brandon, okay, amazing guy, that's funny, and he is, he's just out there cranking it up, and he goes, Terry says, he say, I love the sales process, I love the sales process, and, you know, and he's in, he's in Pennsylvania, and, you know, and he's getting spreads in Pennsylvania of over 20 grand on some assignments, so."

Brandon: "Yeah, that's, that's fantastic. I do have one more question. I'm really curious to hear from you. So, so a lot of this, I mean, you've been doing this for 30 years, right. What I'm curious to know is, let's just say, you look at, from a sales standpoint, you look at Jerry Green from two, three years ago, and you look at what he was doing. I imagine a lot of what we talked about, Jerry Green two or three years ago knew that stuff. What have you learned recently, like, what, what is it that that you're continually learning now that you feel like is really leveling up the game when it comes to sales, yeah, Branch out if you want to, yeah, to you, like, I want, because the thing is, our most recent lessons we learned are always the most potent, they're always the most impactful to us, and I want to give you like, and I know you're talking now about like the basics of sale, but I want to give license to talk about like what's meaningful to you recently, not just what works."

Jerry: "Yeah, I think, you know, when it comes to the sales side, I think one thing that is really, that I, I, I have, I went in deeper and deeper on the study of the psychology of the sale, and how powerful that is, Brandon, and what I'm talking about is like even down to the neuroscience, neuroeconomics, and all this, and how you don't have to be a brainiac, all you have to do is pick up some of these tools, and literally, by applying certain tools, you can change your game, and I think over the last two or three years, I've seen that, to me, come out more and more, of these little tweaks that people can make, okay, for instance, like deal killers, we talk about deal killers in our training, and how to go over those, before you even talk about any numbers whatsoever at all, but we went in and done a study on this, uh, Brandon, and we realized that people, on average, most people skip the deal Killers because they don't feel like they need to talk about them, so they deal with them as objections after they talk numbers. So what we did was went in and found out that people that apply our process, before that, what we started finding now, just in one area of the sales process, just in Deal Killers, we saw an average increase of conversions between 15 to 20 percent, so imagine you making a 100 offers a year, and you can increase that by 15 to 20 percent in regards to conversion, that goes straight to the bottom line, 100 per. so that's where I really studied and started, for me, opening up on the personal basis, on things too, you know, it's kind of sharing with that a little bit, I think I, I, you know, I obviously, getting older, and I just, I, as I go forward more and more into this, I just realize, number one, goes back to the same thing, you know, time, just how important the time aspect of things is, you know, because, you know, kids are all growing up, things are changing, developing, it just goes so fast, so making sure that, you know, no matter what, that you guys manage your time more than anything, because that's literally, you know, think about, we can get all the money back in the world, you know, but we can't gain our time back, ever, so."

Brandon: "Yeah, that's, that's one of those things, Jerry, where I feel like it's a simple truth, it's not comp, I think a lot of us have heard that a lot, but like, I don't know, happenss for you, like sometimes it just sinks in, like way better than others, there's a lot of things that, that aren't difficult to understand, but they're difficult to feel, and like really, really understand, and that seems to be one that hit people a lot."

Jerry: "Yeah, yep, I agree with you on that, I think it's so important, and, you know, another thing, bringing into, just, you know, this is something I've struggled with in the past a lot, is like, comparison stuff, you know, and you just really have to watch that too, you just, the comparison thing will just eat you alive."

Brandon: "Yeah, you know, and so, you know, a lot of you might be listening to this, wherever you're at, you doing this acquisitioned yourself, that's okay, you know what I mean, and, and, guys, you don't have to have a team of a 100 people. I mean, you could be, you could have a team of four or five people, and do over a million a year in this business."

Jerry: "Yeah, I've seen it. Thank you, Jerry, that's, um, that's very impactful. You mentioned a few times that you were with students, that you, you know, have these different elements in your training. How does this work for anybody listening that might be interested?"

Brandon: "Well, guys, I, I own and operate what we call the REI Sales Academy, okay. It was

actually originally founded by John Martinez, which a lot of people know on that. I did buy his company several years ago. I think that the foundation that John created changed the whole real estate World investing world around, years ago, and then when I came involved, you know, I was able to bring over 3,000 deals done and completed to that side of things, and I think I've also so be able to bring the StreetWise typee of investing to that, so now I can take it and apply that with the sales process, Brandon, and I'm watching, I'm watching students do stuff that are just really amazing when it comes to this, so yeah, that's what we do, we have the REI sales Academy, Brandon, and we have people that come in all the time, just, guys, it's something that once you enter, it's a lifetime thing, you can add team members, and it's, you can, all their own on your team, you can have unlimited team members part of that, and, you know, so if that's something I can help you guys with, on things, I'm sure, Brandon, we can drop a link in here for him, on things, right?"

Brandon: "Yeah, yeah, sure, we can, we can throw a link in the, in the description."

Jerry: "Yeah, and use that, guys, because I'll, we'll make sure that, with Brandon, you guys will get an extra 10 percent off, on things, too."

Brandon: "Okay, cool, I didn't know they got that, that's pretty sweet, so yeah, we'll get that link together, we'll put it in the description here. I've heard awesome things about arios Academy, both before and after you."

Jerry: "Well, thank you, so I know there was a good foundation there, and I know that, I know, yeah, we train people every week on this, every single week, yeah, and it's, I've changed it up some, I do a 21, 21 week round now, which it goes for 21 weeks, and it resets, and what I, because John had a great model, but what I've added in, I've added in also actual listening to your actual sales calls, so now people can bring them in, I'll listen to them, we, and H, it's huge, we'll do live role playing, and then what I've done, so I, I've taken the training, and I've added in a coaching aspect to it, now too, so."

Brandon: "Sweet, and yeah, so it's really making a difference for a lot of students, so yeah."

Jerry: "Well, that's cool, Jerry, I'm looking forward to what we can do together too, we just, uh, started up some PC campaigns recently, and, and I expect you guys to rise to the top of our, of our list of best conver, well, dude, I mean, look, we've been going at it, what, just under a month, and I think we're already, already, I think Ashley told me right now, we're one and 12, on, on deals, on that, so."

Brandon: "Yeah, one and 12, that's good, especially for the time frame, because we're talking about bring leeks, right, so yeah, you still probably got another contract or two sitting in the leads you've already got, and that'll come in, you know, days, 60 days, 90 days, whatever the case is, because you know how it is, a lot of them are ready to go right away, but then there's plenty of that other on you just got to keep nurturing, on that side."

Jerry: "100 percent, so that's, that's good, so far, we'll, we'll get some, we'll get some more data to put your team to the test, and then when it's, when it's proven, I wantan to, I want to talk about what we did together because I think that'll be pretty cool."

Brandon: "All right, yeah, no, I'd love to, buddy."

Jerry: "Yeah, well, thank you, thank you for your time, Jerry, and, and for everybody else listening to this episode today, hope you got as much value from this as I did, and I'll see you next week."

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In this episode, real estate investor Donato breaks down his data-driven approach to market analysis and deal selection. From key metrics to watch to insights on buyer behavior, he shares practical strategies for success in today's competitive real estate landscape. Whether you're a seasoned investor or just starting out, you'll gain valuable insights to sharpen your market intelligence and make smarter investment decisions. Tune in to level up your real estate game.

Brandon: "Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast. This is your host, Brandon Bateman, and today I have Donato on the podcast. He has been building a platform called Bright Investor for the past couple of years, all focused on data around comping, dispositioning properties, and targeting markets. So, I'm interested to pick his brain to see what he's been doing and what advice he has for people that are looking for markets to target PPC. And I'll see you there. Donato, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing today?"

Donato: "I'm doing great, thanks for having me here today. I appreciate it."

Brandon: "Yeah, I'm excited to have you here today. We've been talking for just a few minutes before the episode. I think you've got some pretty interesting things to share, and I'm really curious to learn more about you and your business and everything. But for anybody listening that doesn't know who you are or what you do, why don't you share that with us?"

Donato: "Yeah, so I started in real estate in college as a wholesaler and quickly grew to a 4-unit house hack, which then turned into 375 units in a $35 million portfolio by 25. Most recently, a 200-unit deal in San Antonio. Now, I grew that while I was working full-time as a geospatial analyst for the US Department of Defense and the intelligence community. So, you know what that means—long days and long nights, getting off work and going right into work. But it was through that process that I was able to actually retire from my day job, and I got kind of tapped on the shoulder to come be the head of Acquisitions for a multifamily investment group. And since then, I've analyzed over 3,500 deals in the last six months and basically took all of that and wrapped up my experience in this framework for getting deals faster and better areas into my software company, Bright Investor, which I founded a few years back. And now I'm full-time as a real estate investor and software CEO for real estate investors across the nation."

Brandon: "Okay, cool. Yeah, sounds like you've been busy."

Donato: "A little bit. My story is not so different. I started my company in college as well."

Brandon: "There it is. Birds of a feather, that's right."

Donato: "It's a fun experience. I can't say I experienced very much of the college thing once I started the company. I just like, yep, sort of show up to every class that you had to be in, basically do nothing that you don't have to do, and work while you do all the other things. That was kind of my experience too."

Brandon: "College, I remember vividly going on a retreat with some fraternity brothers, and they were going out, they're having a good time, and I was on my computer just on the phone with real estate agents and investors in St. Louis before I moved, getting feedback and talking to them about this product."

Donato: "And I remember vividly one of them walked by me and they're like, 'Donato, why are you this way? What's causing you to do this? Like, why?' And the only thing I said back to him was, 'Why not?' That's fun, why not do this?"

Brandon: "Yeah, why not try? And it was just like, as you started going down that path, you know, this divide grows between—there's nothing wrong with the direction you're going, but it's not for me. And the college experience becomes this is a tool for me to build my future, not this $50,000 party that I'm supposed to then pay for for the next 20 years."

Donato: "Yeah, so just different choices, but I've enjoyed where they've taken me so far."

Brandon: "Yeah, I think it created for me—I'm sort of, it made me sort of a unique case study because I'm the kind of person with the risk tolerance where if I didn't start a business at that point in my life, I probably wouldn't have at a later point in life. Because if you think like, when you're in college, your number one asset is your low opportunity cost."

Donato: "Yeah, like, what are you choosing between? You're probably choosing between like making $15 an hour somewhere or maybe even an unpaid internship, and starting a business. It's really not hard. I remember, like after one month of doing this, I already was like making more money than I would have with like the kind of jobs that were available to me at that time. It was just so easy versus like, I can't imagine leaving a six-figure job to go out and do something that absolutely—"

Brandon: "So much. I get all people all the time. And, you know, I think youth is a huge benefit to starting something because you know, I don't have a spouse necessarily to take care of, I don't have kids to take care of, I'm not funding a college 529 account, I'm not relying on this healthcare to replace my knees in a couple years, you know, there's so many things that I'm not having to accommodate for, and all I've had to do since then is just keep living like I'm in college, and I'm fine. There's no issues. I don't have—there's, I have no other responsibilities beyond just growing this business, and I'm not really giving up anything else. So you're 100% right, you know."

Donato: "Now, I just, at this point, it's like I make so much more, or I'm having so much more fun working with people that, you know, my old co-workers, you know, I remember a very specific time that I asked this guy who'd been working there for 17 years, no kids, so you know, government job, he might be close to retirement, low six figures, and so I asked him, 'Hey man, are you close to clocking out of here and retiring?' And he laughed in my face, like a insulting laugh in my face, like, 'Okay, clearly I'm missing something.' And he said, 'Donato, I've mentally prepared to do another 17 years.'"

Brandon: "And that was the thing that shattered my mindset around him because he's—he was spending 17 years like, 'spare change.'"

Donato: "Yeah, it's ringing off 17 years like you understand that through entrepreneurship and business, real estate, you can be out of here in three to five."

Brandon: "He's like, 'Well, we want different things.' And I just say back to him, 'Actually, we don't. We want the same things, you're just not willing to walk this way to get it, and that's going to cost you for 17 years.'"

Donato: "Yeah, that's a super fair point. Lots of advantages to getting started young, although I can tell you the number one disadvantage for me was that I'm an idiot."

Brandon: "And I firmly believe that me in 10 years won't be. It would have been really nice to start the business at that point."

Donato: "Yes, I have made so many mistakes."

Brandon: "Here we are. Uh, I know, in your mind, you're thinking, 'Oh my gosh, if I knew then what I knew now, I could have done this twice as fast, twice as cheap, with a better hairline and a better waistline than I have now.'"

Donato: "Absolutely, yeah. A lot of times, you just run face-first into a brick wall because you're young and naive enough to think that you'll have it all figured out, that you don't recognize the huge risk. So you just start running anyways, and it's that exact inertia that ends up taking you the direction you need to go because you're not steering yourself off at the very beginning."

Brandon: "Yeah, that's a super valid point. So let's talk about what you're good at. Like, as a person, we'll talk about your companies and what you've been doing too, so I'm curious to hear about that. But what's your superpower? What's your skill?"

Donato: "My superpower is real estate acquisitions and market research. That is what I do every single day. That's my bread and butter, and I spent a lot of time talking about it and analyzing what's working and what's not in markets and properties across the country."

Brandon: "Okay, very cool. So, if we're going down that route, I'm going to start kind of steering you in a way that I think a lot of the people listening might appreciate. I could tell you one of the most common problems that we're trying to solve on a day-to-day basis, and I don't doubt we could be much better at solving, is understanding where we should be marketing. And there are so many different aspects of that, like where we should be marketing means more than just which markets."

Donato: "Yes, it could mean where within those markets. It could also mean which markets, it can mean which states, it could mean where do you draw those lines exactly right because there's a lot of places where, like, one area of the county you're killing it, the other area of the same county, you're not killing it."

Brandon: "Exactly. So there's a brief overview like that. The problem we run into a lot with PPC marketing—The wider you can target geographically, the lower your lead cost gets. So we have this rule for

location targeting. It's kind of like if you go to court, you know, they're going to ask you to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We say for location, you got to target the right locations, and that's where a lot of people stop, but then also you have to target all of the right locations and also you have to target none of the wrong locations."

Donato: "Right, or nothing but the right locations. So because here's what happens if you have, like, let's just say there's an area that's like not desirable to anybody, and everybody knows it. I'll give you a good example. This would be like the Detroit City Center, alright? So I want to target Metro Detroit, but the city center is a little bit run-down, it's pretty bad. There's actually no shortage of motivated sellers because they're true motivated sellers because they really can't sell their houses, right? And when the house fully renovated can sell for $88,000, there's not that much money, there's not that much meat on the bone for a wholesale, you pick it up for zero, we're still not doing so good."

Brandon: "Yeah, it's just not exactly not a place to be doing deals, right? So what do you think happens in the Detroit City Center?"

Donato: "Well, all the companies that are targeting Detroit, they probably say I don't want to target the Detroit City Center. So then what happens when you as the investor come in and you do target it, what you're going to find is when you're bidding in the auction, you are the highest bidder in Detroit, great City Center, and you're not communicating to Google that there's any difference in the value of those leads to you. So what you find is you start to get a ton of leads from there, and those leads are actually low quality. That starts to hurt you."

Brandon: "Right, so just including like one wrong area, the risk you run with PPC is you spend a lot of your budget in that area because it's less desirable to other people as well."

Donato: "Exactly, and on the contrary, if I'm just targeting areas A, B, C, when there's also an area D out there that's equally good as ABC to me, I might get a 15% lower cost per lead if I was targeting area D as well."

Brandon: "Right, so it's not just about me finding the right areas to be in, it's about me finding all of the right areas to be in."

Donato: "Right, because that's how I get a lower cost, whether I have a $100,000 a month budget or have $10,000 a month budget, that's true."

Brandon: "Right, so those are the problems we're trying to deal with: how do we determine what these areas are? So, if I were a real estate wholesaler, I'm reaching out to you saying I could target anywhere in the United States, I just have to figure out like where exactly are the right places for me to target, and I want to use data to do that. What's the path that you would guide me down?"

Donato: "Right off the bat, I'm looking at median home price, days on market, new listings that are coming on the market when I'm looking at areas that I want to target via wholesaling or recommending to wholesalers."

Brandon: "Okay, so let me recap that. So median home price, days on market, what was the last couple ones?"

Donato: "And then new listings coming on the market."

Brandon: "New listings coming on the market, okay. So the median home price, that's going to be a very, like, I mean it changes, but somewhat stable metric, like it's not going to be like a world different in a year, I imagine. But the days on market, that's probably like a constantly shifting metric as well as new homes on market."

Donato: "Yeah, and actually, by tracking them monthly, you would be surprised how much volatility there is in median home prices. People, I use lots of examples like this, I'll use examples of Evansville, Indiana, and then I'll do something like Columbus, Ohio. And when you look at median home prices there pre-2018, what I call pre-COVID era, right, we're looking to see what were home prices doing, what was natural market appreciation and demand looking like before workers were relocating, and there's a huge shake-up in where people are having to transact in properties. And you can track as COVID goes into 2020, 2021, huge spikes in the actual median home price as we continue to see this huge jump up in median prices until about 2023 as interest rates start to really take an impact onto the actual housing market."

Brandon: "Yeah, very specific markets across the US, and then specific zip codes within those markets, not only did not drop median home price month over month for the past 18 months, but they were able to maintain their value, if not even continue to grow. At the same time, markets like Evansville, Indiana saw huge spikes I can only equate to a pump and dump scheme within a period of 8 months, home prices dropped almost $100,000."

Donato: "Wow, it's insane, and the thing is transactions drop very quickly as well. And so when I'm looking at a market that we want to be marketing in, one, I want to look for markets and zip codes that have continued to see growth pre-COVID, indicating to me long-term demand for that area, which my repeat buyers going to be buying properties for me. I want to be able to sell over and over again and decrease my acquisition costs. So the better area I can put them in as a repeat buyer, the more likely they are to continue to transact with me. So I want to find areas that have been continuing to increase in property value, if not maintaining it, over the last 6 to 12 months. At the same time, days on market have not gone up really past what their median was around 2021 and 2022 specifically."

Brandon: "So where demand has continued to see action is high. And for that reason, a lot of wholesalers I've worked with who were dabbling in the wholesale and flip space have consistently moved their marketing away from targeting flip projects because of their reliance on the fact that interest rates have decreased their end buyers' purchasing power, meaning they're ending up being stuck paying that hard money costs and their holding costs for months longer than they ever budgeted because they just can't move that product."

Donato: "And so very specifically targeting those zip codes where we can see the home prices continue to be resilient while days on market has stayed strong allows the wholesaler to continue to get into a situation in those markets where one, they have multiple exit strategies, and two, the demand is there to continue to inspire their end buyer to continue to transact in that area. And they're not going to be in a situation where the margin has fallen so low over the past two years that doesn't make sense."

Brandon: "So I take those two things first, and the number of new listings data point that I look at is really there to get an idea on how much competition am I fighting off the MLS. So if I can see where my median home price is continuing to stay stable, where my additionally, my days on market has stayed resilient while the number of new listings has dropped or stayed stable, I see a huge opportunity."

Donato: "Exactly, it's just a perfect one, two, three of, I have this really nice situation where I can come in and provide a huge opportunity to folks who are trying to transact here that they can't find without me. And then shoot fish in a barrel."

Brandon: "Yeah, that's super interesting, and I'm curious to ask, let's just say you had a really short, let's just say you were focused on like what's going to help you next month, you don't care about like repeat buyers over years or what happens to the values of the properties over years, would that change anything?"

Donato: "I would say no, because I'm still looking for an area where my median home price is going to be about $250,000 to $375,000, maybe $400,000 on average transaction where days on market is ideally less than 35 days on market, and it's been consistent for the last 12 months. So if I'm targeting an area now that makes money and transacts, it's going to be an area that continues to in the future. So even if I'm not looking at that future long-term repeat business and building a company for the long term, the fact that I'm targeting areas where the margins still exist and we can get into an area where the product is necessary to move that product, the fundamentals are the same whether you recognize them or not, and whether you recognize their impact on your success, the fundamentals are the same."

Brandon: "Okay, and in your opinion, exit strategy, if I have, let's just say I'm a wholesaler, wholetail, novation, fix and flip, or buy and hold, right, I imagine it's at least true of buy hold, oh—"

Donato: "But absolutely, you know, specifically with the other ones, let's just say, let me just give you like two, two kind of polar but somewhat similar options. First, let's just say, and on one hand, I'm flipping, on the other hand, I'm wholesaling, would you answer that question differently for me in one of those situations, or would is still be the same

answer?"

Brandon: "My answer to that would be, who are you wholesaling the property to?"

Donato: "Probably flippers, a flipper more, it's the same question. And like, I thank you for asking that because when people ask us like, who are you selling this to, it's someone who's going to either fix it up and bur out of it, or there's someone is going to be flipping it. So if you're not thinking of what your end client is doing, you're doomed from the start. If I know going into this zip code, right, that median home price, the days on market, and the new listings are working, and I have comps showcasing that home prices have continued to stay stable last 6 months, the median household income is up 15% over the last 12 months at a price range where their purchasing power at today's interest rates can afford the home, the ARV that I need to hit, and I think about who my end client is, that is how you get into a situation as a wholesaler where you're successful because you're giving them the product that they need, that they can afford."

Brandon: "Yeah, it's why huge corporations spend billions of dollars on market research on what their clientele can actually want to want to purchase and what their purchasing power is. If I don't know what Sally wants to buy from me at the local corner store, how could I ever make a profit?"

Donato: "So it's really the same question, wholesaler or flipper, it's just what part in the process that you're injecting yourself into."

Brandon: "Yeah, I hear you on that. Let me give you one example of a caveat, okay, like, I can tell you this happened when interest rates started to go up in some markets, let's use Arizona as an example."

Donato: "Um, Phoenix, Arizona, massive appreciation for a long time, right? And what's happening for that time? Well, you're buying properties at like 80% of ARV, and you're selling them to flippers at like 95% of ARV, sometimes 100% of ARV because those flippers are idiots at this point, they're just buying too high. But to be fair, there's so little inventory, you know, supply shortage, etc., right? So if you're a career flipper, you kind of got to buy a property, you're doing that, right? So that's what's happening in Arizona."

Brandon: "Interest rates go up, what happen? Their interest rates go up. Well, now the retail prices of those properties, they slide a little bit, they don't slide a lot, right? So we're looking at like what are things selling for in the MLS, it's down a little bit, but cash buyers, those flippers, instead of buying at 95% of ARV, now I have clients that can't sell them for 65% of ARV if they want to because they got really skittish because they feel like the market's going down, right? So in that circumstance, like wholesalers in that market had a really, really hard time for a period of time until we like made it through that cycle."

Donato: "Um, on the other hand, people who were flipping and still going direct to seller, they ended up doing okay in that kind of market, right? So that would be one example. Would be flippers don't necessarily buy always based on the economics of the deal. There could be some level of perception that's involved in that that could cause them to buy higher or lower based on perception of what's going on in the market in such a way that might not exactly match the retail market because they're trying to look six months in the future and often they're going to be wrong about what's going to happen. So just like utilizing that as an example."

Brandon: "But the only way I can think to really know that is you have to know like at what percentage of ARV properties are selling for cash in a market more recently. So anyways, I'm just, they're just you like a jumbled mess of like random thoughts. Do you have any thoughts on any of that?"

Donato: "Yeah, yeah, no, that's really interesting. It brings up a good point, the discrepancy between data-backed decisions and folks who are transacting real estate based off, you know, their local knowledge or their gut feelings, right? And the potential opportunities that exist for wholesalers to sell to investors that have potentially a rosier outlook than they do based off the data they're seeing. Um, I think wholesalers that are operating on a what's happening 6 month, 12 months out and checking what's going on in the local market that they're already spending, you know, ads on or doing PPC on, will be the ones that can better buffer themselves against turning tides like when the interest rate environment is changing."

Brandon: "Um, and then for flippers, I mean, you talked a little bit about how flippers who were able to go direct to seller, almost cut out the middleman there, will be able to be more successful. Uh, personally, as a wholesaler, I would, I'm a little cautious whenever someone is able to or interested in cutting my out from my entire portion of the business, and which areas they have the capacity to do so."

Donato: "Um, but it's really interesting, you know, where one man's trash another man's treasure, and that's really the thing what you're describing there, uh, for folks who are willing to ignore the data to transact where they feel like they can. But I think what we also pointed out was when you do that, you're also the person at the most risk for when those retail prices start to tumble, and cash buyers, even more so than the data backs up, are more fearful then say they necessarily should be from an analytics approach."

Brandon: "And it always makes sense after the fact, right?"

Donato: "Right, they shouldn't have been so scary, but then there's another world where everybody lost a lot of money."

Brandon: "Think, well, you should've seen the read on the wall of what was happening here, right?"

Donato: "Yeah, but it is interesting how there's like, you know, with all markets, there's, there's some emotion that plays in, right?"

Brandon: "It does seem like for years we were kind of operating on the bigger fool strategy where like, yeah, I'll get this price, I'll get this property under contract, and is it actually worth paying this much for the property in a cash transaction? No, but I know that there's another person out there who's an even bigger fool than I am, yeah, and I'm gonna make the money because that person's gonna buy from me, right?"

Donato: "And then you can point to things like market trends like, well, look how much we've gone up the last couple years, let's see where we can go, like, like, and that's, you see your listing descriptions, or your, you know, wholesaler dispo, uh, descriptions talking about all the great things that are happening."

Brandon: "Um, absolutely, and that's kind of where you have, you know, uh, you know, a boulder that's kind of rolling downhill, and there's always someone that's going to be crushed afterwards, that's going to get worse than I am, uh, but eventually I think that that stops, you know, where we see, you know, huge market shifting events occur, whether that be something like COVID where interest rates drop really quickly, where versus interest rates come back up really quickly or legislation."

Donato: "At some point, things hit where fundamentals are required, and this guy, if I take a quick turn to the VC industry for SAS companies, right, uh, when you're looking at valuations for software companies, people are raising capital, and there's a period of time where it's like, you know, what, a billion dollar valuation, I don't care that you're, I don't care that your churn's at 30%, and I don't care that you've never made a profit, and your LTV is non-existent, uh, that's fine, uh, we're just going to keep pumping cash in this thing until—"

Brandon: "Yeah, all of a sudden, things aren't as rosy anymore, and then that's when fundamentals matter, that's when valuations come down, that's when people start reconsidering what they're willing to do because the safety net of there's another fool out there starts to diminish."

Donato: "So, in this point in time where we're seeing the market, uh, continues to really fluctuate, I think fundamentals matter more than ever, but other side of that, had a lot of talk from the Fed recently on what's going to happen, say, September, October, November, December of 2024, and if we're coming on the other side of what 2023 and 2024 have been—"

Brandon: "Yeah, and so I think we're going to see a potential return to the fact that, look, we made it through, and I think you're going to see it over, almost like overzealous, uh, population of real estate investors that are going to say, back to business as usual, things are easier again, and I, I can just see that, folks—"

Donato: "Who are too anxious to be able to use a strategy of a bigger fool's coming behind me too quickly into a potential turning of the market might find themselves just at the final point they're about to cross the finish

line stumbling because they were too ready to go back to a point where they could overpay for a little bit on these assets."

Brandon: "Yeah, yeah, makes sense. You're like the Warren Buffet of market selection."

Donato: "I mean, I'd love to have that comparison be made six years—"

Brandon: "Yeah, yeah, it's a few years, hey, I turned 25 two weeks ago, so I got a what, 70 years on him, something like that."

Donato: "Yeah, yeah, I say, you know, you don't, you don't quite have the track record yet, but you know, in terms of, in terms of thinking and philosophy."

Brandon: "Exactly, that's cool. Okay, so to summarize what you said, it sounds like like the fundamentals, in your opinion, you're saying maybe this changes a little bit based on like, you know, the bigger fool strategy, what's happening in the market, like emotions, etc., but like the real fundamentals here behind everything are, what's the median home value, and, and I imagine you, you'd probably say well, you don't want to be looking for really low median home value because there's not a lot of money to be made on those deals, no, you have to—"

Donato: "There's gotta be on above, um, and then you're also looking for appreciation of that median home value, so you know, we're not looking at a market that's been hit really hard recently. Ideally, if there's theoretically if there's a solid appreciation over time, then there's also equity, and if there's not a fall appreciation over time, there, there's less likely to be equity, of course, there's always, there always can be, um, and then days on market and why new listings on the market, which I imagine—"

Brandon: "Is kind of, it's like days on markets sort of what's happening, and then, and then new new listings on the market is sort of like the forward-looking look at what's probably going to happen to that market like if that's increasing at time, then, then it's likely that there's a market will increase soon."

Donato: "Yeah, generally like generally it's inverse relationship where as the new listings drop, uh, on market, um, depending on other certain fundamentals like if my days on market are continuing to increase, right, then I would usually expect that there are more properties on the market, right, so new listings are increasing, but if I'm seeing a very specific situation where my days on market is increasing month over month, but my new listings are going down month over month at the same time, that gives me a huge red flag on demand in my ability to be able to transact or sell to someone based on the fact that we're not seeing a lot of business moving on, on the flip side."

Brandon: "Yeah, if I'm seeing my new listings continue to, what was that, uh, go up, and my days on market are continuing to go down, huge green flag on demand for this area on what's continuing to happen in my ability to look forward, uh, as a marketer, and so exactly—"

Donato: "Yeah, but that would all be retail demand generally, so—"

Brandon: "Yeah, are you aware of any way to measure similar things from a cash buyer standpoint, or are we kind of like left looking at the retail demand as kind of the fundamental probably behind the cash buyer demand and sort of looking it that way?"

Donato: "Yeah, so when looking at a cash buyer perspective, a lot of the value that cash buyer is bringing in via a wholesaler is the fact that they are bringing off-market opportunity that generally speaking is going to be more affordable or it's going to be at a better margin than what you can get on MLS, yeah, right, that that's a huge value component for the end buyer of a wholesaler, and so if I'm tracking the retail market, and the retail market, I'm watching home prices continue to decrease while my days on market are going down and new listings are going up, I'm in a situation where it's getting more and more difficult for me to yield a better margin or a different transaction than someone can get on the retail market, and so I think wholesalers are in this almost never-ending battle kind of quid pro against the MLS and what people can get on the retail side based on the fact that their huge value component is that they're bringing deals that offer a better margin or easier access or this kind of secret treasure trove of opportunity that people can't find anywhere else, and so I don't, I think the smart wholesalers are the ones who are keeping an eye on the fact that they're not just competing against other wholesalers, they're competing against this large—"

Brandon: "Oh, jeez, millions of consumers and mom and pop flippers that are looking for an opportunity, or even more institutional who are looking MLS and a retail investor side to pick up opportunity, and so I don't necessarily have an idea on—"

Donato: "Or don't have a way that I could be tracking how long days, how many days, or really in some cases hours it takes from an off-market property to be sent out to your dispo list and then picked up, uh, but it's something that I think wholesalers have to be cognizant of if they're going to continue to operate in this market where you have millions of both consumers and hundreds of thousands of investors on the sidelines who are watching retail prices as an indicator of their buying activity."

Brandon: "Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. Is there anything else you'd look at?"

Donato: "Yeah, on a more specific level, like when I'm looking at a deal by deal basis, so for example, if I'm getting leads through, you know, my acquisition channel, PPC comes in, hits my CRM, and my VA is looking at them, I almost always keep in mind my end client, so am I selling, if I am going to plan to wholetail this, or do like a novation, and I'm going to sell to an owner-occupant, they are very much going to be concerned on local school rankings and local crime, and so if my end strategy I want to include somehow involves going direct to consumer for this asset in some way, um, I don't necessarily have to build in a margin for those folks, so I'm able to go to maybe a little bit higher median home price, but things like being on a double yellow road, having school rankings that are above a four out of ten on a Great Schools ranking system, and being avoiding of areas that have higher levels of aggravated assault, simple assault, vehicle break-ins, or uh, weapon law violations are all things that your end consumer is going to be watching or their agent is going to be advising them on, uh, when they go to transact on the investor side, if I am—"

Brandon: "Trying to sell a property, I'm also generally going to look at things such as uh, local income, local franchises, a lot of investors will buy off of, well, if Chick-fil-A and Starbucks and Target are here, then I want to be here, so looking at assets that have proximity to those types of huge, almost indicative of what's coming to an area establishments, is a great way that I'll use to double check uh, what other companies are doing in the area, so then not when I'm going to dispo that property, I'm saying, look, half a mile from your Starbucks, quarter mile from your Chick-fil-A, income's going up, rent growth year-over-year is up 10% or 5%, whatever that number is, those are the things that I know my investor client on the back end are going to be looking at, so I'll check all those things as well, so my ideal situation, after getting to a market that has the right, let's say days on market, home price, and new listings, if I have an asset that is also around high school rankings, low crime, with proximity to those higher income targeting establishments with year-over-year positive rent growth, all that upfront work makes that property a steal to sell on the back end, so you're decreasing your time to sale, and you're able to start transacting properties a whole lot easier, and you don't get stuck with, I can't move this asset, and that's what a wholesaler's worst nightmare is, right? I've got 10 properties under contract, and my EMD or my um, my window to withdraw is in seven days, and no one's biting, so we want to avoid having to hold those properties on books by looking at some of those more specific intra-market things on a deal by deal basis."

Brandon: "Okay, that makes sense. So you wouldn't look at it and say I'm not going to target this area because of this. You'd more look at it as well, now that we have a deal available in this area, this is the information I'm going to use almost as like uh, as part of the comping process, like understanding how much you're going to be able to sell this for."

Donato: "Absolutely, I mean, once you have some of your highly market indicators saying, look, I'm marketing to this area, the next step is on a deal-by-deal basis saying, what is my risk tolerance for the specific asset, like, I know this area, let's say the zip code is definitely something that I'm interested in, but this street over here, I'm going to have more time, like you said earlier, right, which county on this side of the county I'm doing

great, this side I'm not doing so hot, can we get that specific on a deal by deal basis, so it's part of the comping process, I know before I ever write that offer or my I'm going on an acquisition manager doing a know um, a meeting with the seller, I know exactly what my likelihood is being able to sell this thing based on the street by street analytics, so that way you go down from hey, two out of ten properties or three out of ten properties that we're picking up, we're having a really hard time moving, you can remove those overnight by just having a little more time spent on the analysis when you're prepping these deals."

Brandon: "100%, that makes sense. Anything else you look at?"

Donato: "I generally, well, ideally, this is someone who knows their buyer list, so I, I, this is more applicable to someone who's spent time curating their list and someone who has spent time interviewing some of their buyers, but I think it's critical to understand what their exit strategies are going to be, right, is this a person says, I'm going to turn this into an MTR or STR, I'm going padsplit on this deal, and it has to have, I'm going to be a room by room strategy, right, I really want to understand what is this person trying to do with this asset, not that I have to speak to every single person on my list, but having segmented out their top three strategies that they're trying to acquire properties for is going to be huge, whether I'm saying, look, I know this person, like in Seattle, right, is only targeting properties where they have lot size of over 5,000 ft, like can add an ADU on the back, okay great, so when I'm doing my comping strategy and my PPC strategy and I'm targeting these areas, and then I get my VA who's doing the comping, if it doesn't have this type of say lot size, and I know a significant portion of my buyers in this area are looking for that strategy, why waste another second on that deal because you already know that a large majority of your buyer list is not going to want to take that deal down, and so things like that which is are they going to do a padsplit, great, then I need to have a pretty, I need to have the, you know, square footage or the capacity to be able to add some other bedrooms if I need to be able to do a short-term rental, okay great, what are my local RS looking like, or if I'm doing something like a mid-rental, are there major attractants such as things like in Georgia film industry or around major metros, major hospital systems that my end buyer is going to be successful, so if it had to summarize everything, try your best to set up your end buyer for success, so then you'll be successful, uh, if I, if I can make one piece of advice, knowing who you're selling to by using data in a fast way will help you move product faster, easier, and a better margin because you're matching what you have to sell with what your client is demanding."

Brandon: "Got it, that makes sense, that's cool. T, I'm gonna have to listen to this, this one again, and, uh, and see, uh, see what we can do to revamp some of the strategies that we're using to target markets for our clients because that's, it's super interesting, some of, some of the information that you shared. Um, any last words of wisdom before we close this episode out?"

Donato: "Um, I would say, thanks for having me on, and I would say, there are so many opportunities across the nation that real estate is a national game, that's why you've seen some of the top wholesalers and folks in our industry move away from markets they've historically been successful in and target secondary and tertiary markets in major cities and continuing to go to primary markets in smaller, less known areas. If you want to be successful, you got to go where the fruit is growing, and that means you got to play real estate on a national level, so if you're not already doing that, you need to, and if you are doing it, work with people, use the data, and target things effectively, you minimizing your CAC, you're minimizing your speed to lead, and you're able to move properties faster and easier than anybody else because your head's not the freaking sand, you can do it, so do it if you want to be successful, that's what I have to say."

Brandon: "Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. Thank you for your time and all the wisdom you shared with us today, and for anybody else listening, I will see you next week."

‍

Locations are one of your single biggest levers for getting superior results in digital marketing. Garret Cragun joins Brandon to discuss how location targeting impacts results and where people are going wrong.

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"Hello and welcome to the Collective Clicks Podcast. I'm your host, Brandon Bateman, and I'm joined by Garrett Cragan today."

"Who is, what do we call you? Product R and D."

"Rockstar. Rockstar. Yes. Rockstar. Digital marketer. That's best in the business. That's right."

"We are a company that helps investors level up their digital marketing. The information you'll get in this podcast will help you do that, but if you want to reach out to us to have us do that for you, you can go to batemancollective.com. So, to get started today, Garrett, let's talk a little bit about a nugget. What's one thing that you think is relevant right now that investors will benefit from in the digital marketing space?"

"Yeah, let's talk nuggets. One of the biggest pain points that we've seen lately on Google is cost per clicks are quite high. And the ability to see what people are actually searching has been taken away bit by bit. Over the last year by Google. So, an awesome way to get back those search terms and also bring down that cost is by having some ads running on Bing. Bing is quite a bit cheaper than Google and it does also tend to trend a bit older, which is great for our audience."

"And then on top of that, they don't have the same limits on the search terms they show you, which helps what you're actually spending money on to see if they're good searches or bad searches. And that's gonna, in turn, bring up your lead quality and bring down your ad spend waste. So that's an easy way to scale and scale efficiently with much better results."

"Yeah, that's awesome. I just have one question. Are you ever gonna call it Microsoft? No. Or are you just never, you're just putting your foot down?"

"No way. Just not gonna call it what it's actually called. It's Bing. It'll always be Bing. Yeah. Context for everybody. Good old Bing ads rebranded as Microsoft Ads, and I don't think anybody actually calls it that in the industry. I think the reason they did that is because it's not just Bing, right? It's Bing, Yahoo, AOL, and some other smaller ones too."

"Oh, DuckDuckGo is another one that's on there. Yep. So there are good search engines here. You could say, what would you say to someone who says, 'But who actually uses Bing? There's nobody uses Bing, so why would I even want to advertise there?'"

"A couple of factors. One, it's the default browser on all Windows desktops. So if they don't change that engine it's there natively, which old people usually don't. Which they don't. And also if they're like making a search for our keywords, then they're our target audience. So if they're there and searching it, then doesn't matter where it's being searched. Yeah. Yeah."

"You make a good point. What if you start to run Bing ads and then nobody ever... Like some people hypothesize, then you just won't spend any money."

"Yeah. Cause you pay per click. So not a big deal. Either they search and it's a win or they don't, and you didn't lose anything from it."

"Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah. Cool. So Bing. Good platform."

"Bing. The main topic for today is locations. I want to talk about where are people going wrong with locations? What are you seeing as a media buyer in accounts and how that's basically how location targeting impacts results. Yeah. And all those kinds of things. Locations are one of your single biggest levers for results."

"I like to think of results in two different ways. Cause clients ask us all the time, how do we get better results? And I ask myself that question every single day. And there's kind of two ways to do it. The first one is taking your parameters you already have and doing better within them. Being more efficient, optimizing. The second one is actually changing those parameters. Parameters are like, the locations you're targeting, all that kind of stuff. So you could have locations and you could be trying to optimize to get the most leads or the best leads within those locations. But sometimes it's worth thinking should you be in different locations to begin with, and does that change the game? Because you can make a lot faster progress by changing parameters than you can by optimizing within them. What in your opinion, what are some things that someone should think about as they're deciding what kind of locations they want to target with?"

"Great question. I think there's a few factors in making that location targeted decision. The first is how wide of a radius can your operation handle? If you don't have the operational infrastructure right now to handle nationwide, then I probably wouldn't go that wide because it is, it's gonna be hard to reach those leads and work them effectively. That's the first is, just your, like what's already in place. The second is going to be probably budget is a big one. Of like how much do you have to spend and how are you able to like disperse your campaigns and still have enough data brought in to learn effectively? And then I think the third is just where have you seen the most success historically in your other channels? And that's probably where I would start on paid is what's already been verified and vetted out in your other channels."

"Yeah. Understood. One question that a lot of people have is they hear that in this industry things are regulated pretty heavily from a location standpoint. So I know a lot of people like to target zip codes. And stuff like that. And there's been some restrictions on different platforms and basically the, there's a kind of rumor going around that you can't really do much with locations. To what extent is that true and what can we do?"

"Yeah. So there's been a definite crackdown on Google in the housing industry or Facebook too, or vertical? Yeah. On both, because they don't want people in housing to restrict based on underprivileged zip codes, because that's been a like historic way to isolate the underprivileged, which by the way drives me crazy."

"Yeah. Because I don't feel like I'm discriminating by you are choosing to show my ad in one zip code, but not in another. But for the betterment of the world, I guess we'll stay away from that. And because our ads are going to fall under housing on both platforms, we have to find other ways of targeting that help us to still reach our ideal areas without being blocked for foregoing the route of zip codes. And so in general, what you can do is, target by a number of other methods by city, by state, by DMA or by radius are the most common ways that we've done it historically on counties too. In counties as well. Yeah. And so those are gonna be the ways to still reach that audience without getting caught in the game of cat and mouse with Google and Facebook of trying to work around their rules."

"Yeah. And to expand on that a little bit you'd be surprised by how granular you can get with Google though. Like we might not be able to target zip codes, but we can target a one-mile radius which is pretty better, honestly in certain cases."

"Yeah. Yeah. Zip codes are like an arbitrary thing. Versus versus radius is can be a little bit more narrow. Facebook though, it's 15 miles. So that's definitely a barrier. I know I've worked with clients I'll give one example. We had a client in Long Island and they like they like Queens, but they don't want Manhattan and. I can't remember all the other areas, other boroughs. I think Queens isn't a county, it's a borough. So we had to do a 15 mile radius of Queens, and that actually goes into so many other places when you look at such a densely populated place like like New York."

"So anyways, there there's isolated circumstances where it's problematic or maybe you want like a little town in 15 miles out from that town is just way too rural for you. Sure. So that's where I think Google's a little bit more friendly than Facebook."

"Definitely. The other thing is with Facebook, you can't do actual cities. You can only do radiuses of cities versus Google. You can target cities. So, anyways, but to what extent do you feel like that really hurts us?"

"I don't think it does, honestly, because I think it just gives you more control over the exact outline of the area that you are targeting. I don't think there's that different of an audience composition at the radius or the city level than there is at the level of a zip code. And as our ads run, we can see which of those different ways of targeting are better and which performers and so we can gather data on that just like we could with zip codes. So I don't think it's a hindrance at all."

"Yeah. I've been doing this for a while. I remember the times before that change. And I've met a lot of investors, surprisingly, that kind of cite that time when the change is made is that's when everything stopped working. Which the thing is, because there's other things that happened too, then right now you can't target by age. You can't target by gender. Like all these things that we could theoretically discriminate we only wanna buy men's houses. Not any women who own houses or some evil thing like that. So we can't do that."

"So anyways, a lot of people really struggled with that but, really what the crazy thing is our overall, our strategies didn't change because we had tried all that and we had strategies that were working better before then. And they also weren't

restricted when those changes happened. With the exception of some select things for a few clients. So zip code targeting was another one of those. I even when we could do zip code targeting, I obviously suggested to our clients that we not do it because it's really narrow. You wanna talk about the relationship between how narrow you are and the potential success of the campaigns."

"Yeah. And before going into that I think this is just an example of how Google does not have the best interest of the business at heart. They're always going to change things and change the game and what worked before can't overnight just stop working. And so that's why it's important to always be testing and try new things because they like to change the rules and all of a sudden things are a lot harder."

"Yeah. It's not, you don't just need something that works. You need to find as many things that work all the time and be very flexible so if something stops, you can do something else."

"Totally. Yeah. But going into the how the size of the targeting and the effectiveness of the ads goes in general, the wider you can target, the more inventory you are bidding on. And so the lower you can bid and still win the bid. So for instance if you're in like an auction of an estate if you're bidding on all of the things versus just one item from that auction the odds of winning one thing are a lot higher than if you only wanted that one thing very badly. And that same idea is how things work as well in PPC where the wider you go, the better your odds are of winning the clicks that you want at a lower cost per click."

"Yeah. Yeah. And assuming everything else is equal, lower cost per click equals better results. It's not the only thing that matters, right? So if you're adding locations to your targeting that just deteriorate your lead quality to get a lower cost per click, then it's a losing bet, absolutely."

"But if you're targeting all good locations. So that's where I think what's happened sometimes is I've talked to people that just know, there's like a certain area of town where there's a lot of motivated sellers, for example. So they're like, I wanna target that zip code. But I think what we fail to realize about PPC is you pay for the click after it happened and you're targeting them based on intent. So let's just say you have the zip code where there's not usually motivated sellers, but then someone demonstrates motivated seller intent when they're searching and they're there, then you probably still want that person because they said that they wanna sell their house as is implying it's in poor condition or fast or whatever the case is."

"So that's where we've we've noticed that some of those areas that are clients where they want, they do have higher volume, but it doesn't mean the other areas don't have any volume. And if you're already filtering based on people being motivated sellers, then you don't need to be quite as narrow with your targeting as you think. It's not like you're just blanketing these areas."

"Yeah, absolutely. And I think a bigger indicator of a lead's quality isn't as much where they are because like what worked historically might not work anymore For every searcher it's more about like their past behavior and all of those cues and data points that Google has on that user. So what I would recommend as a very broad rule of thumb is go as broad as you can handle and as broad as is effective because that gives Google more room to use its algorithms and processes to find the intent in that haystack because just having keywords and just having the right location, isn't as effective as pairing that with intent data, which is where things are heading now on Google and on Facebook is being able to leverage more than just where a person is to know if they're a high or a low value prospect."

"Yeah, I think there's all this rhetoric around in the business world of like focus, and I think sometimes with location targeting and digital marketing, it's we're on the wrong track. Where, people say yeah I, do work in both those counties, but I really want to double down on this county so that we can make it work. And I wanna focus. But what people fail to realize is that by being more focused geographically, you lose the luxury of being more focused other places. Sometimes I think you fit like, there's a target. This target has a bullseye. If you target more places that bullseye can be hit."

". Yep. And that means that you can be extremely focused based on all these other things that you talked about, these intent signals to where we can know if someone's gonna be a motivated seller versus if you're more narrowly targeted then and you have a certain amount of budget, then you have to you might be able to target the bullseye, but then you also need to target the arena around the bullseye. And maybe you need to go one ring out from there, because you just can't fit all the budget into the bullseye. So being hyper-focused on locations makes it so you can't be focused on others."

"And there's some relationship there. I like your analogy of the auction. Cause that's how Google works. And, Facebook too, in its own twisted way."

"Yeah, but let's not talk about that. But the, another analogy I use sometimes is, imagine you want to pick apples, so you go to an apple orchard. What a lot of people think choosing locations is, looking at that orchard from afar, detecting which tree has a lot of low hanging fruit on it, and then deciding you're only gonna pick fruit, from that tree. And it's not completely wrong because you, will find some low hanging fruit on that tree. But the thing is just because another tree has a lot of fruit high up. , it could also have some low, hanging fruit."

"Alright. So the way that this works with the, these algorithms, if you target wider, you don't have to just choose the, trees with low hanging fruit because what you can do is you can set bid limits. That's kinda how it works with PPC. So you could tell your person working in the orchard or something, you're not allowed to. , you're not allowed to pick any fruit that's higher than five feet in the air. Or whatever the case is. And in doing so, you make sure that they focus, even if there's trees that have a lot of high fruit, but also have low hanging fruit, you make sure you get the low hanging fruit only and that makes you more efficient."

"So if you look at that, let's just say you're pushing a certain budget into it, and you just chose the tree that has the most low hanging fruit, or that you've seen the most low hanging fruit in historically, or whatever the case is. What happens is you spend some time picking that low hanging fruit and it's great, but then you have to start climbing higher and higher in the tree. and soon enough now you're picking fruit that's higher than in the tree next to it, where it's nice and low hanging."

"So there's some element of it, depending on your budget. . Yeah, absolutely. And so the way that that this, looks in process is having a tiered structure where not all of these are equal and not all areas perform in an equal way. And so what we recommend us as an in between of going broad and just saying, go for it. Google spend our budget which, I wouldn't recommend. Or, the other end of saying I, only wanna target this one county because that's where I drove lots of leads that closed eight months ago."

"What, we would do instead is, give d different tiered amounts of leash or rope. That Google can have on each of those areas based on how much we want it to spend. So we say this, area, we seem to be very effective. We are okay. Okay? If each lead costs up to 200 two 50 a lead, because that's been very effective. And so the odds of that ratio being stronger is higher. Whereas this, other county. , we still wanna target it to bring down our, overall cost per lead. But in general it's, going to be lower quality."

"So w. , we will give Google less rope and say in, in this area, let's keep our, maximum, our target cost per lead to one 50. Because it's, ratios of quality to close deals is a lot lower, but we don't wanna just wipe it out because then that brings that that, bed floor a lot higher."

"Yeah. You're, basically showing that it's not like locations are black and white. No, there's lots of gray there's, good locations. There's great locations, there's okay locations. And what a lot of people say is just, do the great and get rid of anything else. But then you limit your volume pretty significantly and, you can drive the cost in the Great Up. A lot. A, funny way a client of ours said this is I, explained this whole like apple orchard thing. He's yeah, I get it, but it doesn't mean anything if the apples are crap. . Yeah. And he, but he's basically saying is there's some areas where we can't actually. The apples."

"And the, point there being that strategy that Google has, it's gonna get you the lowest cost per lead. That doesn't mean it's the best strategy. So what you're talking about with this tiered structure is, great. We did this with the client recently where there's this big city. and they want leads there. And then there's all these like smaller areas around there. And this, is a pretty high volume investor that does probably at least 400 deals a year

. And, they they, do it in all those areas."

"But what he said is, I only wanna target this core city and the reason is my spend will go to all those other areas if I target those and I really want leads in this core city. So he had worked with four PPC companies before him that just said, okay, just target that city what we did differently. is we changed the parameters. We, said we're gonna target that city, but we're willing to pay X dollars per lead. And then we had three tiers. We had the top tier, and then we had a tier below that where we said, these areas are all worth this much per lead to us."

"And then we had a lowest tier where it's we want leads here, but we're only willing to pay this much. Because the thing is, just because it leads less valuable doesn't mean you don't want it. It means you wanna pay less for it. You can't pay a thousand bucks per lead for a $300. But if you get it for 50 bucks, then that's a six x return. So it's, a good business."

"That's, really interesting. So a lot of people are sometimes frustrated because they target a lot of areas, and what they find is that they only get leads from the worst areas that they're targeting. Can you explain why that happens and how we can avoid it?"

"Yeah. So in general, like you were saying, Google does a very good job of hitting the targets We give it, and it's going to do it at the most efficient way possible. And if it doesn't have inputs of, like, How that lead performed in the pipeline, it's going to assume that was the exact kind of lead that we wanted. And so in general, h how it does that is, is it reaches the areas of our of, our targeting. That have the lowest amount of competition. And in general that is going to to, coincide with the least desirable areas that we're targeting. And so those leads are, gonna be quite cheaper. than going after a metro, but they might not be reachable for your team or they might not be just for other reasons. Very qualified. And so in general it's, helpful to, to have A larger number of radi being targeted than just one large radi. That way Google has, better inputs to like, measure performance than just all reach the outskirts of this radius. And, that's been very helpful for us in the past."

"Yeah. And it's, not even like Google does that like this, it's a confusing concept cuz if you look at you look at channels like Cold Call direct. whatever the case is like to, make a phone call costs a certain amount of money. To send a postcard costs a certain amount of money. And so we deal with a lot of marketing channels where there's a fixed cost, but then the value is variable. So you wanna send the postcard to the right place. You want a cold call at the right person. PPC is weird because the cost is variable and the value is variable."

"Yep. So it's not like this is good or this isn't, it's that this is okay, we just wanna pay less. And, what happens with that? Because of that variable cost component. in the auction system. It's basically if you target two areas, one of them has an average cost per click of a hundred bucks, the other one has 10 bucks. You're gonna get most of your clicks in the $10 area. Just because that's where you win your auctions, you're coming in hot with those bids in the other area. You're just not."

"Yeah. So it's, interesting. It's like Google's like sinister and I'm gonna give you the worst leads or something. No. It's just, you told it, get me as many leads as I can and Right. And it's doing that, it's finding where it can get you the best leads best. different conversation. Like you said, there's some quality implications here. You could even think of a, keyword list, the same way we're talking about locations. Where you can go wider, you can go more narrow. There could be higher quality, lower quality, and you risk unless you provide the right parameters or the right tiered structure to Google, you risk bad quality."

"So Totally. Anyways, that's why it happens. Like you have those, outskirts towns and those have one 10th the population altogether of the main area, but then you get all your leads there. So you either don't target them if they're not good, or you use a tiered structure."

"Yep. Or you have a really big budget."

"Yeah. . That's the secret. That's always helpful."

"Yeah. If you have a huge budget, you just get everything That's right. And then it's it's not like you're picking and choosing."

"What do you think, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the nationwide model. Lots of investors are doing this recently. What do you think?"

"As a marketer I think it's very effective and smart and the way Google and Facebook work is they work best with lots of data points, so the more leads it has to work with. The better it learns what keywords, what audiences, what demographics are best engaging with your ads and with your content and becoming leads."

"So the better it's fed, the better it performs. And as you go broader and you're targeting the cost per lead goes down, which helps your budget drive more leads. Per dollar be because each lead costs less. And so from a a, marketer, I would love to. Help all of our, clients eventually shift nationwide because it makes the, engine much more effective because it has more fuel essentially. And that goes even one step further. If, we can feed Google. More data around quality and say, this lead was, this much more valuable to us than that lead. And that becomes even more effective as it has more data points to pull from. So I love Nationwide because it really does help Google and Facebook perform dramatically better. We obviously drive awesome results for, all models, but Nationwide is in, particular, very well fitting for PPC."

"Yeah, I, I think. . You know what I love about Nationwide? If you can figure it out, there's nobody stopping you from a hundred X-ing your lead flow."

"Totally. There's, so many leads to get. I think I also think there's something people often misunderstand, I think of nationwide as like you go after all these areas that are like these tertiary areas. Or far out rural or something, and that's why your lead cost goes down. But the reality of it is you're. We live close to Salt Lake City, right?"

"You could say the cost per lead in Salt Lake City is whatever it is, which honestly, last year was really high and this year is very low . Yeah. It's a one of those big movers. But, you could say there's that, that that cost per lead. The thing is the way that you get cheaper leads by going nationwide isn't that you just target a bunch of cheaper areas. It's that you could even target 20 markets that were exactly the same as Salt Lake City in some hypothetical situation, and you'd have lower. . Why is that? Why does the cost per league go down even when you're in equally competitive areas? You're just targeting more of them?"

"I think it's, probably a, misnomer. Calling it nationwide, it's it's more just localized versus multi-region targeting. And so like we, we talked about e even if they are equally pursued markets with equal number of advertisers in those, spaces, there's still a, wider range of, or. That, that Google can pick from as opposed to just having this handful of trees to, choose. It has more and, it can, better match the, intent and the cost with your budget, even if they are still on their own still very high demand regions."

"Yeah that's, really interesting. And I think a common misconception around this is, . Yeah. That you think if the average cost per clicks in that market is 60 bucks, you think you pay 60 bucks. What people don't realize is for any given keyword, if your average cost per click is 60 bucks, there's someone who paid a hundred another who paid 80 another paid 60. There's someone who got that click for $10. Yeah. In a really small volume of them."

"I think another another example of this would be let's just say I'm a. and I want, I buy my houses from wholesalers and I want to flip 30 houses each year. If I flip 30 houses in one market, what happens to me is I have to, I probably get a bid more for those wholesalers cause I have to buy more of the houses that I see. Versus if I wanted to flip two houses that year, I can probably buy them really well."

"Now a lot of those people who do. flip two houses each year. Don't, because they don't know what they're doing. But assuming I'm, I know what I'm doing, I could find just the two best deals. And it works the same way in PPC. You can pick off the, cheap stuff, but you can't afford to do that if you have to be aggressive. The, task of getting volume works against efficiency. And it's, always kind of a, trade off. The other thing is we've had some clients try an nationwide strategy just because. , they hear that you can get so many more leads and it's cheaper, but the just because a lead could be closed at a certain rate in the market and it could be dispositioned for a certain amount of money and all those things, doesn't mean that your team

can, that's the other thing."

"I think a lot of operational complexity comes with nationwide. Where we see our clients, we've, we have seen some companies expand. When they expand regions, their number of leads goes up and the quality stays exactly the same, but their actual team performance is lower just because it's a harder barrier to comp properties in a variety of areas, and it's harder to disposition properties outside of your core area. You have any advice on that? Oh, . You mean like how do teams like improve their operational efficiency if they're going nationwide? Yeah. Cuz the thing is, we know that theoretically those leads are a certain value and they're being bought at a certain cost, but it becomes hard as a company to, to actually get that value out of them when it's every time a different market. I'm gonna pause it here. I have no."

"Fair enough. I was just curious. I have no idea. So we, let's just cut that, one out. Perfect. Move on. I have no idea."

"All right. How to answer that. All right, we'll just I'll just jump into something different. Okay."

"What was the thing we talked about just before that we were talking about how going into multi-region still it brings down cpl, even if they're Oh, yeah."

"In the operational complexity. Competitive, yeah. Sorry. I just was like, I don't know. I'll just pick up there. Cool."

"But yeah, some companies we have worked with they, just really struggle to deal with that operational complexity. They end up getting a lot of properties under contract for too high a prices. Their acquisitions team doesn't know what homes are worth, especially in this market where prices are sliding a little bit and I guess the, point they're being it's, not all in theory, right? The theoretical truth is if you could go wider, then you bring your cost per lead down, and that means that you increase your return on investment. But if your revenue per lead slides faster than your cost per lead, , which isn't necessarily cuz the markets are worse cause the lead quality gets worse. It could be cuz you just don't perform as well."

"Yeah. Then you can lose and and I think that's really tough. So there's a balance a lot of our clients are doing well target a few markets within a state or a few states. We have some that do really well, like completely wide."

"I think it's a little bit I think it's a difficult model, but I think it can work really well. It seems like most companies just take advantage by. the, fact that they're just gonna pay maybe way, lower cost per LE 25 or 30%, of what they would've before. And then even if you don't close quite as well or don't disposition quite as well, it can be more profitable just because the lead cost is so much lower. So it's a, yeah, I guess it's just a little bit of an interesting. model."

"One thing that people really struggle with just because of that, nature of how the spend gravitates towards the least competitive areas, especially with nationwide advertising, is just r rural leads. And how do you deal with that and areas that are harder to disposition, unique properties?"

"I think that there's a, bunch of different ways that people handle this. I'll, share that first and then I want to hear your solution because I think it's way better than, a lot of these other things. But, how do you do that? Like how do you, predict the disposition? The dis is disposition ability a word, the disposability? Nope, that's not it. That's not it."

"I I, don't know. How do you predict the capability of dispositioning a property in a certain area? Is it based on the number of people in the county? Population wise? We've had people try to do that. Some people try to do it based on cities. Like I only wanna sell in cities that have at least. , 50,000 population. But then the thing you don't realize is that if you looked at a metro area, you're cutting out a lot of really good areas there because it's a tiny part of the metro area, but it's overall connected to the whole thing. And it might not have a lot of people in that specific town. Every, market has their own place where it's like you in Salt Lake City, you have Salt Lake City, and then South Salt Lake City is a different city. And just because I want Salt Lake doesn't mean I want South Salt Lake."

"Don't want South Salt Lake, but maybe South Salt Lake's not actually that big. It doesn't have that much population cuz it's geographically really. . So I think targeting based on cities doesn't work. Other people just try to do like a radius of cities, just say, okay, then I'll do within this many miles of it. But then sometimes you get really rural stuff, sometimes you don't, sometimes you don't even get part of the metro that you should have gotten."

"So what's your solution to dealing with that?"

"Yeah, so we've b been working on an, answer to the, this question for, quite some time, and what we've, found that. we offer to all of, our clients is we've built out a, basically a database that breaks down all of the different radio of each of the metros in the country. And we have it, it broken down by, by, population, by deal spread and by a number of, factors. And then we work with, our clients. to help them build out a custom location targeting map based on this da this database that we've built out. And what's cool about this database is it's based around a pool of of, nighttime views of, the nation based on lights. And, this was your kind of brainchild. So I'll let you dive into. Nitty gritty of, this targeting method, but it's been very, effective and our clients love it."

"Yeah. What we call it is satellite imagery targeting. And the, yeah. The way that it works is we, choose to include or not include a location based on the light density of that location and the light density itself basically correlates really strongly with ability to disposition a. because it just shows how many people are there. And, cuz Lions, you are around cities and things like that, they're arbitrary. I could have just made that city two cities instead of one city, and now it has half the population. Does that represent that It's not as easy to disposition in?"

"So, I guess the way that we, yeah, the way we did it is it's based on proximity. And continuous lights. So think of it like if you're going to drive from the center of a market, let's say I'm in the heart of Atlanta to whatever property this is. . The ones that are easier to disposition, we find are the ones where, on my way to that property, I'm gonna be passing houses left and right the whole way. If I drive and I pass houses left and right, but then I go through farmland and then I eventually get to this town. It's not as easy. But if it's part of that core metro then, it's part of what people consider to be like the, actual metro, which doesn't necessarily align with the DMA or whatever, it is that people use to, to do that."

"So, anyways, that's, I think that's a pretty neat, way of going about it. One last question. There's a, fun strategy going around. We have a lot of our clients asking us about it because there's people teaching different strategies around locations and how do you choose locations, how do you know which markets to go into and all that kind of stuff. And what, people are advocating for is that you do an analysis. And I'm not gonna lie, this sounds pretty cool. I don't, I think in theory it's not. I, think in theory it's cool. In reality it's, not as cool if you understand how PPC works. But I'm curious to hear your, take on it."

"Basically the concept is you should look at different. You should predict maybe based on median home prices, what your assignment fee would be in that market. And then you kinda wanna model out your, stuff and, look at the average cost per click in that market. And you're looking for these, really good ROI markets where the spreads are gonna be big, but the cost per click is low according to your research with Google, like with keyword planner. And then you also do this on a keyword level, so you might run a nationwide campaign. You look at each different market and you basically analyze these a hundred keywords across that market, and you find which ones are the cheaper ones in that market, and then in the campaign targeting that market, you only include those cheaper keywords. So you're like zeroing in on where that best intersection between locations and keywords is. Does that make sense? Is that pretty clear?"

", what are your thoughts on that? I think it sounds awesome and I think if Amen if, that worked, I think. Could all make a lot of money doing it that way. Where I see issues coming from that strategy is it doesn't really line up with how Google works these days. It doesn't work very well with really, tight boundaries like that cuz it doesn't let you set those kinds of, tight but those type bounds anymore. It just doesn't. So if we wanted to target those keywords, there isn't really a, guarantee. That Google would bid on only those keywords. It, could very easily find some searches that look like that keyword. that actually performed quite a bit differently than the analysis that that, you just spent hours and weeks like

breaking into, because it's a lot of data to pull because goo because Google's actually no, sorry privacy laws."

"And, so that's one. And then going that tight in, Targeting it by location again, sounds great. Let's, cut out all the waste. But that bring, brings up your cost and that paired with the, lack of, control over what you're actually bidding on from, a search term perspective means that you are bringing up your cost on search terms that you don't necessarily want."

"Yeah. And you can't see. So it sounds great, but with, but it's put like pushing against where Google is, heading right now from a machine learning perspective."

"Yeah. I, agree with everything you said, but I'm gonna play devil's advocate. Okay. And because I think there's more to unpack about why it's not a good idea, . Yeah. So let's just say you have a perfect, theoretically perfect negative keyword. , and let's just say that locations aren't any more narrower than you would've gone otherwise, you're just putting them in different campaigns. So it's I'm still targeting the same 20 markets. I would've, now I have 20 campaigns instead of one campaign or two. And I still am, like I'm able to just have perfect exact match keywords, which doesn't exist anymore, but let's just say you could. And you can get relatively close with some pretty aggressive negative key wording and, stuff like that. What do you think in that scenario?"

"I think it's, so if it is broken out into one campaign per like target area, that's gonna really hurt because just for those, not like super. Deep into, how things are built up in, in goo Google ads, your data and your budget is set at the campaign level. So the more granular your account structure is and the, more campaigns you have and the more spread out your budget is in general, the less data. Google and you have at your disposal to, to optimize your accounts. Each campaign might have at most one click a day with it being that, spread out and it, might have one lead per month if, it's that disperse. And so it's, it gets really hard for Google and for you to be able to like, identify trends and bid more. effectively if things are, that broken out and, that granular from a budget perspective data's your friend with the algorithm. Last thing you wanna do is split it a bunch of ways. So it's less powerful. Exactly. I think. Yeah. Yeah, that, that's really interesting. So you say campaign granularity is just not good?"

"It sounds awesome. Structure. Yeah, exactly. Because the, algorithm just even with the same everything, if you just split it into 20 different ways, it just wouldn't work as well. Yep."

"Understood. There's another case for this about how in each of those markets you need to have creative specific to that market. So you're going to like, for example, in your ads, instead of just saying sell your house fast, like you might on a nationwide campaign in Atlanta, maybe you say sell your house fast in Atlanta, and then you're more relevant compared to those other companies. What's your take on that?"

"I don't think that it is the best tactic of having that written in, a static ad and in a static landing page where that text is, hard coded in, into the ad and in into the page. We do instead when we are, very broad in our targeting, is we add an element into our ads and into our pages that, that, pulls the location of the searcher and puts their city, puts their state into the messaging in our ads and in our page. And so you can still have that benefit of being very relevant to the searcher. Without having to, make your, targeting be that granular and that detailed. So there's the, benefit of being relevant and being oh they're, in Atlanta. I'm in Atlanta. Perfect. That's there, but it doesn't come at the cost of, Google and data size and data wholeness, I guess is probably the, right word for it."

"Yeah. I, love when you find solutions like that. Like it's a. you don't add granularity, but you do add personalization. Because granularity is the enemy of what we're trying to accomplish."

"Yeah. The personalization is good, so you want to get one but not the other. Exactly. And, the other thing about this is it just does that on such a deeper level. Cause it's not if someone's in Atlanta, that's just Atlanta. There's Atlanta and there's Alpharetta. And there's Marietta and I don't even know if I'm pronouncing these places right. But Sounds good. There's I don't know how much of people's targeting usually is like the city proper. But suburbs are a pretty big deal."

"Yeah. And you can have a different ad for every single suburb ever in the entire United States. We're talking about if you did that on the campaign level, you would have, I don't even know how many campaigns it would be It would at least 10,000. Absolutely. And, that would just be absolutely insane. So we can be much more personalized."

"The other thing I want to note is I think the concept of avoiding an area because it's too high. , either a keyword or a market. I don't think it fully makes sense in my opinion. I agree."

"Okay. I'm glad you agree with me. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Good, good. Echo chamber here. Yeah. But I think so, if we look at that strategy, let's just say we are doing it with one market and we look at all the keywords and we try to find the ones that are cheaper, and we try to just target those ones. The problem is next week it's different. Which ones are. The week after that, it's different. You could say, okay, let me do this analysis every time. But I think all of those problems can be solved with bidding."

"It's true value-based bidding because if if you know that a keyword is worth a certain amount of money, let's just say the average cost per click in that market is a hundred bucks, but I know it's worth 30, no problem. I'll bid 30 and there's only two things that can happen. Number one is I get nothing because I'm not bidding high enough. And then what did we really risk by having that keyword in our. , pretty much nothing."

"Yeah. Number two is the average click cost per click stays at a hundred bucks, but when the click for 30 bucks comes along, I get it. Yep. And that means I don't have to push as hard on another keyword because now I got this one at an extreme discount. You have any thoughts on, that overall?"

"I think there's a, very strong correlation between cost of a keyword and the intent and the value of that keyword. Other advertisers probably aren't bidding on a keyword at a, at an aggressive manner if it hasn't been found a as, of value to those, other bidders. So it, it doesn't make sense to me to exclude keywords that are high cost because they're likely going be high value. The, key is, bidding in, a way that matches your, businesses unit economics of I like this is, a great keyword, but once it's cost goes above this, based on my usual lead contact rates, lead qualified rates, and one contracts rates at this point that, that, cost per click stops being a, win for me. So I, I wouldn't take it out, I would just give it bounce or on, like from, here to here. This is like a great keyword, but beyond that, it stops being a, win. . The awesome thing about that strategy is it's not just that you're looking at it on a monthly basis or a weekly basis or a daily basis. It's every single time. There's an auction. Yeah. You decide if it's at your right price. There is no way to be more responsive, more accurate, like more quick adjusting to the market."

"So it's, I just think more, more robust. I, I. I have an unpopular opinion, which truthfully, I don't believe to be an opinion. I think it's a fact. If there's haters come, hate me. But I think that when it comes to location targeting, the single most important thing everybody says, it's roi, which I agree with that, but I think there's another metric that's more useful for selection of locations and that's revenue. Revenue per lead is basically it's really simple revenue per lead, but the, things that affect it are your close rates in the area and your spreads in the area. And because of the nature of digital marketing, how we can automatically optimize for cost per lead and all that stuff, I think it's not that important to try to find low cost. or high cost or whatever the case is. What we want is undervalued things, but we don't have to find undervalued things by finding them and targeting them. What we do is we find them by targeting everything but bidding on everything according to the value. So if I, if we know our revenue per lead is a thousand dollars and we know we want a five x return, we bid $200 on those leads, and then we're bidding to a return on investment. Because the thing is the, cost is, In any given market, you can get leads for a thousand dollars, you can get leads For $500, you can get 'em for $200, $100. Nothing's outta question. The real thing is how much volume are you gonna get

for those things? Because if you wanna pay a hundred bucks per lead and you want a hundred of them, and it's a small market, it's just not gonna happen, right?"

"But that's where if you just bid according to, value, I would argue that the, cost or the historical cost you saw in a market or whatever the case is, doesn't matter because you can make the cost, whatever it needs to be in the future. You just have to make it some fraction of what the revenue per lead is. You have any thoughts on that?"

"I think it it ties back to a, guiding principle in marketing and especially in ppc, is the people that win in PPC are, the people that have the best margins. . If you have ha have good margins, then you or like, taking it farther, like a, good like operation, then you can bid higher, spend more and, target wider and win. Where people that have worse margins have to be much more. And, so I, think it's, important to get that dialed in and, then your world of, options on paid becomes much, much larger because you can't afford to go where o other people can't go. That said if things aren't quite there yet in, in, your case. The key is, knowing where you are from a, margin perspective and bidding with that in mind. It's not go, not going to be as scalable because you'll win less of the time, but you'll win where it's most effective in, your business."

". Yeah. One, 100%. Agreed. Agreed. Who was the, who's the person that said the he or she who can afford to pay the most to acquire a customer? Wins. I don't know who it was. Probably Warren Buffet. I don't know. that, I guarantee you it's, not Warren Buffet, but yeah. . But Yeah. Honestly I, feel like if Warren Buffet was a marketer, he might have said that , but this was somebody else. Yeah. Some, ClickFunnels related person, I'm sure. Yeah. Who said that? But, anyways the, concept there is, yeah, if you have a higher revenue per lead, you have a higher roi, always. And other people have to have low cost and you don't have to Yep. You can afford to outbid them."

"Yep. Yeah. And I also think it has implications on the tiered structure. When we do these tiered structures, we do it based on revenue. Here's an area where we expect to have this spread. There's an area where we expect to have that spread. So we spend a lot more time looking at like, how's our spread gonna vary by area? How is our clothes rate gonna vary by area? Is there more competition in that area than another area? Do we have a higher likelihood of dispositioning in one area versus another? We spend a lot more time looking at all that stuff than we do. What is our cost per lead in this area or our cost per lead in that area? Because we can make those whatever we want them. . Yeah. And we just want it's, really, it's almost like the, actual numbers don't matter. It's the ratio of the numbers. It's knowing that this area is twice as high revenue per lead as that area. It just tells us we have to bid twice as much how much we bid. You don't have to know at the beginning. You just have to know that we're going to basically put the bids as low as we can put them while still spending our budget, and we're always gonna bid twice as much in that one area as we'll get in that other area. I wonder if I, don't know if I just lost everybody, but I think if, anyone is lost just do a deep analysis on cost and demand and supply and demand, and that's the, basic nuts and bolts of, ppc. I took lots of, classes in school, in economics, but I've learned much more about it doing PPC than I ever did in school. So it's definitely a, masterclass in economic. Supply demand and margins. Yeah. It's crazy. You're, yeah. It's, exactly like an economic model."

"Yeah. Plus the weird lack of transparency from the economy overlord of Google that just also just puts the asterisk. And also we could do whatever we want on top of whatever the model is. Exactly. So, fun. So there's a little bit of maybe you could say, Tyranny in, this economic model of ppc. But yeah our, loved tyrant Google, right?"

"Yes. We love to hate 'em but, they pay the bills, so we keep 'em around. Yep. Yeah."

"I think that I think that wraps up things for today. Thank you everybody for, joining us. And I'll see you next time."

‍

Jeff Meigs shares his insights on how to nail a video for Facebook Ads and why sometimes less is more after analyzing hundreds of Facebook Ads.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

Hello and welcome to Collective Clicks. This is your host, Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by Jeff Megs, who is a strategist with us at Bateman Collective.

"How are you doing today, Jeff?"

"Doing great. How are you?"

"Yeah. Doing excellent, thank you."

"Awesome. First time being on the podcast. Fifth time for me."

"Yes. First time for you."

"Yep. First time for me. Super excited. Happy to be here. Happy to talk."

"Yeah, yeah. You're more than welcome."

"I want to start. So, spoiler for everybody today, our topic is going to be on Facebook ads and specifically different creative that's working well for Facebook ads. But before, let's get to know Jeff a little bit. Got a couple of rapid-fire questions. He doesn't know what's coming."

"Oh, great. There we go."

"Number one, favorite digital marketing channel?"

"Favorite digital marketing channel would be... Yeah. Really Facebook."

"Ironic. Cause that's what we're talking about today."

"Oh, wow. I picked you just for the right thing. That's perfect."

"Why do you like Facebook compared to PPC or SEO?"

"I feel like it's a little more versatile for everything that it can do. I feel like it changes often. The audience is extremely diverse. Almost everyone's on Facebook, so I feel like that's a good channel."

"Yeah. Or Instagram, you know, like one of their properties."

"Right, right."

"Exactly. Or WhatsApp or everything else in Messenger. Messenger, who knows what else they're going to buy soon."

"Yep, exactly."

"Fair enough. Okay. That's awesome. So, there's a broad spread of audience and all that kind of stuff. Mm-hmm."

"Awesome. And your day-to-day job?"

"Yes. When you're not being an awesome podcast guest, is that you work with clients at Bateman Collective. Yes. You help them build their strategies and all that kind of stuff. What do you like about that?"

"I like dealing with the clients to get, being able to get to know them, on a personal level, but also being able to see the success that we help them bring. It's nice when they bring a lot of enthusiasm to us and we can return that and say, wow, we love your enthusiasm because that drives us to bring you success. And when they're successful, we share in those too and we say, we are so happy that you succeeded. It feels like it's part of our success too. When they have those good leads come in and those deals are close, I get really excited about it."

"Yeah, that's the enthusiasm."

"Yeah. Amongst our clients. It's something where I, yeah. I worked in a bunch of different industries before this one. I don't know that I've ever had such enthusiastic, excited clients. That's one thing I absolutely love about this too. And yeah, you get to get all the feedback. You're on the front lines."

"Yeah. Yeah. So that's definitely cool."

"So, let's talk about Facebook ad creative. What's working? I mean, it's a question that everybody has. What should I put in my ad? Today we're going to talk about the media specifically. So this is, you know, it's not like the copywriting headlines, descriptions, like landing pages. I mean, all of that is its own beast. But we're going to talk about like the image or the video that you put in the ads, and there's a whole bunch of different stuff that we use. We've tested, I don't, I don't even know if we could say how many of these different things we've tested. You would be surprised, like some of the more notable things are your pictures of houses, graphics, animations, professional videos, weird videos. Uh, one time we had like a Muppet, like saying on the news."

"Yeah. On the news. Yeah. This, this just in, we'll buy your house."

"Yeah. That was, yeah. There, there's an actual Muppet saying that, and by the way, it did not work at all."

"We had a five-minute video of a guy eating a sandwich, in which case, like during which he kind of like put in little plugs for like, why you should sell your house to him."

"Uh, that also didn't work. So, I mean, we've tested, we've tested a lot of stuff. Who would've thought ASMR on Facebook didn't work?"

"I don't know. It was a hilarious video like this. This particular client, if you're listening, you're famous around our office."

"Yeah, we love it. Yeah, we love the video. Unfortunately, it doesn't perform with Facebook ads, but, but it was worth a shot and I think it's hilarious. But we've tested tons of different stuff and, and I'd say our strategy right now for most clients includes maybe a little bit of graphics, some images, some videos."

"One thing, first I wanna have a little bit of an overall discussion on the different things are and, and why it's important to have multiple and all that kind of stuff. Um, but then we're also gonna focus a lot on how you can nail a video for Facebook."

"Yeah."

"Um, and Jeff is really good at that. Um, and so, so yeah, he's gonna share some of his insights. I know you recently did an analysis of all of our clients' videos. This is over a hundred Facebook accounts. You analyzed all the videos in them, which ones are performing, which ones aren't."

"Right. Right."

"And kind of distilled those principles into a nice little package for us to discuss today."

"Mm-hmm."

"So we're gonna go over that."

"Um, but first, just, uh, just curious to hear your perspective images versus videos. What do you think?"

"I think videos perform better if people have the captions turned on."

"So that's just something that they should do is turn on the captions on there because."

"Yeah. Which by the way, if you're a client, we do that for you."

"Yeah, we do that for you."

"Um, but it's, it's more interesting, but I think as long as it gets the message out quickly, it can be more grabbing, more attention-grabbing if I don't have to turn on my sound perfect, like I said, with the captions."

"But yeah, definitely, definitely videos I prefer."

"Yeah, I think videos are awesome too. Um, although, let me tell you this, I think, I think that images are underrated."

"Yeah."

"Um, the reason being, people look at it and they're like, oh, it's lazy. It's just an image of like, you know, what works surprisingly well. Images of ugly houses."

"Yep."

"And it's, I mean, everybody looks at it. They say, this looks just like all the other ads on Facebook and all this stuff, but the other ones are like that for a reason."

", yeah."

"Um, surprisingly, they, they also perform really well, like often better than videos. Uh, we also do have some accounts that perform really well with videos. Like I'd say they both work well."

"Um, some significantly better than others in certain markets, but yeah."

"Anyways. You have any comments on that?"

"I, I think surprisingly when I looked at the, the different photos of the houses, I'm like, oh, wow, that's a pretty house. Like I click on that, but it was just the common everyday stock image that we had used a hundred times that performed the best on those."

"So yeah, this a one-story Rambler stock photo was the highest performing one."

"Yeah, it's, it's crazy. And they, they actually can work pretty well."

"Um, something a lot of people don't know about Facebook's algorithm is that you can actually do, it's, it's not about our images better or our videos better. It's actually."

", um, you will get better results with images and videos than you would get with images alone or videos alone."

"Right."

"Right. And this is where it comes down to how Facebook is just creepy, uh, because they have, you know, their two thousand something data points per user."

"Mm-hmm."

"And they also know what ads they've shown to people before and which ones they've interacted with, which ones dwelled on which ones they've clicked on, which ones they've converted."

"Mm-hmm."

"On. And some people, believe it or not, prefer image, prefer images. You know, they don't really have, uh, they don't have the temperament to sit there and watch the whole thing, or they're not as impacted by that."

"Um, or maybe they like to read the, uh, you know, the primary text more so than they want to watch a video. Others do better with videos."

"Yeah."

"I, I think, I think the key to that is options."

"Mm-hmm."

"Is if someone's clicked on a photo last time, they're gonna want to, Facebook's gonna wanna show 'em a photo this time. If it's a vertical video, they're gonna wanna show 'em a vertical video. So having multiple assets creating horizontal, horizontal, vertical, and then photos is just a great mix

."

"Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is, even based on other data from other advertisers, Facebook can predict what asset."

"Impact some of the most, mm-hmm."

"And there are ways that you can set up ads within Facebook."

"Um, we love dynamic creative optimization."

"Uh, if anybody's familiar with that, it's just you throw a whole bunch of assets into an ad and Facebook kind of can put any mix, match any combination between those assets and show them and what you can do in there."

"A lot of people think it's just testing these different things and it's choosing what works, but that's not exactly it. Each person."

"Is eligible for our ads."

"Um, they Facebook predicts which asset is gonna impact that person the most."

"And if there's a certain asset that's just way better than the other ones, then yeah, it's gonna, it's gonna go to most people. That's kind of how it works and it'll optimize that way."

"Um, but it also takes into account that different segments of people might like different media. So this is where you could put an image there."

"And you're gonna impact a certain portion of your audience really well, but it's not gonna work as well with another portion of your audience, right?"

"You can put a video there and you're gonna impact a certain portion of your audience, but not the other. You put images and videos and you can impact all portions of the audience, right?"

"So, you know, together, they're worth more than either one individually, like Baskin Robbins, all the flavors, so many combinations."

"You just mix it together, right?"

", that's that. I wouldn't say that's a traditional understanding of Facebook's algorithm, but I, I'll take it. I'll accept it today. Jeff, thank you. We appreciate, had a good time. Appreciate, appreciate you accommodating me."

"Yeah, thank you."

"So anyways, images, there's a whole bunch of different stuff. I mean, I, I think there's a lot of graphics out there."

"Has great success with graphics, you know, they like say certain things. I think they just look too much like ads, honestly."

"Right. And just the, you know, your standard images of, of homes and things like that, um, or maybe of your team and stuff like that works pretty well. It's also gonna be different depending on your brand."

"Um, like for example, we have a client that has a really strong TV brand where he has him and he has his two twins."

"Um, and he's just known as like the guy who buys houses with twins."

". And it works really well on his Facebook ads to feature those kinds of things because it's on brand, right?"

"A lot of people think brand is like, you know, the colors I use or the fond I use, or something like that. But, but really it's, uh, in his case it can be his family and like those."

"Right, those completely recognizable little twin boys that are in all of his TV commercials are, you know, part of his brand."

"Mm-hmm. And helps make that connection. So, so anyways, there's, there's all that kind of stuff and, and I guess we'll, we'll move on from that."

"Let's talk about videos, cuz we've done all kinds of videos. Everything from like little slideshows to like really well produced videos."

"Um, I know I've had a lot of experience with video marketing and the past with, uh, with other different types of companies, even outside of this industry."

"Um, why do you think that videos."

". So you said they're your favorite. Um, you said they're a little bit more like interactive and those types of things."

"Mm-hmm."

", what kind of benefits are we typically seeing when videos work really well? What's the core difference there?"

"Um, I think it, honestly, I think it's just more entertaining. Um, when people see it, when they see a video, it just makes them more."

", uh, interested to engage with it, but also sometimes the placement of those videos, you're forced to watch those in the first place,"

"So, and if you look at, if you ever go on YouTube and you go to watch a video, what happens before it starts?"

"An ad."

"Right? So when that ad starts playing your finger, sitting right there on the skip button, like you're ready, you're ready to skip it cuz you don't necessarily want to watch it. There's been times when I've wanted to, And I said, oh, hang on, let me, lemme just watch this for just a second. It's pretty rare, but there are times. So when it comes to something like this, I really think that there's certain, like guidelines I think we're going into now that has to do with that, uh, with those ads, um, that do make it more entertaining."

"But it's, it's just, it, it keeps you interested for longer."

"Yeah. A absolutely."

"Um, I wanna note a couple things that I saw."

"Um, looking at our client's data, the first thing is, uh, believe it or not, very slight increase in lead quality is tracked to videos as compared to image."

"Um, so that's, that's an interesting concept that maybe people are qualified a little bit more through the video."

"Um, you can transfer more information that allows people to decide if they are the right person or not for, for what you're doing, right."

"Um, lead cost in many cases is improved. In some cases it's worse. So, so be aware and, and optimize for that."

"Um, so, so anyways, it's, we've seen. pretty well. Kind of a across the board."

"And the tough thing is all, all videos are different, right? So, so that's where there's a, um, you know, we're noticing some trends across those, but it's, uh, it's hard to know how much of a difference it can make because it's gonna be different for everybody."

"But I definitely think it's, uh, it's worth, um, doing one, one barrier that a lot of people have for this is, it feels like it's a big. Um, like they feel like they gotta hire this film crew and they have to script it out and they have to stress out for right two weeks about what they're gonna say on camera and you know, are they gonna look right and you should probably have a makeup person, right? Yeah. Get your hair right. All that kind of stuff."

"Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All of that."

"Um, and honestly, I think a lot of people make a pretty big deal out of it, and they think marketing with video is gonna be expensive and."

"From like a, a monetary and from a, from a like time and focus perspective. Right? Yeah. And it creates a lot of anxiety, honestly, for a lot of people."

"Right? Especially those that don't wanna be on camera and stuff. What would you have to say about that?"

"I'd say don't make it harder than, than it should be."

"Uh, it really should feel like a grassroots, like, homegrown kind of video. That's what people, people respond to the most, uh, especially when it, someone pops up and you see just a nice, friendly face just talking to you as a normal person. being real is what you wanna make sure that you do do with this,"

"cuz that's what I feel like it get gets the most responses. Um, we can all tell when it's an ad, but when somebody real pops up a real person,"

"I feel like our brains engage more. We can kind of sympathize and empathize with them and, and connect with them better than something that's too scripted."

"Yeah, for sure. Yeah, absolutely. I think we, we have to understand like not all video marketing's the same, right?"

"If you're gonna show this in the pre-roll before a movie in a movie theater, You probably need some production quality there, right?"

", YouTube even's, like a higher production quality, uh, video place. Facebook on the other hand, most videos that are on Facebook"

"are filmed with a phone. Mm-hmm. . . So we have to be aware of that and know that you actually stick out"

"with like a sore thumb when you film something really professional. Right. Uh, I worked with the company, this was outside of this, uh, this industry,"

"although it was just when I was like getting into this industry and they hired this company and paid 'em a hundred thousand dollars to make 'em a video and."

"It is a, is an awesome video, honestly, is super entertaining. Um, really engaging, um, and kind of made sense."

"We were spending 30 to $40,000 a day on Facebook ads. So a hundred grand video in the grand scheme of things, not that big of a deal."

"We're trying to push a lot of volume of, of product sales in this standpoint. Um, but believe it or not, one of one of the employees took the product"

"into the parking lot and they held it in their hand and they did a boom. like video with their phone."

"

Right. Showing the product. And that outperformed our a hundred thousand dollars video. Oh wow."

"By a large margin."

"Oh yeah. Yeah. It made a huge difference. And that's, that was my lesson."

"more money. More well-scripted, better production, quality, all those things don't really matter."

"Right. Cause what this other thing did, if you looked at it, it looked like the rest of things on Facebook. Mm-hmm. , it followed the current trends that were going on at the time too."

"Yes. Which was boomerangs. Yes. It's, well, I guess native is, is a word that a lot of marketers"

"would use to describe it. Mm-hmm. , it's, uh, it was native to the platform and, and that made it really."

"Um, believe it or not, and, uh, I worked for a company too that we, we created this big long commercial, uh, we didn't spend a ton of money."

"We spent some money on it, but our highest performing one was somebody just using it in the field. Um, it was an outdoor company."

"They were using one of our products. They filmed it and sent it in, and that got the most engagement we'd had on, on Facebook at the time too."

"So definitely can relate to that and agree with that."

"Yeah. And, and that doesn't mean we want like, absolutely horrible quality videos."

"Like you can take a phone and you can film a video and have horrible audio, right? And you can film a video and have it be like, super shaky and make people"

"feel motion sick, just watching it , you know, you want to have like some level of, of normalness here."

"But I would say I'd pay more money to have a video filmed with the phone right under normal conditions than I would with, uh, to have a professionally film"

"video and over, and over, and over again."

"People keep on thinking that professional video's gonna be better. We keep on getting these from our clients. They hire these, these companies to make these videos and"

"they just don't work better. Yeah. Um, for the most part, I, I don't think I, I, we have had some that like completely failed and we had others that failed a little bit."

"I can't think of any that have been like our top performing. Um, videos is for those professionally produced, right."

"The video production guy's gonna tell you something different. , of course. Yeah, of course they will. Yeah. But um, in terms of results, yeah, exactly."

"You have to, yeah, 10-grade of video is just fine. . Um, so, okay, so we want it to be native, something filled with"

"the phone or something like that. Um, what kind of post-production work is generally done on these videos?"

"Um, , uh, you talking about before that, that the video actually goes out or after, sorry, post Yeah."

"B before like post-production, but before posting. Like are, are there like heavy edits being made or anything like that?"

"Yeah, I, I think it should flow very naturally. Um, I think that you should definitely go over your script,"

"have your elevator pitch down. Um, don't rehearse it too much. Um, and then also beware of filler words."

"If you listen to, if you start paying attention to a filler word like that, you say when you're speaking to somebody, You're definitely gonna"

"hear a lot in this podcast too, because I wasn't paying attention. Um, like those words, we just do it naturally and it's just something"

"that you need to be aware of because it, not because it matters with what you're saying, but that it eats up time and time is really the next"

"thing I want to make sure that we bring up too, is the timing of these videos and how long they should be. Um, the message should get out in five seconds or less because when"

"you've got your finger, when someone has their finger on that, skip. , you have five seconds and then you're done."

"So if I'm saying it to you as if I were saying the, the actual video, I would"

"say, hi, I'm Jeff with Bathing Real Estate and I like to buy your house. We buy these houses every day and you're done."

"That's it. That's your five seconds. That's all you get. So if you don't have that five seconds down, pat down really quickly, you're"

"gonna miss it and you're gonna miss a lot of these people converting. Uh, the best part that I wanted to give a shout out to. Dynasty real estate."

"He's the one I kind of modeled it after cuz he did a a really great job on that. I saw his videos are probably the one of the best I've seen."

"He's very friendly. Uh, he gets his message out fast and he makes sure that he's smiling, he's ready. And they were great videos and there weren't anything expensive."

"There weren't anything like you're saying, production. He was standing in front of a house that he just bought, filmed it five seconds and he had his message done within about 20 seconds total."

"Mm-hmm. . So it was a really great, really great video."

"Yeah. So we're talking about the hook being five seconds, right? Correct."

"Um, and that is, Yeah. I like to, to say the, the five-second rule."

"Yeah. I know a lot of people apply this to food. This, this applies to Facebook ads too, , and basically the, the theory here is"

"you should be able to give your video to somebody else who's never seen it before. You should be able to show them the first five seconds only, and they"

"should tell you why they would be interested in seeing the rest of it. Right? The, here's the key, the reason why needs to be something that only applies to your"

"ideal person that you would work with. So back to my previous experience with this product company, this super"

"awesome video that this company made. It was incredibly entertaining. The, the level of organic reach it got on Facebook was awesome."

"Uh, everybody loved it. That was the problem. Everybody loved it. So if you watch the first five seconds and you said, why do I"

"wanna watch this still, it's not. , I feel like this is relevant to me because I'm their target customer."

", it's because it looks pretty funny. Right? Right. And I wanna see what happens next. Mm-hmm. . Um, because a lot of people, like when we're talking about a hook, a"

"hook is your first like, , you could even say one or two or three seconds. We you're saying five. Cuz you literally can't communicate a message in less than five seconds."

"Right? Right. So, so, but it's gotta be like, pretty much like, forget five, just say as, as quickly as humanly possible."

"Yeah. Right."

"Um, but that's, that's the hook. And, and there's two objectives of a hook. The first one is to capture attention, which I think a"

"lot of people focus on that. But the second one is to qualify. Mm-hmm. if you don't qualify, in addition to capturing a."

"then the issue you run into is that you could be capturing the wrong attention."

"Right. And, and that can be detrimental."

"Yeah. And, and there's been times where I watch videos where they were very, you didn't really get the message of what was going on."

"They would say like, hi, good morning everyone. It's me. I'm here in my truck, just headed out to an appointment."

"and they were head outs an appointment, but everyone's already skipped because they, they didn't get that, that message out that was relevant."

"Mm-hmm. , I, I didn't know if this was an ad for a truck. Maybe it was. And I wanted to watch it. Like you're saying, it's the wrong audience. Oh, I like his truck."

"Let me keep watching this. Yeah. Oh, he is going at an appointment. I don't care about that. So making sure you have that right message out in the first five seconds."

"Definitely. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You know where there's a horrible case of this, um, actually one,"

"one really good performing video type is seller testimonial videos. Oh yeah."

", but. , they are so bad at this . Uh, it's so many times where the testimonials,"

"like, I loved working with this company. They were nice and responsive. They were easy to work with."

"They got my household in this time. And you're like, okay. It just took me 10 seconds to get to the fact that like, we're even"

"talking about a house, you know? Right. They're just, they're just a testimonial for like a company. Right. Um, so it doesn't, uh, you know, it doesn't get to the point quickly."

"So with those ones, it's, it's really good to say like, you

know, I'm here with Jeff. . Yeah. We're here with Jeff and we just bought Jeff's house for cash."

"Tell us about the experience, Jeff, or something like that. Or you, like, you cut the testimonial and you start with a section where they say like, they bought my house, um, and we closed about 10 days after."

"You know, you start with like the mm-hmm. , the, the meat of it. Um, because motivated sellers can."

"Can talk for a long time. . Well, I, and I think what you're, what you're talking about too is also what we use in the uh, um, advertising as well as the journalism world,"

"which is called the inverse pyramid. You make sure you have your most important information out first, and the longer you go, the less relevant or less important the information is."

"If you read a news article, they say, so and so jumped off a bridge at this place. You're like, oh, wow, I wanna read that. But then down at the."

", it says the location, the time, like as it goes further and further down. And at the very end it says, this was written by this person."

"Like, that's the last thing I actually really care about. Mm-hmm. . So getting your most important information out first through that inverse pyramid model is the, the best, best model for sure."

"Yeah. I, I haven't heard that before. That's really interesting. Um, the other thing that is really important, um, is."

"and I, I think this is what makes this even more important for Facebook than for other channels, is how the algorithm works."

"Cause we have to realize we're using an optimization algorithm mm-hmm. and that optimization algorithm used to, uses signals to determine"

"if your advertising works or not. So, and it also uses it to, to kind of find the right, uh, the"

"right people in, in your audience. So you can tell Facebook, please target the United States."

"And what Facebook's gonna do is it's gonna target a subsection of the United States based on who it thinks is relevant."

", one of those things is it looks at who watches more of your video and who watches less of your video."

"Those who watch more of your video, it assumes that they are more qualified for your audience."

"Um, so it's gonna start finding the commonalities between, you know, these five people that watched 20 seconds and these hundred"

"people that watched three seconds. What's different between them? And if you're not qualifying at the."

"Then you could be sending poor signals to Facebook. Right. And ultimately, you, I'm not saying that we optimize for this."

"I'm saying like Facebook's algorithm, we're gonna train it to optimize for leads, but it looks at things in between the beginning and the lead when it's"

"early on because it, it assumes like if more people watch the video, then they're probably more likely to become a lead."

"And if they watch a video, they're more likely to click. And if they click, they're more likely to convert, et cetera."

"Right, right. So you, it kinda like optimizes down the funnel as, as data becomes more available, but, Yeah."

"That's, that's what people don't realize is if, if you have, it's not like you're gonna reach the same people and maybe you're gonna capture"

"attention, but you could actually capture the attention of the wrong people. And through that you could train Facebook to show your ad to all the wrong people."

"Yeah. Right. It could completely target the wrong people just based on your information that you present too."

"Yeah. Mm-hmm."

". Mm-hmm. . Yeah. So it's, it's like, it's, it's kind of a, a dual purpose here, right? Everybody knows about the capture attention, but it's like you wanna"

"actually, the people who aren't. You're a person, they should be so uninterested."

"They should be such so boring of an ad that they don't even want to watch. Right. Anymore of it."

"Right. It should be topically relevant. Mm-hmm. . So that's a, yeah. I think that's a really, a really interesting thing about how it works."

"That's kind of in my opinion, why some of our really boring Facebook ads. With like, just laying pictures of houses work really well."

"It's like so, so boring. Only a true motivated seller would click on it. Yeah. They, they see that pain."

"They, they see their pain point and they go, oh wait, I have this problem. Mm-hmm. not, this looks so interesting. It's, wow, this is my problem."

"This is why it interests me, cuz it's relevant to me. Yeah. Yeah. Same. Same reason Bandit Science say we buy houses."

"On a big yellow sign. Right, right, right. It's you don't wanna overcomplicate things. Yeah. You wanna qualify based on certain things."

"There could be still be more enticing, but you wanna look for a certain type of person. Right. And yeah, if you make your video to open door esque, so to speak, then you get a"

"lot of retail sellers right through it. Versus if you qualify really heavily, you can get the right kind of people. Yeah, definitely agree with that."

"Mm-hmm. , how long do. , the ideal video should be, I mean, you can go, you can go"

"for up to what, two hours total? I think four hours. Like you, you can just take, I honestly dunno super long. I dunno. The take, I think the newest, uh, model is 120 minutes."

"You can go, I would not do that. I would do it in about 30 seconds if you could. And make sure your call to actions before that 30 seconds is up."

"Uh, it's the, the longer it goes, the more qualified it might be for the person watching it."

"During the first 15 seconds, you can really get your message out and get someone in. Next 15, you've got that. Here's where to contact me if you wanna keep watching."

"Here's a testimonial. But really it should be done, I think within the first 30 seconds of that video."

"Yeah, I, I agree with you. A lot of our clients that have the best performing videos have been in the 20 to 32nd range."

"Um, so I definitely think that's a good range. Uh, although one thing to get off my chest, , cause we"

"have is this confession time? What is it? Yeah, maybe, maybe that was the wrong expression. , uh, I'm gonna tell you all the secrets."

", uh, but. , but we've had clients do two minute long videos that work well. Yeah. It's just, the problem is when you have 30 seconds of content that's spread over"

"a two minute video , um, the, I think the key point is you should accomplish a large communication goal in as little time as it could possibly be done."

"Right. And oftentimes ends up being 20 or 30 seconds. Um, but I think there's a lot of pushing these days for people to have"

"short content because there's this rhetoric going around that people have shortened attention spans. Now, which I personally don't, don't believe."

"Like if, if you look at the statistics, you look at like books mm-hmm. they're longer than ever before. Long form television is more popular than ever before."

"Movies are longer on average than they ever, ever were before. It seems like people have not a, uh, not a short attention span,"

"but a low level of tolerance for things that they don't care about. Right. But if they do care about those, They're willing to give it the time."

"Yeah. And that's where my point is, if you can capture someone's attention and continually add value and that takes you four minutes, then it's great."

"Mm-hmm. , in my opinion. Yeah. And, and that can be good for someone who's extremely motivated, someone who may not necessarily know what your message is."

"Mm-hmm. , maybe that first 30 seconds is all they need to understand it, but if they're really motivated, that four minutes can be, can be great too."

"Mm-hmm. . Yeah, I think I use the, uh, a technique called the, so. if you have to ask yourself."

"So what? And you don't know what is going on yet. If you could ask yourself that again and again and again. You haven't simplified your message quite enough."

"Uh, like my name is Jeff. So what? Well, I have money. So what? Well, I want to buy your house."

"So what? Like, I'm in this area, buying houses. Oh, okay. That makes more sense. Like why you're talking to me right now."

"If you can condense it down that way. Or if you're looking to condense it down. Cause you feel like you're rambling on too. You can use the so what model to try

to condense that information"

"to as little as as possible. Yeah. I love that. Um, the other thing to keep in mind is that you do want to call to action"

"relatively quickly, like you said, right? Maybe around that 20 or 32nd mark. So if you're going to have a two minute video, it's really great to"

"have that call to action in there, right in that 20 to 32nd range. And then kind of dive into detail, continue additional detail details."

"Right. Exactly. So it stands alone. If people want to just watch the beginning, they can watch the beginning. They get everything they need. Yeah. And then, you know, it's, it's your pyramid, right?"

"Right. Uh, or what do you call it? Inverse pyramid. Right, right. Upside down. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So the most important information, the best layer first, then you filter it down."

"Yeah. I feel like it doesn't need to be inversed to accomplish that. Right. Well, it's, it's the most. The heaviest, like, oh, so like the big part of the"

"pyramids at the top, right top. See, I was taking like the most pointed information at the top, like that, that, that's the way to look at it too."

"That's, yeah, that totally makes sense. Okay. Understood. . Um, all right. That's, that's awesome. So 20, 30 seconds is standard."

"I mean, I've seen some that are 10 seconds that are great. Yeah, I've seen two minutes. That's great. I don't know that I've seen longer than that. That's great."

"It's not that it can't be done. If you're hungry, you could watch the sandwich one, and maybe it does make sense to watch it for longer."

"You don't know. That video's so funny. I'm telling you. It's, it, it didn't work, but it was so funny. Um, so is there, is there anything else that you think."

"People are messing up when it comes to videos. I mean, you've, you've looked at so many of these across our clients."

"What are they, what are they doing wrong? Generally? I think a lot of times they're trying to make the video, the vi the videos, the"

"video take two, the video's more about themselves and less about the message. Um, . A lot of times when you, you have these videos, you"

"kind of feel like a celebrity. You, you're like, wow, I get to be on Facebook. Like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say all these cool things about me and how nice I am, but you're forgetting who you're talking to."

"You're, you're talking to another person and without some type of connection to that person, they're not gonna care what your message is."

"Um, it's, it's hard to talk to somebody about something if they need something else. If you wanna say, Hey, I'm hungry, but they're drowning."

"Like they don't care what you have to say. Like, you gotta focus on that first. So really making sure you have an emotional."

"During that, that pitch something like, Hey, I just, we just saved this person behind me from their house getting evicted from their house"

"cause we bought their house for cash. That's an emotional connection. If you have that pain or. If you say, uh, look how easy it is to get this cash offer, and someone's been"

"thinking about listing their house on the market, but they see how difficult it is to actually sell their house, they can now see, wow, this can take my pain away."

"And that, and they have that emotional connection. Or if you have, um, some type of way that you connect with them personally, just"

"by a joke, a smile, anything that, that says you're human and that you're a real person, that you're easy to talk to is gonna help move that ad further and make"

"it sure that people are responding to. As as instead of acting like they're a robot, pretend they're a real person."

". Yeah. I uh, isn't it strange that that's like advice, it should"

"be common sense, but Right. That's like some of the best advice is the things that you like, you actually, it's common sense. You should have already known it, but your actions didn't reflect"

"that you understood it and knew it. Right, right. And the reality is it's common sense. It's not there."

"It's like in a lot of videos, we just bought this house behind me. Uh, if you want buy yours, let me know. Like that."

"There's no feeling no one ca it's, it's, it's making it feel like I just recorded this."

"I'm sending this video to my mom or my brother, or someone that really people respond to better. Cause that's what we see every day."

"Nobody sees these kinds of things online and goes, this isn't an ad. If it looks like an ad, it's like that."

"That's an ad. If it doesn't feel like it, it feels like something. that you can relate to and that latch that you can latch onto"

"emotionally and then respond to it. Yeah, that's, that's really interesting. Who do you think should be in the video?"

"Should you have multiple people? Is this an acquisitions person, the founder of the company? I, I think you can have multiple people in it, um, but not maybe"

"towards the end or once you've already gotten your main message out. I think the person that should be in it is either the."

"that makes the initial phone call that is contacting the client or the one that's gonna show up on the doorstep."

"Um, it's that I think what we talked about, uh, was the, uh, celebrity kind of effect, right?"

"To where if you're calling a lawyer for an issue because you saw his billboard on, on the freeway and you see his picture and you call and be like,"

"oh wow, I got this guy, I got him. It's the guy from the. Who cares. He just spent money. That's all he did. He spent money on a billboard."

"But you're like, I get to talk to him directly. That's so cool. And you immediately have a connection. So it's either the person that's gonna be calling them or the one showing up,"

"up on the, up, up on their doorstep. Ideally, it should be the same person that you've already been working with, but"

"at least one of those two it should be. Mm-hmm. . Yeah. For, for all of you smaller wholesalers, flippers out there"

"that are saying, I don't know how I can deal with the big guys. There's bigger companies, bigger budgets and stuff like that."

"Here's a secret. They have. 10 acquisitions people. Right. They can't put a person in their ad and say that that's gonna be the"

"person that shows up at the house. Yeah, you can do that. I've, I've had clients tell me, wow, I, I called this guy and he"

"said, you're the guy from the ad. Huh? And they were so excited to talk to the person from the ad. Yeah. It, it, uh, it, it actually does, it does make a difference."

"And, and if you're one of those bigger companies, no. Like, I mean, it's not 100% necessary. Right? Right. Like, a lot of times when you call someone on the billboard, you don't expect"

"to talk to the guy on the billboard. Right. But if you. , that's a bonus. Right. And for that guy on the billboard, that's a competitive advantage."

"Mm-hmm. , because you're going to show up at their house and all they know is they reached out to several companies online, and some of them sounded a little bit sketchy."

"And now we got these people showing up at my house, but they're gonna see in that video. But Jeff, I know Jeff, right? I feel like I'm connected to Jeff."

"Can I talk to Jeff? Where's Jeff? Let me, let me speak to him. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because they saw you in the video, right? Right. And because of that, they, they feel on some level connected to you."

"Here's the. Twisted , maybe twisted is their own word, but benefit of of that is if"

"you are in the video and you're the person who's gonna show up on the appointment, uh, there's, everybody has characteristics and everybody has biases"

"towards other people's characteristics. And there are gonna be some people who don't like you or don't trust you."

"Yeah. Because of the way you smile or the way your face looks, or some experience they had with someone before that looked kind of like you"

"or, or your race or your accent, or. Whatever ex-boyfriend you look like, my ex-boyfriend, I can't deal with you."

"Yeah, yeah

. Everybody has those things, but there's some people they're just more inclined to trust than others. Mm-hmm. , the really cool thing about putting the video out there, um, is you eliminate"

"some of that mismatch between the person who they see in the ad and who that actually shows up in the appointment."

"So cuz otherwise if you don't do that, what happens is you get all kinds of people with all kinds of different preferences and then"

"someone shows up at their house that some people are gonna naturally feel more inclined to, like others are naturally not going to like them."

"versus if you put that person in the ad, then those people that don't like them, they just don't reach out. Right. , they're already disqualified from the very beginning."

"Right. Cause they're not gonna respond to the ad. Yeah. Those that go through, they've al, they're already pre-qualified to have seen your face and decided that they trust you."

"Right. Enough to at least take the next step. I think that means something. Yeah. And like you said, branding with the twins."

"where if you, Brandon can be just, you're standing, standing there buying or houses with your, your sons, your twin sons."

"But if they're not a family person, maybe they won't, won't respond to that. But because they are, they're like, wow, I'm gonna call this guy."

"He's a family guy too. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You will find your right people through qualification and through targeting."

"Mm-hmm. qualification improves targeting Right. On Facebook. Right. So you'll, you'll find those people."

"So, so last thing I wanna talk about is call to. . Um, every, I mean, you said so what?"

"Right, right. This kinda like the so what thing? Right. The call to action is the final, so what? Right. Right. Yeah. It's like, what should you actually do?"

"Mm-hmm. , like, I feel impacted by this. What should I actually do? What mistakes are you seeing people make with their call to action? It's not specific enough."

"Um, it doesn't actually say what to do. It says Call now or let us know instead of click below."

"And we can help you. Like here's the, here's the message right here. Click us, click Right now it takes 10 seconds."

"Yeah. I've even seen some people show in the video like the landing page. Right? Like, look, your computer's gonna take you here. Here's what it looks like. Right."

"Exactly. You're gonna fill this out. Do not be surprised. You will go here. Yeah, exactly. It's just, it needs to be very specific."

"Um, and you can even repeat that call to action. during the video if you need to as well. So like you said, during the first 30 seconds, you should get that message out."

"If you need to make it two minutes, repeat that call to action action at the end of the two minutes Right when the video cuts off too."

"Okay. Yeah. Very good. Um, so specific and specific. Clear and clear."

"Yep, yep, exactly. Understood. Any other things that you wanted to note that you think that people are generally, uh, could be doing better with when it comes to video?"

"Um, I think that that pretty much sums it up. I mean, people wanna make sure they know how easy it."

"Uh, a lot of times they don't understand what the process is gonna be. Sometimes during that extended period you can say it takes this long, um,"

"you're gonna have this person call you. We'll reach out within five minutes. So that they set better expectations of what's going to happen during the"

"process, during that video, I think that can be a little more clear. Cuz if you just say, I wanna buy your house right now for cash."

"It's like, well, you showing up at my house right now with like money in your hand, like how does this actually work? So make sure those expectations are set based on your process and"

"how things are gonna work for you. Yeah, it's a. Yeah. It's interesting sometimes, like you have these companies who are like, I keep on"

"giving these people calling me and they just want an offer on the phone and they don't want me to come by their house. He said, he asked me if I was showing up with a check."

"Like Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah. . The, the thing is, if you didn't tell 'em not to do it, you can't"

"get upset at them for not doing it. Right. Right. So that's a great opportunity to qualify. Right. Explain how it works."

"Um, and it's a little bit less, I mean, sometimes when you give tell people how things are gonna work and stuff, it kind of sounds like you're like"

"dictating for their scenario or something. If you do it in the video, then they know it's for everybody and they can't judge you, so. Right. So it's kind of like your opportunity to just unapologetically"

"like say how it's gonna. Yeah, exactly. And then it is what it is. Yeah. And again, if they don't like that process, maybe they won't give you a"

"call, but it's better than finding out two weeks from now that they're not calling you back because they don't like your process in the first place."

"Yeah. That's, that's a waste of time. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And some people are gonna love the process. Yeah. And they're gonna be actually inclined to reach out because of that."

"And, and that's what I found really with this in industry just in general, that I, I really appreciate is a lot of the, our clients, the guys we work with are just"

"so personable, so friendly, so easy to work with, make sure that shines through. Uh, but I feel like it's something in the industry that just"

"like, makes these guys happier. I don't know if it's the money, I don't know if it's working with people. I don't know what, it's, the only way to succeed is you have to be really good at sales."

"Right. So, so all those people that aren't like that, they never made it. Right. That's, that's true. That's, I think that's what's going on."

"That's a good way to put it. Yeah. All, all the, the nicest salesmen made it through. Yep. . Yeah. Yeah."

"Anyways, I, I completely agree with you and I think we've had definitely. Amazing videos from clients that have performed really well. Yeah."

"Um, so that's it for, for the episode today. I hope you found some value and, and learned a few things that'll help you to"

"take your Facebook ads to the next level. I'll see you on the next one."

‍

Bateman Collective Account Manager Shaun Young and Brandon discuss the idea that ROI is not everything when it comes to achieving business success. This episode explores the idea that focusing too heavily on ROI can actually negatively affect profitability and provides insight on how to avoid this mistake.

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From the Bateman Collective account strategy team, how are you doing today, Shaun?

"Doing pretty good."

"Excellent, happy to hear it! We had someone bail on our podcast last minute, so you are officially like the two minutes before the podcast fill-in. I was just excited, ready to take it over."

"I'm always ready to go. I hope what I told Sean though is what we're doing here is just what he does every day, so it's, you know, there he's been—his life has prepared him for this. He was not born ready but spent a lot of time being ready to be ready."

"Yeah, tell us a little bit about what you've done at Bateman Collective."

"Yeah, no, I’ve been with Bateman Collective for quite a while now, and my biggest focus has really just been taking over a lot of our clients. Brandon, when I came in, was managing all of our clients, and I came in to help kind of take some of that off of the plate and help transition into more of a strategic focus, making sure that we get to the strategic needs and things like that. Brandon's really busy, so that's kind of my goal here, is making sure that we take care of our clients and give them the strategy that we need. And so, I've worked with probably almost all of our clients up to this point, touched all of our clients in some manner."

"So yeah, and now you probably work directly with more clients than anybody else on the team."

"So yeah, super grateful to have you here, and I don't want to understate the impact that you have on our clients' strategy and results, and the so many of the things that you do so much better than I did when it comes to communicating with clients and making sure that we're headed for success and all of that kind of stuff."

"So today, the topic is that it's not all about ROI, which I know is, I guess, like controversial, or—and the reality is it kind of is about ROI. I mean, there's some things that are more about ROI than others, but I think that this kind of relentless focus that we have sometimes on ROI can make it so that we ultimately don't profit as much as we could in our businesses. And I want to talk about some of those details and some of the misconceptions that people have and where they go wrong. Do you have any thoughts on that just introducing the topic, Sean?"

"Yeah, no, I think it's something that's really easy to get caught up on because ultimately it is the end result; it is the end goal. But if you're so focused on the end goal, then you're never—you're going to miss the targets on the way. In fact, I actually enjoy going shooting a lot, and it's something that we, whenever I bring somebody new, I'm always teaching them, you know, when you're looking down the sights of a gun, if you're so focused on your target, or if you're focused on the target that you're not really paying attention to where you're aiming, then you're going to miss your shot. You need to be able to see the whole line down your whole sight and understand that from your eye to the sight to the target, you need to be able to line that up. And if you can't see the sights, you're going to miss your shots. So, I think when it comes to ROI, it's extremely important, but you also need to understand what's going to get you to that ROI. I think another point with that is that sometimes the target's not even ROI. I mean, everybody, I think, if you ask most of our clients, what's the target, they'd say ROI, and I think that's a valuable metric, but really profitability is what we're shooting for, right?"

"Oh yeah, and I think volume's often ignored. You can have 100x ROI on ten dollars a month in advertising spend, and it's just not that exciting, right? That's not as good as a much lower return on investment but at a significantly higher volume."

"Yeah, yeah, there's kind of that trade-off between those."

"One thing I guess I would clarify too is I think a lot of this episode is going to be about decision-making, like how do we analyze marketing channels, make good decisions that are going to help us get the results we're looking for in the future? And with that, it's the return in the future that we actually care about more than the return in the past."

"Any thoughts on that, like this dynamic of how important is past ROI versus future ROI?"

"Yeah, no, I think past ROI is extremely important to take into consideration because it plays a heavy role, and it's one of the best ways that you can use decision-making to understand what the future is going to look like. But I think as everyone has learned this year, there's a lot of question marks in our future that we've never encountered in our past. You know, the markets in a crazy point that we've never seen before, and if you focus too much on the past stuff, then you aren't taking into consideration what's going on and what's going to be happening in 2023. So, I think there's a very, very healthy balance that you need to find in order to be able to prepare for the future without weighing too much on the past but at the same time using it to help guide those decisions."

"Yeah, absolutely. It takes a critical eye to kind of get an idea of what's going on. I think sometimes things are easier understood just by taking them to a completely ridiculous extreme that'll never actually happen in your life. Like, one thing I was thinking about through this was, you know, theoretically, if I were to spend 10 million on a marketing channel, and I got absolutely nothing from it, that actually wouldn't matter if we're looking at should I spend money on that marketing channel next year or next month or whatever the case is. The way to answer that question is, what do I think it's going to produce next year or next month or whatever the case is. Or, another bias that I've seen people have is they've spent a lot of money on a marketing channel, and they've done that for a long time in their business, and it's just not working or it's predicted to not work in the future, and what do you do when you've spent millions of dollars on a marketing channel, and it's produced for you, and then now you're looking at should I do that over the next amount of time? You want to look at is it going to produce over that next amount of time or not, and the answer can definitely go both directions."

"How do you keep—how do you take into account those factors? Because something that I think is really difficult that we deal with in this industry is that trends just take a really long time to notice. Like, something can change right now, and we might need six months of data to look at it and really understand that it's changed, right? So maybe six months in the future, we're finally realizing that it's changed, and we're making reactions. But I think it's important that we're more reactive than that, but if we become too reactive, then we're making actions based on incomplete data, and it can be a little bit all over the place. What would you say is the best way to kind of control for that?"

"I think patience is a big one for that, where, kind of like you mentioned, if we're too reactive, if we're looking at our campaigns on the daily, there's way too much flack, way too much stuff that is just completely random and has no impact on the future. But if you don't touch your campaign for a year, and then you go back and look at it and try to figure out what's going on, you're also going to have no idea because you missed so many touchpoints where you should have been looking at things and understanding and making adjustments. So I think it's important to be patient and give it the time it needs to develop into a trend, but at the same time, you also need to be watching at a good pace. This is exactly why we visit every 30 days with all of our clients because it's a good amount of time where we can look at things and we can start to see trends where they start to emerge and prepare for them but also not be too reactive and impact trends that we think are happening but may not in the future, or missed trends that are happening and such. So I think that's the biggest thing, is making sure that you're patient while at the same time watching things in a timely manner. So it's a healthy—it's a hard thing to figure out because I think everyone always has a question: how often should I be adjusting things on my campaign? And it's different for every market. I mean, if we were in e-commerce or something like that, it would be much faster where you'd see campaign results after like six, seven days, but here, in this market where we have a much lower number of conversions, just in total, you have to give it the right amount of time."

"Yeah, absolutely. I think your analogy from before about—I know almost nothing about shooting, so I'm gonna butcher this, guaranteed—but kind of aligning yourself with the sights with the target makes a ton of sense because I kind of think of that as comparing to a funnel. Like, and in the top of the funnel, you have ad spend, right? That's your money you spend, and then from that, you're gonna get a certain number of impressions. From those impressions, you get clicks, from those you get leads, from those you get good leads, from those you get appointments and contracts and deals, and canceled contracts

, all that kind of stuff, right? So each of these is a phase that everything has to go through, right? If you're gonna have a deal, then first, someone has to see your ad, then they have to click it, then they have to fill out a form, and then it has to actually be a good lead, and then it has to become a contract, and then it has to become a deal, right? So those are, that's kind of how a funnel works; every step is mandatory. But the thing that I think there are some relationships with this like as you get really close to the top of that funnel, we have a lot of sample size for that, which I think is really unique, yeah, right? So, for example, if we've been running a campaign, and it's been running for a week, and it has zero impressions, nobody has seen the ad, that probably tells us that something's wrong. We don't need six months of data to say that something's wrong with that, right? Because we're not actually gathering data because nothing's happening, right? Because that's a really high funnel metric because we know that should be happening, whatever amount of times it's happening per day, depending on the budget and the channel and all that kind of stuff, but a lot, right? Because a lot of people see the ad for how many people actually get it. If we compare this to direct mail, it's like, did you send the postcard, right? Yeah, if you haven't mailed the postcard, then patience doesn't fix that, right? You gotta mail the postcard, gotta be working correct. So, but then we take it a little bit deeper. So we could do that, we can measure that in really small increments, and but but nobody cares about impressions, right? I don't care how many people see my ad, um, I'm sure I'm sure you don't care about that, what we care about is profits, ROI, all that kind of stuff, but as we get deeper and deeper into the funnel, we get closer and closer to those metrics, and but two things happen: one, we get more relevant with our metrics because we care more about clicks than we do impressions, and we care about leads more than clicks, and qualified leads more than leads, etc. But we also have a smaller sample size for those things, and I think with the budgets that most companies are working in this industry, you can only go do so deep in the funnel in a certain time period. So so that's where there are like what I would call leading metrics, which would be kind of those upper funnel things. It's not a—you know, it's not like it's a—it's a binary action that like people talk about leading and lagging metrics like it's either leading or it's lagging, which isn't exactly true. You're, you're leading; there's impressions are more leading than clicks, and clicks are more leading than leads, but that's slowly becoming more lagging, and then ROI is all the way at the bottom of that whole funnel as the most lagging metric that we generally have in a campaign. So so basically what I'm saying is, what I would argue is that the amount of time to analyze the data depends on how much data you have, and you can always analyze it on some level, but I think where people go wrong sometimes is they analyze it deep in the funnel, but when they only have run it for enough time to analyze it high up in the funnel, there's not enough sample size to go quite that deep."

"Yep, no, I think that's part of the exact issue, and why people jump out when they shouldn't and make decisions when they shouldn't. You know where it—it's, there's not, you kind of like to your point, you have to go down the funnel, and sometimes we work backwards out the funnel. We look at, 'Oh, so-and-so got this many leads this month,' kind of thing. And then, okay, well, that trend, that came from this many clicks, that came from this many impressions, you know, and so we're being—having you have to be able to take all of that data into consideration to be able to make those decisions. And if you're looking at ROI constantly, which I know most of us do because that's that's our end goal, right, but if you're constantly looking at ROI, you're so far down the funnel that there's just so much or so little that impacts it that you haven't, you don't, you can't make a good decision without understanding the rest of that funnel. And so I think to your point, measuring at the right point of the funnel is another huge thing that too many people are doing wrong where they're measuring either too high or too low in the funnel."

"Yeah, and to make sure that we're, like, so clear that there's no opportunity for anybody to misunderstand: like, we care a lot about ROI, right?"

"Oh yeah, absolutely, you just need the right time to look at it, because otherwise what you get is you get extreme values, either extremely high or extremely low."

"I'm not sure if you're familiar with the concept; it's a statistical concept of regression towards the mean. It's, uh, what it basically says is let's just say like you take a sample of like extremely tall people, right, that are like seven foot four or whatever the case is, and you estimate what are the, what's the height of their children going to be. Um, so if you just looked at it the way that a lot of investors look at their marketing, they'd say, well, the parent was seven foot four, so the kid's gonna be seven foot four. If we look at it, the way that it, uh, that statistics would argue, it's we would say it's an extreme value first, so what's probably going to happen is the height of that person's children are going to be somewhere between seven foot four and the actual average height of a person in that extreme value is probably going to regress towards the mean, and we're going to end up with a more normal value. So so the second value observed tends to be much more normal than the first value observed if the first value is extreme, and where this happens, it goes both ways. We have clients where the extreme value is that they have a lower return over a period of time, so then they quit even though the next value is much more likely to be significantly higher, and then we have it go where we see people get way too excited about like picture like I just started my ads. I was talking to a client the other day that had like three contracts in their first weekend, and so they have this like super extreme value from like not that crazy of a budget in a really hard market, yeah, where it's just like awesome like I'm super glad that happened, but I wouldn't call that normal, and I can say with almost certainty that it's, that the next week's going to go worse than that, right, because we're just dealing with a small amount of time, right, so we want to like not get too excited or or upset about extreme values either direction, um, because there's so much there's some much random variation, it's crazy, it's crazy when you're doing big deals and you do a small number of them, and when I say small, I mean like 10, 20 a month, right, I'm not talking which anybody listen to this by like that's a ton of deals, but what other businesses do you know that rely on 10 or 20 customers each month?"

"Oh yeah, it's like no businesses."

"Yeah, no, I 100% agree, and I think to that same point where it's such an emotional game where you're the owner of a company, you know, that's your baby, and you want to make sure that baby's taken care of, you know, and when things are going really well, you're excited, when things are going bad, it's all you think about. It, you know, you lose sleep, you lose sleep over it, you know, it's, it's, it's extremely emotional, and I think that's honestly part of my job is helping people manage emotions, and that's kind of the way I see it, you know, where where I see what's happening with all of our clients, and I understand like it's so exciting when things are going well, and it, it sucks when things are going bad. I think I think everyone listening to this podcast can agree that at some point in the last few months, there's been some moments where you're losing sleep and you're just not sure what's happening. Um, I, I see it with all of the clients that I work with, and I think we all need to be careful not to let our emotions get the better of us and make decisions based on how, how we feel, you know, if the business isn't going well and or we're not getting the leads or they're just bad quality and and we're just, we don't know what to do, we don't always make great decisions in the heat of the moment, same thing when we get, you know, a six thousand dollar spread on our first, you know, first lead out of PPC or something like that, like I've seen that happen and people get so excited and then the next month they're like, wait, where's my, where's my next $60,000 spread, you know, where did it go? So I, I think it's, it's such a game of emotion management at that, to that same point of making sure that during the highs, like you said, you know, and during the lows, we're just understanding that there is a median and we need to keep that in mind and be focusing on the median rather than the spikes and the peaks and the valleys of the moments."

"Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to make this pretty tactical now and let's just talk about what can you actually do to practically do that. My favorite method is something I call controlled funnel analysis, and it's—"

"I guess I'll start with an example that maybe everybody can understand here. A good example is let's just say you're doing direct mail and let's just say it sends you—it costs you 40 cents to send a postcard and you get a 4x return on average. If postage goes way up today and now suddenly it costs 80 cents to send a postcard instead of 40 cents, what return on investment are we going to have on the future is the question right? If we're making a decision of do we want to continue to do mail or do we not want to continue to do mail, the answer in this scenario is probably a 2x return. But if we just looked at the past and we said well we had a 4x historically so we're just going to have a 4x in the future, it's going to turn us wrong because it doesn't take us six months to measure the data that postcards now cost us 80 cents to send instead of 40 cents, right? We can do that instantly because it's just something that's situationally has changed."

"Or if the cost of our cold callers has doubled, or you know whatever the case is. But I think when we get into digital marketing people are a little bit less familiar with some of those dynamics and how they function so they don't quite know how it works so it's not quite as cut and dry, and also that happens on a ton of different levels."

"So my favorite way to go about this is like I said controlled funnel analysis and the way that this works is if you picture that funnel what we can do is we can actually measure what's happening until a certain point of the funnel and maybe where we cut that off is clicks if we have like a really small sample size maybe if we have more sample size we could cut that off as leads or if we have more we can go qualified leads or appointments or contracts or whatever the case is right so we kind of measure as deep into the funnel as we can reasonably and then we add in assumptions after that point so this is kind of like the controlled part where we're assuming things and let's just say um we're working with a client that just started with us what we might do is say well your cost per lead for example is a hundred dollars and we expect with this channel and these circumstances and everything maybe it takes 20 leads to get to a contract so what we're doing is we're controlling we're saying we expect the 100 cost per lead and then we're assuming it's going to take 20 of those to get to a contract because maybe we only have 10 now maybe we have 20 maybe we have 30. it's not a good sample size for for what our actual rate of getting to a contract is so then we assume that and then we can realize it's probably going to be trending towards a two thousand dollar cost per deal so assuming the the rest and uh one one place where we really commonly do this is based on based on opportunities like we know in PPC for example it generally takes about 4.8 opportunities to get to a contract right so we can see like what is our cost to get an opportunity and then we can assume the rest if we don't have much sample size for that but the really cool thing that this does is compared to just the pure patients play where the the cost of postage could double and you wouldn't notice we were actually seeing those things that are shifting right because it means something if our cost per lead has gone way down and we have enough sample size to say that that's the case or if our lead quality has drastically improved or something that means something but when these time periods are too short for us to measure the entire funnel from an ROI standpoint we can make a few assumptions and we can do that based on our averages which works if if someone's brand new working with us we can also do that by some blend of that and then the the company we're working with and their historical averages if they know kind of what it's taken to to get to PPC deals historically does that process kind of make sense?"

"Yeah, no, absolutely. And I think to your point of making sure that we're measuring at the right point and controlling that analysis where it should be—"

"I think the when it comes to I think the biggest benefit the Bateman has over everyone else—sorry, I'm gonna kind of preach, get on a little box—I want to hear it."

"Yeah, no, and the thing I've been most impressed with with working with you and the Bateman Collective is that we have the ability to look further down the funnel than someone does just running their own campaigns. To your point, being able to control that analysis requires so much data if you're gonna do it effectively. And I've never seen an agency with the amount of data that we have been able to collect. It blows my mind how we—and for your for everyone's understanding—it's, we measure it at much more than just the impressions, clicks, and conversions. Like we, because we have all of our clients housed under one manager and one MCC, we're able to understand what the numbers are on, you know, how are these leads qualified or unqualified? What's our cost per qualified lead? You know, what's—we can even—we can get so deep in that, and it allows us to make decisions across all of our clients using all that data from everyone."

"Um, to control that analysis kind of like you're saying where even though let's say you just started a new campaign, you know, and you're two months in, you have maybe enough impressions, barely some clicks, you know, to be making some decisions, your hands are tied. You just have to wait longer and—and because we have the ability to look at so much more data across all of our clients across the whole country, we can look past that barrier. I worked in e-commerce for a while and I—I didn't like e-commerce because every market is completely different and it's impossible to gather data on one market and apply it to another, you know, and—and so you can't do that in most markets. And so in this market, having that advantage is a game changer. Um, and—and honestly, is I—I think that's credits to a lot of the success we've had and things like that."

"Yeah, absolutely. I—I want to share one story about this I think is—is pretty interesting. It was this, uh, this client they were working with, and they were running Facebook ads and Google ads, and basically they came to me saying like, 'I'm really concerned about Google; we're happy with Facebook, really concerned about Google.' They had like a deal on Facebook; they had nothing on Google, and they just said like, 'We want to cut Google; we want to double down on Facebook.' When we did this funnel analysis, there were a few things that—that we saw. The first one was their rate of closing for the number of opportunities they had on Facebook was really high. Remember we talked about this concept of regression towards the mean? That was an odd number—what's it called—outlier, right, that was like the equivalent of like the seven-foot-four person is what we saw in terms of like their their conversion on opportunity so far, yeah. And their cost per lead was actually really high on Facebook, and on Google, on the other hand, the cost per click was super high historically, and it had gone down significantly, um, with the market shift. And they historically just had some, uh, some lead quality issues that were specific to one particular aspect of the account. So so they're looking at it like we haven't really gotten much of anything quality from Google, um, I'm looking at it like we're a little bit lucky on Facebook, and on Google, we can actually see that we have some sample size issues and a really clear direction to shift the campaign. So so anyways, when it came down to it, they just said get rid of Google, we're going to double down on Facebook. So I had this conversation with them; it's like I feel like I just—I have to say this like that's a really bad idea. I'm so sorry. I don't want to like go against you, but—but it's a bad idea. But they did it anyways; they just said like, you know, that's what we got to do. Um, but two months later, um, we convinced like you should probably put Google back. Um, so we do that, and—and then looking at their business today, Google has performed with close to a 10x return on investment over the past four or five months, um, compared to they had nothing before, and Facebook is actually tanked negatively, and believe it or not, the cost per qualified lead has stayed really steady, but they just haven't converted as well in those opportunities. So so there, they have actually regressed towards the mean, so to speak, on Facebook, and on Google, we're seeing that the pattern of future results didn't look like the past, but we did that through looking at the leading metrics versus the lagging metrics because what we could tell is like when we look at the data, we can see yes, the result is this, but Facebook is lucky, and on Google, we can see yes, the result is this, but it's a little bit unlucky. And with time, we can see some of those leading metrics are trending

really well, kind of the equivalent of we're now seeing that it costs 10 cents to send postcards instead of 40, and we know that those funnel metrics will work out if we can keep it at that cost. Um, so anyways, that's just a story I'm sure you've had similar circumstances with with clients. I love this circumstance because we actually were able to continue to spend the money to see how it plays out at some point."

"Yeah, because there's a lot of these circumstances where our hands are tied, right? We tell the client you should do this; by the way, if you hire a company to run your marketing, and you don't listen to them, I just don't—I just don't understand what you're doing. But um but there's a lot of circumstances where you know we just—we make our recommendations, people don't want to listen to them, and we never see how it would have played out otherwise, right? You kind of like steal your own fate if you decide to—to stop doing something, um, because you never know what would have happened otherwise. But this was a circumstance was interesting because we were able to kind of re-engage it later and—and see what happened."

"Yeah, no, it's—it's definitely something that occurs more often than a lot of people think, um, and I think you know I've—I've worked with a number of clients—I was—I was trying to think of one specific example, but there's just—there's a lot of people, uh, just looking at things too prematurely. I—I and to give you guys an idea, um, what something that we measure a lot is how long clients, um, stick around after starting campaigns and—and how that goes right, and it skews; there's—there's so much, um, so many people get so nervous around the two to three month market, and in our onboarding, we're always saying, this is a six month process. You know, in our sales, we say, this is a six month process; you've got to give it six months, make sure you have the money for six months, you know, it's—we—I feel like we drag that concept just continually beating it."

"Yeah, we definitely beat the dead horse, right, and—and but it's—you know, it's so important, you know, and there's—I—I cannot tell all of you guys how often I have the conversation at like two, three-month marks saying, 'I don't know about this; it's not my best ROI; I'm getting better ROI from here,' and things like that. And I think it's—it's such, uh, it makes me really frustrated when people don't understand that it's—it's something you need to be able to get to the right point to understand what kind of ROI you're gonna get. There's no one gets 10x ROI after two, three months, you know, it's impossible, and if you do, you're insanely lucky, and it's not going to continue. I'd argue it's like if you're talking about that kind of return, it actually happens more often in that time period than not because we're talking about because I think what happens in the beginning, it's not necessarily bad returns, it's, you, you observe the most extreme values, yeah, and those values, uh, can be extremely good or extremely bad; it's just like we see the whole bell curve, right? So we're a little bit more relaxed about it because we just—you know, just like been there, done that, seen it before, yeah, you know, but it's, uh, I get it when it's like it's the money you spend; it's the only money you've spent; it's your only data point, then it's, uh, it's a lot more concerning, um. So I, I totally, I totally hear what you're saying, but I also get where where like some of our clients are coming from, and also to be clear, like this is like ten percent, like 90% of our clients just like trust us, yeah, and and follow the process, and and it's, uh, and it's awesome, right? So it's just, it's so hard when you want something for someone and you want it to work for them, but it's, uh, but you have to, it has to be a mutual effort from both sides in order to get where where you're trying to go."

"Absolutely, yeah, it's a, it's definitely a tough game. One analogy I've heard before is it's kind of like like launching a rocket into space. If you look at the beginning, um, it takes like 90% of the fuel that the rocket has—this especially applies to SEO—oh yeah, it takes like 90% of the fuel that the rocket has just to get it, like, off the ground and like up a certain amount, right? And then like as you go, it gets exponentially easier to, now and then eventually, you know, you're in orbit, and you just need like a little fuel to go a really long way, right? And but it takes a lot to get off the ground, and everybody talks about how they were in orbit, and they just need a little bit of fuel to change their direction and make this much more progress or whatever the case is, but nobody talks about how in order to be there in the first place, they had to burn a lot of fuel taking off, and that's that can be really, uh, really exhausting for, for a lot of, a lot of companies just to get to that point. So that's, I mean, that's definitely a circumstance where the future looks different than the past."

"I think that's a perfect analogy. And if—if I can touch on SEO for a second too, I think it's SEO is such an interesting thing in this industry because in the majority of other industries, SEO is the first thing you do. You don't do ads first; you do SEO first. You build a site; you optimize it; you get it going, um, and then you, then you start running ads, and it's the opposite in this industry. People just jump on ads, you know, people want to see ads work in order to know if SEO, exactly, it doesn't at all make sense, but that's—that's how it works."

"No, it's exactly that, that, um, and I think SEO is something that is just so missed in this industry where it's—it's such an opportunity because to your point, it takes 90% of the fuel. You will burn money getting SEO going, and if you're so focused on your ROI, you're never going to get SEO going because SEO does not produce a viable ROI for at least a year, you know, um, and—and that's if, if you're pumping quite a bit of money into it, um. Yeah, on the topic of SEO, I just want to share a couple, like, interesting facts that I think will—let's just go through a mental exercise. So fact number one is more people click on organic results in Google than unpaid ads. Number two, this isn't really a fact, but just—just think, um, how—just count in your head over the past year or whatever the case is, how many real estate gurus, investors, you know, whatever the case is, have mentioned how PPC is great, just—just think how many have you heard, and then think the same thing for SEO, and then realize there's more SEO leads out there than there are PPC leads, and how much do you hear about PPC versus SEO? I—I've asked in the past couple weeks, I've asked two of our clients that have done well with SEO to come on the podcast, both of them refused; they said I don't want my competitors to know like PPC is the thing that's good enough that everybody wants to talk about it so that like everybody, you know, everybody's excited, they want to share the results. SEO is the thing that's so good that nobody wants to talk about it exactly because they're just afraid."

"Gotta keep—tricks, they're afraid of losing it. There's a real scarcity mindset there, but it's, it's true; like how much, how many people love PPC, but for the number of people who are pursuing SEO compared to the opportunity size there and the number of leads, it's a really, really good channel."

"Oh yeah, you just have to be more patient, you have to kind of have the mindset of I'm going to work harder and I'm going to spend more money and I'm going to do that longer than anybody else does, and if I do all of those things, it's unreasonable that I'm not going to outperform my competition with an SEO standpoint, but nobody's willing to do that; that's what makes it so easy though in this industry."

"It's not, it makes it because because your competition is not that heavy on SEO compared to so many other industries I know where you have to spend so much money to make a dent, and here you can go pretty far if you're willing to have the patience, but the inconsistency just kills like that's where we have uh clients like SEO feels like the thing that is just easy to turn on and off when it's, I mean not really."

"Yeah, it's the first thing to go whenever someone's tight on money, for sure."

"Yeah, I mean we just had a conversation with a client that had a really tough issue with their acquisitions team where they've like pretty much lost all their acquisitions team, so so then they're saying I want to cut SEO, um, and like that's a good example of what I consider like not a

great way to make a decision. So for PPC, I'd be like yeah all about it, cut PPC, but for SEO, they were just like well I don't want to pay for leads that we can't actually manage, but then the question I asked well in is in two months, are you, are you ever planning on hiring an acquisitions team because the problem is if you don't, uh, you know if you don't continue to stay consistent with SEO and and this is where it kills a lot of investors they take like a two-month break here because of cash flow or two month break there because they, uh, you know they didn't have their acquisitions team ready to manage leads and stuff like that but SEO is not about that two months, you know, you do that and then now it's going to take you four months to catch up to where you were paying for it, it's like taking a higher interest loan against your future lead flow and it's just, uh, it's just not worth it if you don't have to, that's, that's personally what I've seen screws people up on SEO in this industry like it's not actually that hard but if you don't just do it consistently for a long time then it won't, it won't produce but that's, that's just a, it's a hard thing to do because you haven't seen it work yet."

"Yeah, you have to have faith, you have to have a lot of trust and whoever you're working with or something like that, you know they're not just blowing smoke and giving you fake numbers, you got to trust that it's actually going to get to, to, uh, to where it's trying to go. Have you seen any other problems like that with SEO?"

"Yeah, no, I think I think we need to look at SEO more like, uh, investing in stock, and, and I mean we're all investors, right? Rentals, right, it's perfect, rentals, you know, real estate stock, whatever it is, you don't have to become a day trader of SEO, you know, yeah, and, and, and so if SEO is one of those things that if you can just constantly be keeping it on and, and, and be investing in it, it's, it's a true investment that pays out, you know, really well later on, um, and I think that's the way we need to look at it. I mean not to, not to diminish paid ads because paid ads are kind of our bread and butter, but at the same time, it's, I think SEO needs a lot more attention in this industry. I know some people, especially those two clients it sounds like, would, would prefer not to have it become the mainstream thing because they're doing so well, but that's why, like, people do well with it when they do it because it's not the mainstream thing, and it's kind of a Blue Ocean strategy, so I, I think that's it. SEO needs a lot more love, and I, I, you know, my clients can, can tell you that I love SEO, and I'm always preaching that if things are going well, get some stuff going with your SEO, you know, and, and don't, don't cut SEO the moment something goes wrong, you know, um, so I, I think that's exactly where we need to be, and I think there's a lot of opportunity coming up here in the future with both paid ad and SEO where the, the market's crazy, people don't know what their ROI is going to look like at the end of 2023, so they're being really cautious, and I, and every, every mastermind that I've gone to, um, there are all the, the people who are doing well are all preaching, you know, 'Double down now's the time to like double down, just do everything you can to, to go crazy,' and, and it's, I think it's, it's a great time to be doing that, and, and not focusing so much on your ROI and focus more on, you know, what or I guess a better way to put it is not focus on what your ROI is going to be in six months and what, what but instead what your ROI could be two years from now if you're taking advantage of what's going on now."

"So yeah, I mean the last market crash made a lot of millionaires, so yeah, it's really true. I think um and maybe we'll close with this I think a client that I talked to recently to have an awesome perspective on this um just to put it into like someone else's words and uh I'll butcher it but but basically we were looking as results and get like three deals this month from PPC and and he had like one deal from SEO all he would talk about was the deal from SEO and I was like what about these three deals from PPC like aren't you excited about those two and he compared it um he basically said like you know those deals from PPC are good I view those like wholesale deals right I made this much money from this deal and that was good that deal from SEO where I made 20 grand or whatever the case is I view that as I like netted 20 grand of rental income this month basically and just think about it like whatever revenue you did in your business you know if you do if you're doing you're doing 300 or 400 000 a month or you know wherever you're at What If instead of that was wholesale deals what if that was rental income it's a whole different game right because there's implied equity there and that implied equity has a lot more value than than a wholesale deal a quick buck I kind of think like think of that like SEO versus versus PPC um so that's that's it for today um for the collective clicks podcast we'll see you next time foreign

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In this episode, Brandon is joined by Brad Chandler to discuss his two decades of investing and purchasing over 4000 homes. Brad provides essential lessons from his own marketing journey,  invaluable advice on how to select a marketing agency, and how to become happier and live a more impact-driven life.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

‍

Welcome back to the *Collective Clicks Podcast*. This is your host, Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be joined by Brad Chandler.

Brad Chandler is an investor in the DMV area who has purchased over 4,000 homes in the past 20 years. They purchased about 300 homes over the past year, and he has a wealth of knowledge from experiences both in his personal life and business life. We’re going to talk in this episode about marketing directors and what it looks like to hire them. We’re going to discuss marketing and some of the key lessons he’s learned. We’ll also talk about how he learned in his personal life to be happier and more impact-driven rather than money-driven. And there’s so much more to cover. I'm looking forward to the episode, and I hope it adds some good value for you.

Thank you for joining us today, Brad. How are you doing?

"I'm awesome, thanks for having me," Brad responded.

"Yeah, of course. Really happy to talk to you," I said. "You know, you're one of the very few people who wants to talk to me right now, right between Christmas and the New Year," I joked. "It seems like everybody’s taking time off, and here we are."

Brad laughed, "Yeah, I love it."

"Well, I've been looking forward to this conversation. You're someone I consider to have a great depth of knowledge and experience—more so than most real estate investors. Personally, I’ve learned a lot from you, and I think our listeners certainly will as well," I said.

Before we get into it, just to kind of set the background so everyone’s aware, could you share a little bit about yourself, what you're passionate about, your journey in real estate, and what you’ve accomplished?"

"Yeah, man," Brad replied. "So, let’s go back to ninth grade. I read a book on how to buy real estate with no money down, and at that time, I knew that’s what I wanted to do. So, I went, I got my undergraduate degree, then I got a graduate degree in real estate. I came out and was working for a developer in 2002, and an investor bought my neighbor's house in Vienna, Virginia. I went and talked to him, and he said, 'I buy houses at 30% below market, fix them up, and resell them.' I was like, ‘Geez, I didn’t know you could do that. I thought you got rich by putting 20% down and holding onto real estate.’ So that was in November or December of 2002. And I thought, ‘This is what I’m going to do.’ I was working full-time. My son had just been born, so I’d come home at like six o'clock, spend time with him until eight, put him to bed, and then work from eight to eleven every day. And on weekends, I’d be pounding 'We Buy Houses' signs, mailing out direct mail. Every month went by without a deal, but I was showing up to these real estate meetings and meetups, seeing people making all this money. And I thought, ‘If they can do it, I can do it.’ So I just became more and more persistent."

"In July of 2003, I bought my first house, and by August, I had bought six. In October, I came home and told my wife at the time, ‘Hey, I just quit. I’m forming Express Homebuyers.’ And she was like, ‘What?! We have a newborn, I’ve got two kids to support, and you just quit?’ And I was like, ‘It’ll be fine.’ And here we are, 19 years later, with 4,000 houses bought, and, well, I was right," Brad chuckled.

"Yeah, that’s... wow," I said, laughing. "I think everyone has a similar experience. When I started my company, it took years for my wife to even realize it was a real company. For a while, it just felt like that thing I do to avoid working, where I’d just kind of sit in that room on the computer and 'work'—like, whatever that is," I joked.

"Yeah, it's funny. I think it’s how everyone starts," Brad said. "It takes some time for your family to believe in it. But that was way back in the day. So you were sending mail back in 2002?"

"Yeah, man," Brad replied. "And I started SEO in 2003. I launched a website and began working on SEO in 2003."

"Nice," I said. "That definitely gave you a jump on the market. It was a different world back then. So, tell me about Express Homebuyers today. What kind of volume do you guys do? What kind of staff do you have? What’s your focus?"

"We’ll do around 300 deals this year, primarily in DC, Baltimore, and Los Angeles," Brad explained. "We just opened Los Angeles in the last six months because we had a really talented employee move out there. So we started spending some marketing dollars out there. We're focusing on wholesaling and fix-and-flips. Obviously, it’s a tough market right now. Prices are declining, so we have to be really careful about the fix-and-flips we do. If we could do all wholesales, we would. But sometimes, you leave money on the table if you only wholesale, so we do both. Right now, our focus is just to weather the storm. It’ll pass; it always does. And hopefully, as prices continue to decline, we can build up another portfolio. Back in 2010 to 2012, we bought 80 rentals, rode them up, and sold them. This time, maybe we can put another zero on that number and buy 800 rentals."

"Yeah, I understand," I said. "I’d also love to dig a little bit more into your experience during that last recession because, I mean, you know as well as I do, if you talk to the average wholesaler today and ask them how long they’ve been in the business, most of them got into it between 2015 and now. You're definitely the exception. You've been doing this for a bit longer. Tell me about your business during 2008 and 2009. What was that time like for you?"

"Yeah," Brad began. "So, before I jump into that, let me just say that the new wholesalers today are really struggling. Everything’s changing—credit is tightening, interest rates are rising, so buy-and-hold strategies don’t make sense anymore. These guys who just started out? It’s going to be tough. It’s going to be tough for anyone, but especially for the new guys. We’ve been around a long time. We have cash, we’ve spent millions on marketing, so people still think of us even if we’re not running ads."

"Um, but place a bigger emphasis on the active comps now in the declining market than the sold comps. So that's a big, that's a big, uh, kind of gold nugget," someone said. "And then, you know, we made our houses look extra nice because we were renovating at the time. And you know, like my partner said, we didn't need to sell a thousand houses, we needed to sell one house in one neighborhood right at a given time. So let's make our house the nicest one in the neighborhood. We've started staging again. We've started, uh, doing landscape packages outside."

"We used to go to brokerage firms and offer them incentives. We would take them to the Redskins games. We would, um, we would give them an extra percent or an extra couple thousand dollars. So those were a lot of things that we did back then. Um, some of the stuff we're starting to introduce again," they continued.

"Yeah, understood. In other words, you actually have to try to sell deals these days," another replied. "Yeah, it's not like it was before, but I've actually heard similar things because so many people are trying to cut back on their rehabs. But I know quite a few companies that are kind of preaching like, 'Now's the time, if any, to spend more money on your rehabs because you need a good product. You need the best-looking house.'"

"You do," someone agreed. "I mean, because, you know, the average person who could afford a $400,000 house a couple of years ago or a year ago can now afford maybe $260,000. It's crazy what the interest rates have done in terms of volume and affordability."

"Yeah. Yeah, understandable," another added. "So, what about right now? If we're looking at your life and what you care about, what's important to you? What are you passionate about, and where are you trying to go?"

"Fortunately, I've got an amazing team," the speaker replied. "You asked about the team structure. I've got about 15 full-time employees in our Springfield office, and I've got about another 12 full-time virtual assistants in the Philippines. And we have the best team we've ever had in 19 years. So, I am only working about three hours a week, if that, on Express Homebuyers. I'm in a great position where it’s running without me."

"Two years ago, while trying to get my son help for anxiety, I came across a lady. I was on a Zoom call like this, and she said, 'You know, you have a tic.' I was like, 'What are you talking about?' She said, 'You blink profusely when you talk about your childhood. You may have some unresolved childhood trauma. Do you want to come out and work with me? Bring your son out and we can work with my Navy SEAL husband.' At the time, I went out and, in a weekend, my life was radically transformed. There was actually a three-hour session that transformed my life."

"We went back and looked at stresses and traumas from childhood," they explained. "What we all do when we experience stress or trauma is form meanings or untruths to get through that stressful period. But when you're six years old and something bad happens to you, you typically say, 'It's happening to me because I'm bad,' and that’s how you cope. At 47, when your subconscious mind is still telling you that you’re bad and unworthy, it no longer serves you. It led to two divorces, the use of alcohol and drugs in my life, five business mistakes that cost me $9 million, and the list goes on."

"But, I don't drink anymore. I don't smoke weed anymore. It’ll be two years in a couple of weeks. It’s been the best two years of my life. My life has radically changed, and I’ve found freedom and happiness on such a deep level. I know God put me here now to do this work and help other people."

"So, I've started Brad Chandler Coaching. I'm helping other people, whether they’re anxious, dealing with depression, weight issues, relationship problems—really anything involving the mind. It can be solved because it always comes back to the same thing. It always comes back to unmet childhood needs. We didn’t get our needs met as children, so we developed coping mechanisms. Those mechanisms cause mental distress, bad relationships, and self-destructive behaviors like drinking."

"I’m passionate about this work, if you can’t tell," they added with a smile. "I’ve read probably 40 books. I’ve studied under some of the best people in the world in this space. I’ve gone to conferences. I’ve immersed myself in it, and I’m getting better every day. I’m also seeing amazing results with my clients."

"That’s awesome," someone responded. "So that’s what you do with your other 37 hours of work each week now that you’re not as involved in Express Homebuyers. It sounds like that contributes to your happiness quite a bit since you’re passionate about it."

"Let me tell you," the speaker said, "I’ve made $300,000 on a wholesale deal before. But nothing compares to getting the texts and phone calls I get now, with people saying, ‘You have radically changed my life and my family’s life. I’ll forever be indebted to you.’ It’s priceless."

"That sounds incredible," the listener said. "What advice would you give to someone who might be in a similar situation to where you were before?"

"Totally," they answered. "I’ve developed a proven system. I was taken through it myself, and then I refined it with input from three amazing people in this space. It can help anyone who’s suffering—whether it’s relationships, business chaos, or anything else. This is the first business I’ve started where I’m not focusing on the money. It is a for-profit business, and I do charge, but my focus is on making the biggest impact."

"Um, I got involved in a trademark lawsuit. Most investors know I was the guy who got 'We Buy Houses' trademark canceled. Well, should it have gone that far? That cost us almost $2 million?" someone lamented. "No. It was my ego. It was like, I gotta protect myself. It was silly, it was stupid. I mean, it cost us probably both $4 million between me and the 'We Buy Houses' guy. So, yeah, lots of mistakes."

"And what I would tell you now in this market is you gotta be really good. You shouldn't be looking at expanding unless every system is dialed in unless you've got every person in the right seat, unless you've got your follow-up systems where a call comes in and you are all over that call immediately and you're setting appointments and you're following up with appointments. If you don't have everything dialed in, number one, you're probably gonna go out of business in this environment. But number two, you really shouldn't be thinking about anything else. Expansion, self-storage, multi-family, anything until you get your house right. That's actually paying your mortgage and feeding your family."

"Yeah. Understood. Focus. And then move on," another agreed. "Make sense."

"Yeah. That's heartbreaking to hear about all those mistakes, but sounds like you've had some wins over the years too, that hopefully add up to a little bit more."

"Yep, yep. That's definitely the case. I've made millions and I've lost millions. And, look, it's who I am, right? Your story of who you are is who you are, and you are right where you should be at any given point in the universe. It doesn't mean you have to stay there if you want, but if you want to change your life and your future, all you gotta do is change your thinking about how you perceive yourself in the world."

"Yeah, absolutely. Let's talk about marketing a little bit because that's my focus. Really curious to hear some of your thoughts there. What are some things that you've learned about marketing in this world of wholesaling and flipping real estate?"

"I mean, what have I learned about marketing? Just forget real estate. What's important about marketing? You know, StoryBrand is a great organization and it talks about everyone having an internal problem and an external problem. So, you need your grass cut. That is the external problem. You never call because you need your grass cut. The internal problem is you've got house guests coming over and you don't want to be embarrassed. Your HOA is gonna fine you. Your neighbors have been bugging you, so that's why you call someone. A lot of companies make the mistake of marketing to the external. So, you've gotta market to the internal problem, which is their pain. Why are they calling you from a marketing standpoint? And then from a sales standpoint, it's the same thing. You gotta focus on their pain. Don't focus on the offer number, don't focus on how great you are as a company. Focus on how can you solve that problem. No one cares about who's listening to this podcast. No one cares about Brad Chandler or Justin. Right? What they care about is what can we do to help them, help them change their lives, right? So, that's part of what I've learned from marketing."

"I've learned we could have a two-hour session on this, right? But marketing is, don't spend dollars unless you've got a really great follow-up system because for many years we spent a million dollars a year in marketing and our follow-up system was terrible. Now our follow-up system is amazing. So, don't spend a dollar or a dime in marketing until you can really make sure that you can service those leads that are coming in."

"Let's talk about what a great follow-up system is. Because I have some suspicions. We have some clients that, like my experience with follow-up systems and acquisitions and everything is that generally companies believe that they're in a really good spot there. And if everybody believes they're in a good spot, but some statistically are just performing significantly better than others, then it tells me that probably not everybody's doing everything exactly right. But it's hard to dig into all the details. I imagine maybe you, years ago when you were spending this million dollars a year in marketing, did you feel like you had it figured out?"

"We did. And we were using Infusionsoft, which is really hard to figure out if you're doing something right. And when we switched systems, we went onto Salesforce, it was evident that we weren't that good at it."

"So the CRM helped you?"

"Yeah, so we have a 99% contact rate, I think, of people of leads that come in. So we're all over them. Those 13 VAs, when the phone call, the lead comes in. If it's not picked up by an acquisition specialist in our home office, it rolls over to the VAs and they're all over it. And if there are missed calls or after-hours calls, they are just all over them all the time following up."

"What kind of metrics do you measure that help you know that your follow-up game is on?"

"So it's response to lead time. It's contact rate. Those are two huge ones. We look at appointments, we look at appointments closed. You know, the one area of our business we probably could get better at, but I think we've made a lot of strides in the last six months, is going on an appointment where we don't get the deal and we don't close it. We could probably get a little better there. And I think that's where most of the leaky buckets around the country, at least with the big investors are, they're really good at getting an appointment and then when they don't get the appointment, they're not great at the follow-up."

"Understood. What about after that? So what about long-term follow-up?"

"So we do, I mean, we have a category just called long-term follow-up. And we, you know, we hit people unless you're telling us not to, like, we're hitting people every single month. I mean, we've closed leads from our old Infusionsoft system seven years prior, uh, that they had literally come in seven years ago and we, so, so we never stop contacting people again unless they ask us to."

"Yeah, fair enough. Yeah, that's the tough thing about marketing, return on investment. You have to realize there's a, if you're good at your follow-up game, I've talked to a few people that are like, 'Oh, I always close like 75% of my deals. I close it like on the spot.' Um, and like they view that as a positive thing. And I view that as you probably don't have enough follow-up because that would skew your metrics quite a bit. I'm also curious to hear from you in terms of, uh, speaking of a well-running machine, from a marketing standpoint."

"How do you manage the marketing? Cause I know you've gone through, uh, a few different phases and, and some better times and worse times in terms of like hiring marketing directors or managing it yourself, that kind of thing."

"Yeah, I mean, right now, um, we, we, we do not have a marketing director. Um, I played that role for many years and I love it. I love the whole marketing. I love the creative. Uh, don't, I'm not great at the data analytics point, but I like it. I like looking at reports and stuff and figuring out what we do. So right now, um, we are managing, you know, we're working with agencies like yourself. We have a couple of agencies and they, they kind of handle everything and, and they, you know, I mean, you know, this, we, we have a weekly or biweekly, you know, every two weeks call and we just walk through the metrics and we, we work together as a team to try to, you know, improve things."

"Understood. So basically outsourcing is your solution right now. Why have you chosen to go that way?"

"I mean overhead. The, the, our last marketing director was costing us a lot of money, on several fronts."

"Yeah. Fair enough. And, and I, uh, that's kind of one thing that I'm getting at here because I had that experience of working with your past marketing director. I don't wanna name any names or hope he never hears this or anything. Cause I'm trying to make this like a positive learning experience."

"Sure."

"My honest belief, like most marketing directors that we have worked with as a company, I really don't think they're adding that much value to the company that they're working with. That's been my experience. Like when your previous marketing director left, you probably remember that your return on investment on your marketing with us literally quadrupled, the moment that they left because they put so many constraints on us and what we could do, what we couldn't do, what we could say, what we couldn't say, where the landing pages were, all these things and, and they basically like didn't allow us or potentially even some of your other vendors to really like, make the impact that they need to make."

"Sure I heard that from, from other vendors as well."

"Yeah. So it's, uh, yeah, that's a case where maybe a marketing director adds negative value, but, but there's other cases where it's, it's a tough game though because, uh, you want someone like, it's like being a marketing director is like being a steward of your money, right? Uh, you're investing in that

person. And it's, uh, like, I think, I think many are, are well-intentioned, but it's just, it's a hard role and it's hard to treat that money as if it was your own right? A business owner just does absolutely on a different level."

"But on the flip side of that, Brandon, it's hard to find good agencies. Like you. You're the exception out there, right? So while I'd say, yeah, maybe go the agency route, I mean, you can get snowed by agencies because they'll tell you what they want you to hear. Not, you know, what, what really should be happening? Cuz their incentive is just make more money. Make more money, make more money. You don't operate like that."

"And so, yeah, just, just be really careful of the agency that you select."

"Yeah. Fair enough. What's, uh, do you have any guidance on that? What, what makes you choose one agency over another?"

"I mean, look, I, so is it, this is, you know, it's kinda like the whole IT thing. Um, we don't, when you don't know something, it's really hard. Um, I, I would have to just say, Do exhaustive research on them, have several conversations with them, and then look for referrals. Like, uh, you know, this is a pretty connected community. Um, and so if I'm saying, hey, just, uh, just Brandon's organization is amazing to work with, um, you know, I've got a pretty good name. So as people who've worked with, that's, I, I would do that. First of all, I would ask people who've worked with them and not just over two months, three months, but who are the clients that have been with someone for a year or two And see if, see if you can talk with them."

"Yeah, understood. Uh, which, . Yeah. Probably, honestly is the best, the best way to get an idea of it."

"I agree. It's, it's a tough game to, to make a decision on something that you don't fully understand the, the details of it."

"Um, so, so in closing this up is, is there any other advice that, that you would share or anything you want our listeners to know?"

"Yeah. I mean, this is gonna go back to the personal side because you guys can make, you know, 10 million bucks and, and not be fulfilled. Uh, you can pick up, you know, look at the newspaper, look at all the people who've died. You know, the princes of the world, the Michael Jacksons, the on and on, and on, and on and on. Um, so if you're suffering, I just want you to know that you don't have to suffer a day longer. Uh, there is a proven method to, to stop your suffering. , once you do the work and figure out, you know, the truths and live under the truth, like everything in your life will change, including the business, the way you run your business. Just, just like it's done with me, like I have literally transformed the way that I run my business, the way that I attract people, the way that I look at growth. Now, I don't need to go make 10 million. Would I like to make $10 million to change the world? But I'm not, I'm not looking from the standpoint that I'm, I have to make this, I have to make this. So now I don't come up with all these crazy ideas and market expansion, and let's do this business and let, and let's do that business. So I would just take a good hard look at where you are in your life when you look in the mirror. Um, do you say, Hey, this is exactly where I want to be, and or do you, do you look in the mirror and say, gosh, I wish things were different. I thought things would be different by now. And if the, if the, if it's the latter answer, you thought things would be different. Now you gotta take action, right? You, you keep doing what you're gonna do. You're always gonna get what you get. So if you're in a shitty marriage or your business is going downhill, or you're outta shape or whatever it is, you gotta take some change. And there is a little bit of pain like to, to look at the truth. You gotta go through the, the pain of the truth to get to the freedom. But I am a testament to. that going through that pain and getting to the freedom is something I never, um, I never even dreamed about. I did not know life could be this good and, and there's no reason that that can't happen for you too."

"Yeah, understood. Um, for, for anybody that wants to contact you specifically, uh, to talk about that or, or anything else, how do they get ahold of you?"

"Yeah, so go to bradchandler.com/contact, and I've got everything in there. My little four-minute story of my life and my transformation. Um, I'll do, I have a free 30-minute phone call with you, whether you work with me or not. I wanna help you. I wanna help you find the freedom I have. And then every single day of the year, I put out a video on freedom and happiness and relationships and all this great stuff. So every social media link is on that page. Bradchandler.com/contact."

"Okay. Awesome. Well, good for you. Thank you for taking the time to join me today and for everybody else listening. I'll see you next time."

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In this episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast, we sit down with Aaron Gaunt and explore why he chose to expand into multiple markets, his successful sales script, how it helped him convert leads, and his passion for being a father. Join us as we dive into Aaron's story and gain valuable insights into his success in the wholesale real estate market.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

"Hello and welcome back to the Collective Clicks Podcast. Today, I'm gonna be interviewing Aaron Gaunt, who is a client of ours at Bateman Collective for probably three or four months at this point. Aaron shares a ton of great insights, including why and how he decided to expand into multiple markets instead of just staying in Southern California. He talks about his simplified sales script and how that's been working to help them perform in the top 10% of our clients from a lead conversion standpoint. We also talk about his journey of being a father and some of the things that he's passionate about.

This is the first podcast of the year, recording fresh on January 3rd. Are you excited for the new year?"

"Yeah, 2023 is gonna be... I'm excited as well," Aaron responds.

"Which year is this for you in wholesaling? I'm curious," the host asks.

"It's 2023. We've just ended our third full year. We literally started in 2020. So all that year, 2021, and 2022. That was our third year. We're going on to our fourth this year," Aaron shares.

"Exciting! Well, for everybody listening, not everyone knows you. Of course, I know several will from your podcast or the masterminds you're in and all that kind of stuff. That's how we know you. So, let's give a little bit of an intro. Tell me a little bit about your story. What exactly do you do and focus on in real estate?" the host inquires.

"Man, I have a fantastic story," Aaron begins. "And I say that with pride. What real estate has done for me and my family has not just given me financial freedom, but also fatherhood freedom, my marriage, a house, a life... you know, freedom from a nine-to-five."

Aaron continues, "So basically, what happened a little while back, I was in the fire department. I got a job in the fire department here in San Diego. I met a lady, and we got her pregnant very early on. I’m going to be fully transparent—I got her pregnant, and we were dating for probably about three months. She decided that she didn't want to be a mom. At that time, she was going to give her up for adoption. She tried, she said that I wasn't going to be in her life, etc. Now, I wasn't going to let that happen. So I actually opened up a court case before she was even born. I wasn't asking for much—I just wanted 50/50. I just wanted to be in my daughter's life. I didn't want anything else from her. I just wanted to be a father.

So, I did what I did, sucked it up, and became a father. And we'll get to the good part soon—I'm a happily involved father right now."

Aaron takes a deep breath and continues, "Anyways, if you've ever been in court, it costs a lot of money. I was making probably about $80-90K a year in the fire department—not really much. So, I ended up going into debt, fighting and going into this court case, paying for attorneys, paying for her, etc. I looked back and thought, ‘Okay, how can I pay for a good, decent attorney? I didn't want to do this on my own. I knew I needed legal help. We had a lot of emotions tied to it, especially when it comes to your kids.’ So, what happened was... I remember like it was yesterday, I sat down on my bed, looked at the ceiling, and thought, ‘How do I make money?’

Back in the Navy, where I served for eight years, we used to pass around books. One of those books was *Rich Dad Poor Dad*. Big surprise, right? But I didn’t take any action back then—I was still in my early twenties, partying, going to different ports, drinking, and not worrying about my financial future. But when the time came, I decided to pick up that book again. I remembered it from the Navy. So I re-read it and thought, ‘Okay, real estate is what's going to get me through this court case and help me pay these bills.’ But then I said, ‘I'm in debt. How the heck am I going to get into real estate while I'm in debt with no money?’

I asked myself, ‘How can I?’ instead of saying ‘I can't.’ That’s key—if you say you can’t, you stop your train of thought. So I did my research. I typed into Google, ‘How to get into real estate with no money.’ What came up was wholesaling."

Aaron continues his story: "At that point, I was still working at the fire department. I went down the YouTube University rabbit hole, trying to figure out what wholesaling was. After maybe a week or two of research, I found out there were coaching programs. These guys were talking about, 'Hey, we coach.' This was at the end of 2019. Then, I stumbled upon Wholesaling Inc. Tom Krol and Cody Hofhine were running it at the time—fantastic individuals. I even thought it might have been a scam. I remember I called them up, spoke with a sales rep, and we talked about the course. It was $5,000 at the time."

He pauses and then laughs, "I was still at the fire department, dating my wife (she was my girlfriend at the time). I went over to her job and said, ‘Hey, there’s this thing called Wholesaling Inc. They’re going to teach me how to do this wholesaling thing so I can get into real estate with no money.’ But of course, it was costing money to get into real estate."

Aaron chuckles, "So, I did my research, found out they weren't scams, and saw the good reviews. I called the sales rep back, and I put Wholesaling Inc. on my credit card. I got into the course, and they were teaching direct mail at the time. As we all know, direct mail is expensive. I put it all on my credit card. So much for getting into real estate with no money, right?"

Aaron explains how things progressed from there, "Two months later, I knew I had to make it work—I had already invested so much into it. Two months later, I closed on my first deal for $19,000. It was a huge win because I got to walk into my attorney's office and hand him a check that paid off most of the debt. But I kept going. That’s how I got my first deal and how I got into real estate."

"Mmm-hmm, that's great news! So, tell me a little bit more about your journey so far with digital marketing. Like, what have you experienced? Could you talk about the very beginning? You mentioned that you got a deal in the first week, but since then, what has happened? How do you see that fitting into your long-term plan with your company? How’s that going to grow through 2023 and beyond?"  

"No, a hundred percent. One thing I wanted to focus on, and there are debates, but this is how I see it right now. I used to think that going deeper and not wider was the key. Right? I wanted to go deeper. In Southern California, we were solely focused on Southern California. A lot of people were afraid; they’d run away from Southern California. But we were doing deals, and a good amount of sizable deals—good rippers. I mean, we have another 120k rip that we just did today, locked up in San Bernardino. Those are the kinds of deals you’re going to see in Southern California."  

"Right."  

"But anyways, instead of going deeper, when we saw the market correction, we saw that the West Coast just got annihilated with price cuts. Prices are going down like there’s no tomorrow. So that opened my eyes. I realized we needed to go wider because properties that are $200,000 and below are still flying off the shelf for our investors and cash buyers. So I decided, 'Hey, let’s go!' and we’ve kept morale high because that’s something we’re really going to focus on in the upcoming year—culture. I really want to keep the culture high."  

"Yeah, definitely."  

"I do want big rips, and we’re still going to get those. But I also want deals to come through consistently, to keep my team busy, keep them motivated, so we can ring that bell and celebrate. No matter if it’s a $2,000 deal or a $100,000 deal, I just want action and activity. That’s how I see it right now. We did 19 contracts last month. This month, we’re projecting 20 to 25 contracts, and we’re going to make that happen through PPC. I’ll be honest, that’s where we’re going to focus—inbound marketing—and also focusing on pre-foreclosures and MLS deals."  

"Right, and why MLS?"  

"The reason we hit MLS is because they’re already on the market; they’re already motivated. They’re raising their hands. Agents are going out of business. Agents are struggling right now, and sellers are going crazy. We’re getting some good rippers off the MLS just because they’re not selling. So that’s when we get to come in and say, ‘Hey, we’ll give you a low-ball offer and move this for you.’”  

"Mmm-hmm, yeah, absolutely. Understood."  

"I like how you talked about that difference between focus—like going deeper in a market versus going wider. A little context for everyone: as I remember it, we started out just advertising in Southern California, then we added one city in Texas, and then expanded to Southern California and many major cities in Texas. Now, we’re going even wider than that. What has been your experience with that? I’m curious to hear about the challenges you ran into with that shift and how you overcame them. Because some of our most successful clients tend to do this—spread across more markets. Mmm-hmm. You’ve probably noticed that you get more leads that way, and there are more opportunities to come in. But there are people who are scared to do it, and some who have tried and failed for various reasons."  

"No, a hundred percent. By taking that step of imperfect action, we figured out how to manage other markets because I believe we have the infrastructure now to handle deals anywhere. We have platforms to find buyers in all different markets. We pay a crap ton of money for those platforms. We started in Southern California, then went to Texas. The market was changing, so I wanted more leads. We started in San Antonio because I got a lead there. We made a good chunk, so I said, ‘Hey, let’s check out San Antonio.’ Then we expanded to all major areas in Texas."  

"Right."  

"Then I thought, ‘Screw it, let’s go nationwide!’ We were getting leads from all over. You could target an area, but sometimes you’ll get a lead from a different state. We were moving deals from different states, so it made sense to expand. Let’s bring down our cost per lead and get more lead flow into the database. The more leads, the more opportunities I have in front of me. And being all virtual now, we’ve learned how to put on the headphones and use techniques to lock up deals. We provide opportunities for other investors, and we get paid very well for it."  

"That’s great. Can you explain your process for locking up deals?"  

"When a lead comes in, my script is the shortest we’ve ever had because the leads are motivated. I go straight to, ‘Hey, it looks like a great property. Why are you even considering selling this property?’ I try to get their 'why,' which is usually on my dashboard because they filled out the form, but I want to dig deeper. Then I tell them, ‘At Seller’s New Day, we have a few options. Is it okay if I explain them to you?’ We offer a cash option, a retail buyer option (our novation), and a listing option where we partner with listing agents in the area. Then I ask them, ‘What do you think would be the best fit for you?’ Most of the time, they say they want a cash offer."  

"Really?"  

"Yes, seven out of ten times they pick the cash option. I explain the pros and cons of each option, but the cash offer is always the most convenient and fastest way to solve their problem. So, we send the agreement, connect them with our fulfillment side, and it’s off my plate. I’m off to the next lead."  

"That’s so important. Too many people try to push acquisitions managers into a transaction coordination role, which is a nightmare waiting to happen. You can’t do volume that way."  

"Exactly! You can’t. And the difference in price between the retail and cash options is huge. But surprisingly, a lot of clients still pick the cash option."  

"That’s interesting because you’d think they’d go for retail every time since it’s more money."  

"Right? You’d think that way because if we were selling our own house, we’d probably pick retail. But the thing is, they’re looking for a cash offer. That’s why they came to us. We’ve set up our marketing to attract that specific audience."  

"Mmm-hmm."  

"And don’t be afraid to offer all options. I even have a listing appointment today, and I encourage everyone in my office to be a real estate agent, even if they don’t use it. It helps them understand the basics of real estate and gives them another way to assist."  

"Got it. I’d love to dig deeper into your process for each of those three options."  

"For sure. The cash offer option is straightforward. But when expanding to new markets, the concern is usually around dispositions. They might not have a buyer’s list in that area or experience with selling in that market."  

"Absolutely. Dispositions are key to dominating in this downturn. I put all my VAs on dispo. They call buyers in the areas we need to sell properties. We’ve struggled a bit with dispo, but we’re getting back into a rhythm. We use platforms like InvestorLift on cartel mode, which costs a lot, but it’s worth it. We also use PropStream to pull cash buyers in the area. If we can’t move a deal, we JV with someone in that market who has a solid cash buyer list. My VAs, like Jim, are rockstars at finding JV partners on Facebook."  

"That’s smart."  

"Right? I tell my team not to give up because it's not just about taking orders. We have to think, ‘How are we going to sell this deal?’ The days of sending out an email and getting offers are over."

"Do you think you would go down?"  
"And then they'll tell me, cuz now I've just given it everything from A to Z. I've given you all the options. You can't, there's nowhere else you could go to get a better. I'm sorry, but that's how it is. That script I just told you, there's no better option out there."  
"Besides what?"  
"Unless I lost some kind of rapport, there's no other option. You're gonna get all the prices from me. It's a one-stop shop, and that's how we get all the contracts that we do."  
"Yeah, that's awesome. Uh, I think there's also, just knowing you, I'm sure there are some other things here that are a little bit less obvious or a little bit more hidden, you could say, right?"  
"Right."  
"Because let's just say I'm a robot, and I bring 'em on. I say, 'You have three options. Here's what you could do,' right? That's it. If there's not that trust there, if there's not that rapport, then 100%, we're not in a good position."  
"Um, do you have any tips? And I know a lot of this book that you're referencing, which I've read personally, 'How to Win Friends and Influence People,' a lot of this stuff would be very applicable to this. But in terms of the actual script for negotiation, the offer presentation, and stuff like that, I feel like I understand that. Do you have any advice on getting to that point in the call?"  
"Right."  
"Things like making sure that you actually get ahold of them. What does that typically look like for you guys? And how do you, uh, how do you make yourself stand apart from the other several people probably calling them right at the beginning after they filled out multiple forms online? Just getting to the point where they even trust you enough that you're that deep into the conversation, that you're talking about offers?"  
"Man, that's a great question. So as you probably already know, it's speed to lead when it comes to PPC. Talking about me being a father, I'm probably the worst father when it’s at the dinner table. When I'm at the dinner table, and until again, I had acquisition guys. We're actually going to be hiring some more acquisition guys coming in this month. But currently, as the only acquisition guy dealing with the PPC leads, I'll literally be at the dinner table, and we'll get a lead that comes in through Brandon Bateman. And I'll say, 'Oh, gotta go,' and run into the office to hop on the phone and get 'em, you know? So basically, my opening is just saying, 'Hey, this is Aaron. I saw that you filled out a form here at Seller's New Day. Did I catch you at a bad time?'"  
"And if they say, 'No, this is a good time,' perfect. I just go right into it: 'Hey, I mean, it looks like a great property. Why are you looking to sell?' And then boom, you go right into it."  
"Right."  
"Our follow-up process, let's say they didn't answer their phone, I like to call. We do a double tap—text, email. We call it a footprint, right? Making sure you're always in front of them, making sure you have a CRM. We use Left Main Core."  
"Uh-huh."  
"So from there, every day, I'm just calling, texting, and emailing them every single day to get them on the phone. I also have pre-recorded text messages, so I like to get through my leads quick. I have a dialer set within our CRM, so it's literally like, click and go. I have a voicemail drop where it just drops a voicemail, so they get a voicemail, text, email, and call. Like I said, we call it footprints because they know everything."  
"Right."  
"So if they decided not to call back, then we did everything in our power to do it. Now, again, this is virtual. I can't just drive to their house, but yeah, we're on it pretty hard."  
"Okay, yeah, that's awesome. I appreciate all that feedback and everything. Is there anything else that you'd give as advice? So, for context, Aaron, the people listening to this podcast are often our clients or people considering working with us. Do you have any advice for either of those groups?"  
"Oh man, I'm always giving you guys a shoutout, Brandon. We've tried out one or two others, people who are doing PPC now. What happened was, I think it was the Red Beards that really got me drawn to... no, I'm just kidding."  
"(Laughs)"  
"No, you guys have been fantastic. You built rapport with myself, always being on it. When we email you about an issue or if there is any, for example, let's say a lead gave me a false lead, and I say, 'Hey, can you guys fix this?' You guys are on it."  
"Right."  
"And again, I feel like there's a connection between me and your team. I had a chance to hang out with a couple of guys from your team at the last CG meeting. You guys were fantastic. We were hanging on the rooftop, throwing back drinks, so that was really cool."  
"That's great."  
"But other than that, like I said, and we talked about that earlier too, I want to make sure this is done right. I want to see my return, so I'm going to have a team that does this systematically. Too many people, I think, just kind of throw stuff at the wall and hope it sticks. You're going to know more than I do. My last return from the other program, the leads just weren’t coming in. They didn't have the structure or infrastructure that they needed. But you guys definitely have the infrastructure."  
"Thank you."  
"You also seem like a good leader with your team. A lot of people look up to you, and you can see that. And I want my marketing to be led by a good person, someone who definitely knows what they're doing."  
"Yeah, thank you, Aaron. (Laughs) My fish for compliments worked perfectly."  
(Laughs) "I appreciate you, and everybody, take notes. You've been incredible to work with. So, any vendors listening to this, go call up Aaron and try to get him to buy your stuff because he's a great guy."  
"No, not anymore."  
(Laughs) "Well, it has been awesome to have you on here. I think you've added tons of value. Is there a way someone can reach you if they want to get in touch?"  
"Yep, just hit me up on Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. Also, check out my podcast, 'The Real Estate Block Podcast,' where we have guys just like myself who are doing consistent deals. But that's about it."  
"Very cool. Tell me, is there some way we can support you in that? I imagine with that podcast, you're doing some coaching or something like that?"  
"No, not yet. We're just giving out value. The reason I started our podcast was... well, just like the reason why I started it... when I saw the market correction, we felt it pretty hard those first two months, right? And I thought, 'We were the only ones feeling it.' Then we realized, oh crap, everybody's feeling it. It doesn't matter how big or small your business is—everybody felt it."  
"Right."  
"And I had some buddies tell me that they went out of business, all kinds of stuff. And I said, 'Heck no. I want to make sure we're adding value and helping people who are still doing deals. Let's get a platform for them to share, so people can reach out to those I bring onto the podcast for help.' So it really started with wanting to help people during this downturn."  
"Okay, understood. Well, that's awesome. I didn't know that was just a value add to help people, but that's great, Aaron. I encourage everyone to listen to the podcast. I have no doubt what Aaron puts out there is solid, and I think that's a really interesting premise too. Any last words before we close things up today?"  
"No, I just appreciate you and thank you so much for having me on your show, brother."  
"Yeah, likewise. Aaron, thank you for coming. For everybody listening, that's it for today's show, and I'll see you on the next episode."

‍

Keywords are the foundation of Google Ads, and it can be easy to short-circuit your campaigns with poor keywords. In this episode, we dive into the keys to generating quality leads with optimized keywords.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by Garrett Craigan, who is our lead of paid media here at Bateman Collective. He’s one of the best PPC masters that I know. We’re going to talk all about keywords and negative keywords, which is just the first part of the eight essential elements to having a successful PPC campaign. We’ll dive into all the details, including things you don’t normally hear about, and some of the biggest mistakes we see investors making that, if fixed, would lead to better PPC results. How are you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing good, how are you?"

"Hey, doing excellent, thank you. I know we had planned for some banter, but we’re completely awkward as people, and I think that made this impossible."

"Yes, we suck at being people."

"Yeah, that's right. So, we’re good digital marketing robots, and I guess we’ll just jump right into the stuff today. Sorry to everyone listening, we don’t have anything fun to say."

"The topic for today is the beginning of a series where we go over the eight things that are essential to having a successful PPC campaign. On the flip side, these are also the eight things we see a lot of investors doing wrong when it comes to their PPC. So, it's going to be pretty in-depth. This is definitely for you nerdy investors out there who want to get deeper into the weeds of PPC. We’ll discuss technical terms and all that stuff, but if you’re familiar with the platform, you’ll find this interesting. As I said, there are eight key points, so today we’re just starting with numbers one and two, which are keywords and negative keywords, followed by ads."

"To give everyone a little context, we do a lot of audits. It happens all the time—an investor comes to us and says, 'I don’t know what’s going wrong with this; I’m managing my own PPC, or I’m working with an agency, and it’s just not working the way I want.' They ask us to take a look. We look into the account, see what’s going on, and try to figure out why they’re not getting results. Pretty commonly, there’s this interaction between negative keywords and keywords. Do you have any specific thoughts on the common mistakes you’re seeing?"

"Yeah, I think that in the space, there’s a tendency to focus too much on the 'sexy' parts of PPC, like dynamic localization or different ad types. But really, at the core of PPC, we are bidding on search terms. Having good keywords and search terms in place means you’re likely to get good results. But if that’s not there, everything else will underperform. It’s crucial that your keywords are targeting the right intent and that you’re not bidding on searches that are out of market or of lower quality."

"Yeah, you basically just said what I’ve been saying in so many audits recently, just with different words. I often tell clients something along the lines of, 'I’d love to talk about all the problems you have here, but you’re not even eligible for most of the problems that could arise because you don’t even have the right search terms.' That’s step one. People think fixing that will make their campaigns great, but it’s just how you get from an F to a C. Having good search terms is the bare minimum. The rest of the work won’t fix that, just like how you can’t build on a bad foundation."

"I think the root of that issue for a lot of companies comes from not understanding the difference between keywords and search terms. A lot of people don’t really get that. Could you explain it?"

"Sure. The search term is what’s actually being searched—the exact words typed by the customer, like 'how can I sell my house fast for cash?' That’s the search term. A keyword is what we tell Google is the general intent we want to target. So, we can target a keyword, but the search term may not exactly match it. Most of the time, it doesn’t."

"Right. Most of the time, we’re targeting a general search, and Google tries to match it as best it can. That’s why it’s important to go into your search terms to see what you’re actually paying for. You could have good keywords but still end up with poor search terms. That’s where things can get stuck if you’re not diligent in pruning and cleaning up those search terms."

"Exactly, that makes sense. I think it would be helpful to provide an example. A common scenario is that you have a keyword like 'We Buy Houses,' but then your search term ends up being 'Buy Houses.' You’re telling Google you want to target 'We Buy Houses,' and you’re seeing that you’re getting clicks and leads. Everything looks good on the surface. But when you dig deeper and see what someone actually typed into Google when your ad showed up, they might have searched 'Buy Houses.' To Google, taking the word 'We' out doesn’t seem like a big difference, but anyone in the industry knows that 'Buy Houses' is buyer traffic, and 'We Buy Houses' is seller traffic. They’re really different in nature."

"Exactly. I also think a lot of people don’t realize how many search terms there are. It’s insane. I did an analysis at one point—it's been a while since I did it, so I’d be curious to do it again—but at that time, I found that across our clients, over 80% of the leads they got came from search terms that only had one click in the entire history of their account. People think they have these five main search terms they’re going heavy on, and that’s where all their leads will come from. But in reality, there are thousands of search terms, and most of the leads come from long-tail search terms, which are more specific phrases. Very few come from the big, obvious ones."

"Interesting. Yeah, I read a stat that there are a thousand brand new search terms on Google every single day. So, what was searched historically isn’t static—it’s always changing and evolving. That’s why it’s so important to update your keywords based on what’s happening."

"Now and what's working well now because they're always changing, and those search terms are going to be different every single day. If those aren't being pruned, you're wasting a lot of budget."

"Yeah, the stat that I saw is that about 15% of Google searches each day are completely unique, and they've never been seen before in the history of Google. It rounds out to about 500 million searches every single day."

"That's a better stat than what mine was," Garrett replied. "That's good. I wonder if what you were looking at was a specific account or something or a specific niche because like 500 million and a thousand are really different numbers."

Brandon nodded. "Yeah, but it's insane. And I think this is like marketing stereotype 101, right? Marketers like to put people in boxes. They like to say, 'my customer is this.' I saw this funny post on LinkedIn where someone was just making marketing predictions for 2023, and it was super sarcastic. They said, 'new CEOs and boardrooms are going to come up with customer avatars that are oddly specific in 2023, and it's not going to actually yield any benefit.' Because we do that all the time. We expect people to fit in these boxes like, 'this is who my customer is,' but people are so unique and so different. The way they search for things is different all the time."

"One thing interesting to think about is how many keywords do you really need," Brandon continued. "I've talked to a lot of investors who think the name of the game is almost like guessing what all these search terms are going to be and making a keyword for each one of them. They think, 'Oh, I'm working with this professional PPC company, and the difference they have is they probably just have tens of thousands of keywords, and they know everything that people search.' What would you say about that?"

"I don't think it's as much about having an ideal count of keywords in an account to maximize it," Garrett explained. "It's going to be based on volume, intent, and budget. You can have a thousand keywords in your account, but if your budget is only a thousand bucks a month, you're probably not going to show up for most of those, and you're not going to get enough data for any given keyword to even mean anything. So it has to be based on your budget, your audience, the volume that each keyword can get, the monthly searches that keyword has in a given month. All of those things have to be considered when you're building out an initial keyword structure for an account."

"Yeah, understandable," Brandon replied. "I'm really curious. What's the largest number of keywords you've ever managed in an account, or you've seen?"

"I managed ads for a Fortune 500 company, and they had, I think, in just their account targeting North America, about 8,000 keywords," Garrett said. "And they had an account for each continent, each market."

"Wow, 8,000 keywords!" Brandon exclaimed.

"Yeah, but that was just like a different account per market because of different OCC currencies and things like that," Garrett added.

"Oh, understandable. Interesting," Brandon said. "The reason I ask is because I have a completely ridiculous story. I had one client that had six million keywords."

"Oh my God," Garrett said, shocked.

"Yeah, six million keywords," Brandon repeated. "How many of those had any clicks, impressions?"

"A smaller number," Brandon admitted. "But to be fair, they had like the biggest search term universe of any company I'd ever worked with in my life. Six million keywords."

"And they spent about five million a month," Brandon added. "But still, that's like a dollar a keyword. It's insane."

"Wow, that's crazy," Garrett responded.

"Anyway, that was tangential," Brandon said, getting back on track. "But cut those down, team! I think there's definitely been a shift if we're talking about PPC strategy in terms of the number of keywords. If you're looking back to 2017 PPC, this account that I was talking about, they've been going since 2008 or something, so they've got a lot of history. The world of PPC has changed quite a bit, and it seems like most PPC marketers are on the side that things have changed really significantly in the past decade with keywords."

Garrett nodded. "Yeah, and even in the past three or four years. There have been some big changes."

"Yeah, what are some of those big changes?" Brandon asked.

Garrett explained, "There's been a big change in the way platforms work. The biggest change has been with match types. Google has become a lot more loose and liberal with how it matches your keyword with search terms. They say it's to give the algorithm a bit more freedom to match intent, not just the actual keyword. But really, I think it's because they want to sell inventory on searches that, in general, aren't being bid on by advertisers. That's a big change. What was once an exact match keyword is now much looser than it was a couple of years ago."

Brandon clarified for the listeners, "Just to clarify for everybody listening, if you're not familiar with match types, basically when you give Google your keyword—you say 'We Buy Houses,' for example—there are different match types. Historically, how it used to be was exact match meant someone had to type in 'We Buy Houses' exactly. And if they typed in 'We Buy House,' it wouldn't show up. Then there's phrase match, which would be like 'We Buy Houses' has to be in there somewhere. So they could type in 'We Buy Houses California,' and you would still show up. Then there's broad match, which was like you type in 'We Buy Houses,' but then someone searches 'We Buy Ugly Houses,' and you still show up."

Garrett chuckled. "Yeah, and if you ever want to learn how to completely evade an issue and give yourself license to do anything you want, go read Google's help articles about what match types mean these days."

Brandon laughed. "It's hilarious! They basically say, 'If you do this match type, it means all of these things and also whatever we want.'"

"Pretty much every article from Google now just says at the bottom, 'Also whatever we want,'" Garrett agreed.

"In their own words, 'based on the algorithm's learnings,'" Brandon added.

"Yes, exactly!" Garrett replied. "So wild."

Brandon continued, "So the way it used to work is you could have your keyword 'apple,' and maybe you'd get 'apple,' but now you could get 'apples' or even 'orange,' and Google says, 'They're both fruit, so close enough.' It's different, especially when you get to some of these nuances like 'We Buy Houses' versus 'Buy Houses,' which mean really different things."

"How do you think the way to deal with keywords has adapted because of that?" Brandon asked.

Garrett explained, "So there was a very popular keyword structure used in the past called SCAG, which stood for Single Keyword Ad Group. Basically, what people would do is build out one ad group with an exact match type of their keyword. The theory—and what worked historically—was they would force each search term into one ad group, and then it would match the search with the keyword, the ad with the landing page, and have really good matching across the board."

Brandon nodded as Garrett continued, "But since things have changed, and match types have become much looser, that old way of doing things is pretty obsolete now. It's much harder to match one search with one keyword because Google's algorithm is so loose. So it has become increasingly important, as Google gives more freedom to the algorithm, to have a really fine-tuned negative keyword list."

"Yeah, that makes sense," Brandon responded. "It probably is helpful to dive a bit deeper into negative keywords because they function differently than positive keywords."

Garrett agreed. "Exactly. So, you could say there are two types of keywords: positive and negative. Positive keywords are telling Google what you want to show up for, while negative keywords are telling Google what you don't want to show up for. Negative trumps positive, meaning if you have a positive keyword like 'We Buy Houses' phrase match, and you want that included, but you also have a negative keyword for the word 'scam,' if someone searches 'We Buy Houses companies that are scams,' you wouldn't show up because of that negative keyword."

Brandon chuckled. "You'd need to also have the plural version, but yeah."

"Right," Garrett laughed. "If we didn’t have that negative keyword in there, we would show up, and obviously, that would be a poor click. So that highlights the importance of having a negative keyword list because Google doesn’t know the difference between a good and bad search, but we do."

"You ever played Whac-A-Mole?" Brandon asked with a grin.

Garrett shook his head. "Actually, I don't think I have, but I know the game."

"Okay," Brandon continued. "If you want a visual representation of adding negative keywords, Whac-A-Mole is the most appropriate thing because they’re always popping up. There are always new bad search terms that Google is making you pay for just because. In the same way that there are those 15% of Google searches every day that are completely unique and could be beneficial for you, they could also be negative for you if they’re irrelevant."

Garrett nodded. "Exactly. And I’ve seen so many people play this game for years—literally years—and never really get anywhere because they’re not keeping up with negative keywords that they theoretically need."

Brandon leaned in, interested. "So what’s the key to staying ahead of that curve? How do you keep your negative keyword list sharp?"

Garrett explained, "It’s about constant pruning and reviewing search terms. You can’t just set it and forget it. You have to consistently check your search term reports, see what’s coming in, and add negative keywords based on that data. It’s ongoing, and it’s vital to the long-term success of any PPC campaign."

Brandon nodded thoughtfully. "Makes sense. I think a lot of people underestimate how dynamic search behavior really is and how it evolves over time."

"Totally," Garrett replied. "And it’s not just about quantity, it’s about quality. Even if you have fewer keywords in your account, if they’re well-tuned and paired with strong negatives, you’ll get better results than if you’re trying to go after everything and spread your budget too thin."

Brandon smiled. "That’s solid advice. I think people are going to get a lot out of this."

"Glad to hear that," Garrett said with a grin. "Anything else you’re curious about?"

Brandon paused for a moment, then said, "Actually, yeah. What about ad copy? Have you seen a shift in what types of ad copy are resonating with audiences today compared to, say, a few years ago?"

Garrett nodded. "Oh, absolutely. With all the algorithm changes, it's become increasingly important to have ad copy that speaks directly to user intent. You can no longer just rely on generic copy. It needs to be specific, relevant, and engaging. Plus, Google's emphasis on Quality Score makes it even more crucial that your ad copy matches your keywords and landing page experience. So, in short, it's about alignment—making sure everything flows seamlessly from keyword to ad to landing page."

Brandon looked intrigued. "Interesting. I feel like that makes the whole process more cohesive, right?"

"Exactly," Garrett affirmed. "And when everything is cohesive, not only do you see better performance, but you also see higher engagement and lower costs per click because Google rewards that consistency with a higher Quality Score."

Brandon grinned. "Man, this has been super insightful. Thanks so much for sharing all of this."

"Of course!" Garrett replied. "Always happy to help."

‍

Shaun Young, an account strategist who has worked with 100+ real estate investors across the country joins Brandon in this episode. Together, they delve into the world of Google Ads and discuss the key elements of where people go wrong especially when it comes to ad copy. This is the second part of an eight-part series that focuses on common mistakes made by investors, areas where they can improve, and strategies for outperforming the competition.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

‍

"Welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'll be joined by Shaun Young from my team. Shaun Young is an account strategist that works with over 50 Real Estate Investors across the country, and we're going to be talking all about Google ads, specifically the ads. This is part two of an eight-part series about all the things that matter to have a successful PPC campaign. We talk about where investors go wrong, where they potentially do better, and how you can do exceptionally well so your competition cannot catch up to you."

"All right, how you doing today, Shaun Young?"

"I'm pretty good."

"Awesome, happy to hear it. Another last-minute podcast for you."

"Oh yeah, excited. My favorite kind."

"This is the second part of a probably eight-part, unless we change our mind, series that is all of the things that you need to do to have an excellent performing PPC campaign. For each one of those things, we're going to talk about what do people do wrong, what can they do better, and how do you do it the absolute best so that your competition can never catch you. And we'll talk about all three of those things today."

"Last time the topic was keywords. This time the topic is ads, and those are the first two out of like I said eight things that have to do with Google search. If you don't care about the details of Google ads, if you don't want to get into the weeds, this episode is not for you, and this whole series isn't for you. But if you have an interest in the specific weeds, you want to know why your campaign's not performing, you want to understand the specific aspects of the ads and how they work, then this is a great episode to dig into some of that stuff more in detail, and we will share all of our secrets so that you can hear them."

"Super excited to get into things. So let's start with what people are doing, and I'm thinking we could just do it one by one. What are they doing wrong and what's the version that's better? When it comes to ads, what would you say is the first thing that people are messing up with?"

"Yeah, honestly, one of the first things I want to talk about is people only using one ad in their ad groups, the one like responsive ad, and just one of the easier pitfalls to fall into because it's easy. You only set up one ad, it makes some people think, 'Hey, I'm going to test this and replace it with more content later on,' and things like that. But when you have only one ad in your ad group, it limits what Google can do."

"Google has what, something like 75,000 touch points on everyone? We've shared different numbers of different points in this podcast, and all of them are different. I know they're probably all different, but we don't actually - I don't know that anybody knows, but it's a lot, a bigger number than anybody can imagine."

"Yeah, it's massive. And so it's - I think in that context, giving Google more to play with allows it to do what it wants to do and do best, and let it test the different responsive ads. Let it show people what it thinks is going to be best because you can set up your demographic of what you want and everything like that, but you don't really know Billy Bob Joe who's going to be searching for 'we buy houses' later on today. You don't know what he's like, and Google does, though. And so by giving Google options within the ads to talk about, it can know, 'Okay, this responsive ad is going to be better for Billy than this other one,' and you're more likely to convert. You're more likely to have a better lead quality and lead flow with more options for Google. And so having multiple responsive ads is something that I think is a huge thing that's a problem because a lot of people don't do it. They'll just do one ad, one ad group, one campaign."

"Yeah, gotta get more in there."

"Yeah, I get what you're saying. I'll just add a couple things. I think we probably want to clarify responsive ads in case someone's not familiar with that. Google, for the longest time, used primarily expanded text ads, and what that was is it's exactly what you expect to see from Google. There's like headline one, headline two, headline three. Sometimes they added that kind of partway through and used it half the time, and that was kind of how Google functioned."

"Now they have these things called responsive ads, which means you just throw in - I think it's up to 15 headlines and four descriptions, or maybe more than four descriptions. I can't remember. There's some other options, but I think it's four."

"Yeah, so you put in a bunch of descriptions, bunch of headlines, and then Google just mixes and matches that and turns it into whatever ad it wants. And a lot of people think because they're doing that, they don't have to have multiple of those because there's like lots of assets there. So on one hand, you need to have a lot of things in the responsive search ad so Google has options, but the tough thing is you can't have things that don't make sense together in there."

"So that's where having multiple ads allows you to have multiple themes. Then you can be testing theme one versus theme two, in addition to testing which headlines work for each theme the best. Otherwise, you're just restricted to one ad, one theme, or you have multiple themes in there and your ads don't actually make sense because Google throws them all - those headlines in whatever orders they want to throw them in, and it just doesn't actually make sense."

"Yeah, no, and I think on top of that as well, making sure that you have them grouped by the right themes too. Like not grouping them just randomly and things like that. You need to have them be along the same - I guess repeating what you said, but a little bit deeper is making sure that those themes actually go well together. Because when you have more than one ad, you do open yourself up to different messages being shown, and you need to make sure that those messages are in line with what you're trying to get with that ad or with that campaign."

"Absolutely. One kind of like sub-subtopic of this, not something we planned talking about, is pinned headlines. You have any thoughts on pinned headlines?"

"I have mixed feelings about pinned headlines. They're beneficial if you know that a headline works well, but if you don't, don't pin is kind of my opinion. I think you should give Google the opportunity to have a level playing field when you're first starting out a new campaign. I don't like to pin things when I'm just starting out if it's like a fresh campaign that I have no data on. And given - like in our campaigns, we pin a lot of that, but that's because we have aggregate data across all of our clients. We know what works and what doesn't. But if you're starting a brand new campaign, don't pin anything in the beginning is my opinion. Don't pin and let Google play with everything. And then as you get some data in from performance, you'll start getting a picture of which headlines are working, which ones aren't. At that point, you can start pinning the ones that really work."

"Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. And you're right that considering the data we have, we have more liberty to do more things earlier. We can kind of set up guard rails because we already know where it's... oh, this is already learned in 20 other accounts that these are the headlines that work better here or in this certain position or whatever the case is. And just lower the number of things that Google's testing to just the ones that we think are most likely to work, and it gets you there faster because Google will get there, but it could take it a really long time if it's just doing things randomly."

"I would say there's one exception to what you talked about, and I see this problem with a few accounts that we audit where they have headlines that just don't make sense in certain orders. You have to make sure that they actually make sense because Google's machine learning doesn't really understand that. It just knows the performance of this headline is a certain thing. Like for example, a call to action for the whole ad - you don't want that to be your headline number one. So you can pin, and there's ways to pin where you're just pinning to a position. You're not just making sure the headline shows up, but you're just saying if it does show up, make sure it shows up in spot number two or spot number three or whatever the case is, because maybe it doesn't make sense if it shows up in spot number one."

"So it's hard to imagine because if you have 15 headlines, if you imagine every possible order that those could come in if there's going to show three at a time... I know there's some mathematical way to figure that out, but the answer is it's a ton of stuff. But it has to actually make sense, and the machine learning will eventually find out what converts and what doesn't, but it needs to... sometimes it'll just take it so long and it has to gather so much data to get there that you can shortcut that process."

"It's a good point. Any other notes on multiple ads?"

"I think I've given my box, but summary there - just make sure you have multiple ads with similar themes. It helps a ton versus just having the one."

"Yeah, absolutely. The next one that I want to touch on is the what those headlines themselves say. I think there's a tendency for marketers overall to always be focused on what gets someone one step deeper down the funnel. So when we write an ad, we think how do we write an ad that someone wants to click. But the other variable that we have to think about there is not just are we getting someone down the funnel, but who are we getting down the funnel. And it could be that a certain headline attracts more people but less of the right people, and that's true really often."

"And then the other thing to think about with pay-per-click advertising is exactly that - pay per click. It's not pay per view or impression. Now on Facebook, that's a different story, right? On Google though, it's pay per click. So assuming you're going to be paying for that click, you want to make sure that you're qualifying the person. So that's where the rule of thumb is qualify and convert, don't just convert. Whereas most marketers just focus on the convert section, they look at what ads get the highest percentage of clicks, the highest click-through rate, but we want to qualify too."

"And I think a specific example of where that goes wrong in this industry is messaging around pricing. If you look at all the options that a seller has, basically a wholesaler is usually the absolute worst at price, and they're the best at everything else. And then they could go like retail, for example, that's much less convenient and takes a lot longer, but the price is better. So you just have to think of your strengths as a company. Literally, the thing that you're worst at is price, and I cannot tell you how many ads I look at in this industry that say, 'We'll pay top dollar for your house. You'll be shocked by how high our offer is,' you know, all this stuff where it just doesn't attract the right kind of person by any means."

"And you pay for those clicks, and then those same people, when I'm doing these audits, they're complaining to me that their leads are all too retail. They all want too much money for their house. And I look at their ads, and their ads say, 'We'll pay you more than anybody else,' and they're surprised that those people are the people that are being attracted by those ads."

"So I think that's something to keep in mind. It's not just about what gets the most clicks. You want to think each of these clicks you're going to pay for, how do you make them count? The opposite version of that is you could say, 'I'll buy your house for 50% of market value' in the ad or something. Then nobody wants to click it, right? So there's a balance here, but I think focusing on the pain points that you want people to have is a really good way to make sure you're getting the right people. And you can let your competitors buy all the clicks from the people that are motivated by the wrong things. It's the most ideal scenario. You have any thoughts on that?"

"Yeah, mostly along the lines of what you're saying here. I think some marketers take advantage of the fact that high lead flow looks good when quality suffers because of it. And that's where like a lot of like broad match keywords and phrase match, exact match keywords get for... where we take the stance that we want... we don't turn the dial as far towards quality as possible. And honestly, like nine times out of 10, I feel like the investors that I work with are like, 'I'd rather have high quality, a little bit lower lead flow than like massive lead flow, low quality.' It's just better to be not filtering through all the garbage."

"And so that's what I typically recommend - really trying to decide what you want as quality and making sure that your message is absolutely in line with that. Because like you said, if you just say, 'We'll buy your house regardless, no terms attached,' everyone will come to you, but you won't get any deals out of it because you can't do that and you don't want that. So having that key messaging of making sure that you have a good balance of, 'Hey, we want to convert this ad, but at the same time, we want to make sure it's the right person,' is super crucial in making sure that it's a successful ad campaign."

"Here's another thing - I completely agree with what you said. I think another thing that makes us even more dangerous is the machine learning that we're dealing with in Google where you can give it 15 headlines and it's going to start to learn. And if you look over time, it's probably going to end up serving a few of those headlines way, way more than the other ones because it finds that they work better. So if you have some things that attract the wrong people but they get a lot of clicks, you risk - even though that's one headline in 15 - you risk that headline is going to be shown 90% of the time because Google's AI is going to learn that's a good headline because by every measure that they have, it's showing that it's a good headline."

"And that's, I think, probably the most dangerous thing about... we see this on Facebook too. It's not just about having the thing there and attracting the wrong people. The problem is these ad platforms, they double down on mistakes, and you start spending all your money on a piece of junk over some time."

"Yeah, it's like just imagine giving your acquisition manager a high five every time they get just a really bad deal, a bad contract. That's exactly what you're doing by trying to just push high lead flow with all these ridiculous statements in Google. So because Google thinks that you want it, and it'll give you more for a long time too because you have to retrain it if you try to change. So yeah, absolutely."

"What else? You have any other items?"

"Yeah, the other one that I wanted to talk about is making sure that your keywords are actually relevant in your headlines. One of the things that we've talked about numerous times is that you got to be really careful with what you're using in the headlines because Google's AI doesn't understand proper English and things like that, and you can get some really weird looking headlines coming out of Google if you're not careful about what you're putting in there."

"Making sure that you have headlines that are going to sound attractive to people but not just like keyword stuffing them. What I typically recommend in those situations is you want to have your keywords in your headlines and things like that and your description, but you can't just have just your keyword and just shove a bunch of keywords into it. This isn't the 90s anymore. We can't do that, right? It has to be relevant, it has to look good."

"People read things on Google, and you just think of the scammy ads you've ever seen on Google, and they all look exactly like that. Think of just... I think of Alibaba, for example. Have you ever shopped on Alibaba? Their listing, their titles are just like keyword stuffed to every keyword possible that could be related to that item, and it looks so bad. And you just look at it, you're like, 'Yeah, I'm not buying that. That's weird.'"

"So you want to make sure in your headlines and titles on Google that it sounds good. It's something somebody's going to read and be like, 'Oh, that sounds like a reputable company.' And on top of that, also it ties into making sure that you're qualifying and not just converting as well. Making sure that you're not just putting the keyword in there... you can't just have a dynamic keyword line in your headline so it just shoves their keyword in there every time they search for it. You need to have good content that people can read and actually like."

"Yeah, that solves my situation. If someone's searching 'sell my house for cash,' you can't just have an ad that says 'sell my house for cash,' and then it just looks weird. You have to be like, 'We'll buy your house for cash,' and here's our stipulations, those things to help try to qualify that as well. So that's my thoughts on keyword stuffing and having good quality headlines. You have anything to add to that?"

"I think what you just noted is the most common way that people screw this up. I think of it kind of like a continuum, though. You have that side that you just talked about, which is Alibaba keyword stuffed everything, do it for the algorithm, not for the person. And then you have on the far other side - this is much less common in this industry, but then we have brand marketers. Like, never have a brand marketer write your PPC headlines, 'cause it's going to be like something incredibly creative and nobody's going to get it. They always think too creative, too high of cognitive resources that are necessary to understand it, and it's always like the next step instead of clarifying that this is relevant to what you just searched."

"So it's one of those things that... which sounds amazing, but for people that are like... the average cognitive resources that people have available as they're doing searches on Google is not enough to comprehend those headlines. So that's one side, and then yours - the other side is kind of in between. Because if you don't put enough keywords in your headlines and that kind of thing, then Google doesn't like you because part of your quality score is going to be your ad relevance. They'll actually charge you a higher cost per click if you don't have your ads hyper-relevant to your keywords. And including the keywords in the ads is a great way to do that, or like slight variations. But yeah, you can go too far. So I think it's about finding the balance for sure."

"One thing on that topic is... mentioned this briefly... it's Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Yeah, this has been a common practice in Google ads for a long time. Google has these dynamic possibilities where you can basically put your keyword into your ad dynamically as a headline. So someone searches something that matches to your 'we buy houses' keyword, and then your ad will say 'we buy houses,' inserting that keyword in. And this is something that I've seen pretty problematic in a lot of accounts because what you can end up doing is you don't write your keywords with the intention of them being in an ad, but then you write an ad that inserts them."

"So your keyword might be 'companies that buy houses,' and then your ad might have Dynamic Keyword Insertion, and then you insert 'companies that buy houses' into your ad. And then just think of that - someone searches for 'companies that buy houses,' and then they read your ad and it says 'companies that buy houses.' That doesn't make sense. You're a company that buys houses, so you might say something being like 'We Buy Houses,' right? And then it's like really clear. But if you just insert 'companies that buy houses,' that doesn't make any sense."

"Yeah, and that can definitely bite you. It doesn't always make sense. I think one of the reasons that people do this is so they can have a single ad group. For anybody that's unfamiliar, an ad group is like a container that holds keywords and ads, and the idea is you want everything in it to be somewhat relevant to the other things. But if people put like all their keywords into a single ad group, then you have to have this in order for it to be relevant to all those things. But if you have your ad group structure set up right to where all the keywords in it are relatively the same, you don't have to dynamically put them into an ad to make it relevant."

"The other place where I've seen this bite people is in with trademarks. It's easy to have competitor keywords, which are just a pretty standard practice that you have a competitor - the most common one's probably 'We Buy Ugly Houses,' right? But 'We Buy Ugly Houses' as a keyword, it's a great keyword. So common, almost that I think a lot of people don't even think about it as a competitor keyword, but it is technically. But then if you have Dynamic Keyword Insertion, you'll take 'We Buy Ugly Houses' and you'll put that in your headline, and then you're doing trademark infringement. And Google potentially won't even let it run, or if they do, you might get sued. And that particular company tends to be very litigious."

"Your other companies might... you can definitely use competitor keywords. Generally, attorneys will agree that that's not illegal and that's not trademark infringement. But putting those in your ads so it looks like you are that company is very much trademark infringement because it causes confusion for the consumer. So that's another place to keep yourself out of legal trouble. You don't even have to write a trademarked ad to do trademark infringement in Google ads. All you need is just the wrong setting turned on in your ad and a keyword that makes it trademark infringement, and you'll have no idea it's happening because you won't be seeing those ads very often."

"Yes, yeah, absolutely. Because you never... you never realize that those things come together. So I generally... I don't know what you would say. I'd say just don't use Dynamic Keyword Insertion. Make a structure where that's not necessary. But if you do, definitely review all of your ads with that Dynamic Keyword Insertion and make sure that you don't have trademark issues, make sure they actually make sense. Because anytime you do something dynamic like that, you just have to be careful about what could possibly pop up because there's tons of variations."

"Yeah, yeah. No, I'm on the same page. I think using Dynamic Keywords is something that's much more tactical, and I wouldn't recommend using as someone who doesn't work with ads daily. So that's my opinion on it."

"And you mentioned too earlier where you mention the ad score, and that's one thing too. Uh, anytime you build an ad in Google, Google will give you an ad score, and it will dynamically update to be better or worse as you're building out the ads. It drives me nuts. If there's one piece of advice I could give on that - just don't pay attention to the ad score. It's not worth it. Google doesn't have your best interest in mind because that ad score is based on a very narrow set of rules that are meant to be widely purposed for every type of ad. And the problem is, I've listened to tons of podcasts, tons of other agencies talking about their results of using, trying to... these ad scores, and it doesn't seem that it really has a meaningful impact on the ads in the way that people really think it does."

"I worked for an agency, and one of the top things on our list of things to do when we were building ads was make sure your ad score's as close to 100% as possible. And it did nothing. And honestly, like the ads that agency did not do well with ads in my opinion, and I think that's one of the reasons is they were so focused on what Google was telling them to do that they weren't focused on what was actually needed to happen."

"It's similar with the Google sales reps that call all of us every day. I get daily calls from them, and they don't know what you need to be doing. They know what Google wants you to be doing, and that's not going to benefit you. So as far as the ad scores go, when you're building out those ads, like you do want to have quality headlines and things like that, but Google will... if you're trying to hit that 100% score, Google will be stuffing keywords into your ads. You will be building ridiculous headlines that don't make sense just because you need another headline or something like that."

"Like kind of like you said, there's 15 headlines, four descriptions, and some other options as well. You don't have to have all 15 and all four if it doesn't work. Sometimes there are situations where you don't need all that, but Google in every situation can say you need all 15, you need all four. So I just recommend don't pay attention to the ad score. With our ads, our ads do amazing, and our ad scores are not a reflection of that. Google standards... yeah, we're just like average and sometimes worse than that. I have one client that's doing just crazy right now. He's killing it, and I think he has an average of like 30% on his ad score, which is in Google's eyes horrendous. Don't worry about it. It's not really worth focusing on. It's at the bottom of the priority list."

"Yeah, I'm gonna join you on your soapbox for just a minute. This gets me fired up. Another one that I just hate - optimization score. This is so... the ad score is for an individual ad. The optimization score is what Google says for an entire account - how well is this optimized? And there's a lot of debate around this because this is why we're not a premier partner with Google. Because Google has this Premier Partner badge. You don't really get much from it, maybe slightly better rep. Most agencies just use it for their marketing to where they can say we're Premier Partner with Google, and it's hard to achieve that because it is hard to achieve that. One, you have to have all these requirements with the number of accounts and how long you manage them and all this different stuff."

"But one that's just non-negotiable for me is you must have an optimization score across your clients of at least 70%. An optimization score is a completely arbitrary metric that Google assigns on an account level saying it's not how well you optimize, it's how well are you following what Google wants you to do. And most of those recommendations are junk. They're not actually good things that actually... yeah, help our clients. So in order for us to be a partner with Google, we have to prove that we follow their rules, not what's best for our clients. And it... it drives me crazy. So that's why we're not... we're not a part of that program."

"But along those lines, we just... I just had an experience with a client over the weekend where I was just... I was looking in there. We were talking about something else, and I look in there and I see in the change history like your... like nightmare where you see 'applied recommendation,' which recommendations are kind of part of their optimization score. They say you should do these things. I'm like, 'Why would we have applied a recommendation? Who is it?' And I look, and it was the client that did it in their app. Like it just popped up and it said, 'Please let us do this. This will improve your results by this much.' And it was to include the Search Partners Network in their ads."

"And so I messaged him immediately, and I'm like, 'Why are you doing this?' And he's like, 'Oh, is that going to be a problem?'

‍

In this episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast, Brandon is joined by Garret Cragun from our paid media team to discuss landing pages. We'll cover five common mistakes people make when building landing pages and how to do them correctly, as well as four ways to create exceptional landing pages.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

"Welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. Today, I will be joined by Garrett Craigan from our paid media team, and we're going to talk all about landing pages. We'll discuss five things that people are doing wrong and how they can do them right, and then four things that you can do to be exceptional with your landing pages. I think there's a ton of value in this episode, especially at the end, so enjoy and let us know if there's anything that you want us to cover in future episodes."

"How you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing good. How are you?"

"Doing awesome. Excited for the topic today to dig into everything. So for everybody's information, today we're talking about landing pages. This is part of our who-knows-how-many-parts series on all the pillars of PPC, all the things that you have to get right to do well. The topic for today is landing pages. Landing pages are one of the biggest places where I see issues when I'm doing audits on accounts of people that are coming to me and basically saying they're not getting the success that they're looking for with PPC."

"As for the topic today, we do have Garrett, our research and development lead, product lead manager of most people in the company, like whatever we want to call him – superhero."

"Yeah, so we're going to talk over five specific things that we keep on seeing in these audits that people are getting wrong and how you could fix those. Then to end, we're going to talk about four things that you can do that even your competitors aren't. The beginning is just like how do you get on par, and the end's about how you actually accelerate ahead of what your competitors are doing to get exceptional results by doing things exceptionally. So let's get started."

"Number one on most common things that we're seeing that people are doing wrong: page speed. Still a huge issue for landing pages. You want to elaborate on that?"

"Yeah, people are very impatient, and they expect a quick load speed, especially on mobile. We see consistently that businesses don't do a great job of keeping their pages lean and quick, and that has a huge impact on how that page performs."

"Absolutely, and we do see for the most part desktop pages seem to be okay. It's mobile that's just getting destroyed for some reason. Why do you think that is, that it's so much harder for mobile?"

"I think people still build out their designs on desktop, and so they optimize it for how they're designing it and they just forget that most of their traffic is going to be mobile. With the power difference of a phone versus a desktop, it just needs a lot more refinement and attention to have that page perform well, whereas on a desktop it can load faster because it has a bit more processing speed."

"That totally makes sense, and it's definitely really interesting. I think a lot of people would pay a lot more attention to this if there was a metric to measure this, but this is pay-per-click advertising, right? For each individual click, and so many times I don't think people realize how many of those clicks you buy and then people bail before your page loads. So you still paid for the click, and then they didn't actually get to see everything else."

"I actually built out a metric like that for one of our clients. I called it the cost per non-bounced visitor. So you can import bounce rate from other sources and then your cost, and then you can estimate our cost per non-bounce visit. If your page doesn't do well, it'll have a high bounce rate, and that kind of gives you that metric."

"Just to define bounce rate for people, it's when a visitor comes on the page and spends under what is it, like 1 second?"

"I thought sessions. Is it under one session?"

"Yeah, I think I forget this metric. Bounce rate is one of those weird ones. I actually think it's a really common misconception in this industry too. We've had some clients judge our pages too much on bounce rate, but let's just say you were running traffic to your home and now you run it to an action like a single action landing page. Bounce rate is measured on the number of sessions that only have one page load opposed to multiple page loads. Then if you have a single action landing page, your bounce rate is the inverse of your conversion because someone either bounces or they convert, no other option."

"Yeah, and if you're running to your main website, then it's not because maybe they're going to click on all these other links, they're going to go to all these other places. That's where people are seeing these like 50, 60% bounce rates on main websites, and then on our landing pages, they're seeing an 80% bounce rate, but really what that means is a 20% conversion."

"Actually, really? Yeah, it's just in the main website might have been a 10 or 12% conversion rate. It's just there's less people going around to all these different places on the website."

"Correct. There are ways to do time on site, but I guess the header code would load before the rest of it."

"Yes, that's a little bit harder to implement on a landing page. Like a 10 seconds on site might mean 10 seconds waiting for site to load after the header loaded, but it's loaded. So anyway, it's just a sad thing to pay for that traffic."

"And the other thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is if you have that poor load speed and people are clicking and then it's not loading, then they're clicking back, it also can affect your cost per click."

"Yeah, because if they are waiting and getting impatient, go back and reclick again, you're getting charged twice for that click, but that's not a different user."

"Absolutely, and the other thing is that it would affect the quality score too. Google has this mysterious landing page experience score. I don't know how much you know about the things that go into that."

"I know it's a lot of behavioral metrics that they measure, and I think one of those is time on site before bouncing back, if I'm not mistaken."

"I think you're right. So if people are coming on your page and then they're clicking back immediately, then that's a signal to Google that people don't have as good of an experience clicking on ads when they click on your ad compared to maybe your competitor where the page loads more quickly. And in Google's eyes, you have to pay a premium for that experience."

"Yeah, which is annoying. A lot of people don't realize that everybody pays the same cost per click. Google favors people who provide a better experience to users."

"So that's number one, page speed. What are some things that people can do about it? Like why is it common for page speed to be so bad in general?"

"What I've seen is it's due to the images that are on the page being too big. So it's very easy to just reduce the size of those images or even taking off videos if they're not essential for the experience because those take up a lot of space and they load pretty slow. So that's where I see the biggest impact is in reducing the size of those image and video files."

"Yes, absolutely. And I think that's definitely a big area for improvement. We've seen other things like we used to use a form software, for example, that would slow things down with an embedded form. This is really common with CRM forms. If you're just like throwing your Podio code on that site, it can be really slow sometimes from a page load speed standpoint. Salesforce, same deal."

"There's also, for anybody who's interested in improving their page speed, there's a tool called Google Page Speed Insights that basically breaks down everything that could be wrong with your page speed."

"Yep, it's cool. Although there's specialized developers that work on this stuff and definitely know all the ins and outs of optimizing a specific page."

"One other technique I would share is lazy loading on our pages, where if you do have things that load more slowly, you can decide the order in which you want them to load. So you don't just load everything all at once, and where you'd be better off maybe loading everything and then loading the video after, especially if it's like you have to scroll down to find it or something like that. Just so people have a functioning top of the page before the bottom of the page loads or something like that."

"Correct, yeah, that's huge."

"Absolutely. What would you say people want to shoot for on their page load speed? How do they know if they're doing well or not?"

"I think the best benchmark is that Page Speed Insights that you mentioned. It gives the score out of 100, and on mobile, I think a good target is probably 80. Just because of the average of that device, 80 is going to be pretty strong. On a desktop, I think it's very doable being over 95."

"Yeah, absolutely. The only caution I would give to this is I've seen some people who are completely obsessed with page speed to the extent that their landing page doesn't have anything good on it either."

"Correct. Huge. If you want the fastest page speed, you would just have an HTML thing that says like 'Please send me your information' like 'We Buy Houses' lead form and that's it."

"Be fast, but no, not even a lead form. You just put like an email or a phone number to contact you."

"Yeah, so that could work because a form would be slow, but anyway, it's not all about page speed. There are people in this industry that preach like page speed is like the most important thing, and it's important. I would definitely say it's important, but if you're going so far that you're hurting your page in other ways because of page speed..."

"Another example of this is like analytics and tracking codes and things like that. By the time you put like conversion tracking in and Google Analytics and you might have even some additional tools that track keystrokes or whatever the case is, we'll talk about some of that stuff later. That stuff all has a negative impact on page speed, but it also has a positive impact. So it's kind of balancing those things, I think too."

"Totally. So that was number one. Number two here is optimization for mobile. I want to jump right into this one just because it branches off from the page speed. Like a lot of people, because they build it on desktop and then it's adapted to work for mobile, it's not efficient or optimized for mobile. That's where a lot of people say mobile-first is the way to design today."

"Where're I think it's close to 80% of our traffic. Does that sound right to you?"

"Probably. Last time, 75 to 80 is mobile."

"Yeah, like a lot of our traffic is mobile. I think that makes a ton of sense. Just people work on computers and people always forget that. But what else in terms of mobile are people getting wrong?"

"I think a big best practice in how your page performs is having things, the most important parts of the page, be visible above the fold. And that fold is like where people's screen ends, and on mobile, that looks different than on desktop. So it's important to have your form be higher up on the page on mobile because it might not be if you're doing the design on desktop. It's just a much smaller screen, and so having the important stuff packed up on the top is very important on mobile, and people always forget that."

"Yeah, the simple test for this, just to make this like black and white: if you pull up your website on your phone and you can't see the form and the button to submit the form on your screen without scrolling, then it's probably a problem."

"That's bad, yeah."

"I know it's like the default with Carrot sites because they have all that text beneath the headlines and everything. On desktop it works because the text is on the left-hand side and the form's on the right-hand side, but then you pull it up on a phone and all that text is the entire first screen. There's not even a form."

"So that's, yeah, that's a good example. And actually, that's number three here: is the form above the fold, which is true for desktop and mobile, although you'd be surprised how often I find in audits that people have like the forms at the bottom of their page."

"Yeah, or something like that, which is just not standard. Because you'd be surprised, I think everybody when they design a landing page, they just picture someone just going through and reading all their landing page. They're not going to read. The vast majority of form submissions are people who just clicked and then they don't even scroll, they just submit a form right then."

"Do you have a good call to action? And I think having some additional content if they do scroll to help towards conversion for those people that need more convincing, I think it's good. But you do lose conversions if you don't have a call to action immediately available. Even if they are going to load everything, at least they understand from the very beginning this is the purpose of the page, I'm supposed to do this."

"Yep, and then they're thinking about that the whole time. Am I going to do that?"

"Anything else about the form being above the fold?"

"No, I think that's a good summary of that best practice."

"Cool. Let's talk about call to actions. Should somebody have a phone number on their landing page? Should they have a form? Should they have both?"

"I think it's probably best to have both. In all of these things, I would say test it, but I would start with having both because people have different preferences. Some people don't like talking on the phone, and some people want to like explain their whole situation, talk to a human, and not wait for an appointment. So I think having both is beneficial to maximize the audience's response by having a method of contact that they prefer."

"Absolutely, and I've seen probably the biggest one I don't like is when someone just has like a form only and they don't have a phone number. Because some of our clients, like when we do track the quality of phone calls versus form submissions, the phone calls are better quality than average."

‍

This episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast dives into the world of conversion tracking, with our resident digital marketing guru Garret Cragun. In this fourth episode of what is likely an eight-part series, we'll discuss effective strategies and techniques to ensure you're getting the most out of your PPC campaigns in the real estate investment industry.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. Today I am joined by our resident digital marketing genius, Garrett Cregan, and we're going to talk all about conversion tracking. I'm excited to jump into it. How you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing good, how are you?"

"Doing awesome, thank you. Super excited for today's episode. We are talking all about... this is part four out of probably eight parts. Let's see if we have a bonus for essential pieces of PPC in the real estate investment industry. Anyway, the topic for today is conversion tracking. It is the most technical topic that we have, I think, and it's something that in a lot of the audits that we do, we see people doing wrong. So there's definitely a lot of room to improve here. Let's start out just by talking about what conversion tracking is and why it matters."

"Yeah, so everything in an ad account comes down to the data that we feed the platform, and if we aren't able to give it good, accurate data, it's not going to be able to give us good, accurate results. When we say tracking, what we mean is the ability to record and report back to the platform what people do on the site after they first engage with your ad."

"Yeah, absolutely. There's this... if anybody's not familiar, if you go on Google Ads, you see this 'Conversions' column. That's kind of the results of conversion tracking, right? That's where all the information goes in. And there are a few common mistakes here for sure. Is there anything that you want to bring up that you're seeing as well? Should we talk about how this actually works first, just technically how people know it?"

"I think there's some misconceptions on this too. I think people just assume like everything that comes through a form is tracked as a conversion or something like that, but this is all for the most part... well, there are multiple ways, but largely, this is mostly cookie-based. The way that it works is you fire a JavaScript snippet when something happens, and that kind of communicates to Google. It really works the same way with Facebook. That communicates 'our event that has value to us happened.'"

Here's the first part of the text with grammatical corrections, proper capitalization, punctuation marks, and dialogue formatting:

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. Today I am joined by our resident digital marketing genius, Garrett Cregan, and we're going to talk all about conversion tracking. I'm excited to jump into it. How you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing good, how are you?"

"Doing awesome, thank you. Super excited for today's episode. We are talking all about... this is part four out of probably eight parts. Let's see if we have a bonus for essential pieces of PPC in the real estate investment industry. Anyway, the topic for today is conversion tracking. It is the most technical topic that we have, I think, and it's something that in a lot of the audits that we do, we see people doing wrong. So there's definitely a lot of room to improve here. Let's start out just by talking about what conversion tracking is and why it matters."

"Yeah, so everything in an ad account comes down to the data that we feed the platform, and if we aren't able to give it good, accurate data, it's not going to be able to give us good, accurate results. When we say tracking, what we mean is the ability to record and report back to the platform what people do on the site after they first engage with your ad."

"Yeah, absolutely. There's this... if anybody's not familiar, if you go on Google Ads, you see this 'Conversions' column. That's kind of the results of conversion tracking, right? That's where all the information goes in. And there are a few common mistakes here for sure. Is there anything that you want to bring up that you're seeing as well? Should we talk about how this actually works first, just technically how people know it?"

"I think there's some misconceptions on this too. I think people just assume like everything that comes through a form is tracked as a conversion or something like that, but this is all for the most part... well, there are multiple ways, but largely, this is mostly cookie-based. The way that it works is you fire a JavaScript snippet when something happens, and that kind of communicates to Google. It really works the same way with Facebook. That communicates 'our event that has value to us happened.'"

"A lot of people just put that code on the page after their form, for example. So someone fills out a form and then they go to this thank you page, and on that thank you page you have this conversion tracking code that says, 'This was a lead.' The way that it has to work is the ad platform, like... this tracking, it's built for even e-commerce scenarios, for example, where someone could click on an ad, go to the website, go around a whole bunch of different pages on the website, leave for two days, come back, buy something, and you would be able to track it. Because the JavaScript basically tracks: did they click on an ad and then convert within a certain time period?"

"So there's something called an attribution window. If it converts within that time period, then it's there. So a common misconception is that like a test lead going through your form, for example, would mess up your conversion tracking, which isn't really true. It wouldn't count extra conversions. It really just is that someone has to click an ad, and then you have to fire this code for them. As long as that happens within the time period, which I think we set by default at 30 days after clicks, it counts as a lead."

"All right, so common mistakes with this. What are you seeing?"

"I think the most egregious error is just not tracking at all. That makes my... that's just gross and it's just a waste of ad spend. And that's harmful because if things aren't being tracked, then we have no idea what's working at all. It's not even like we don't know what's bringing in good or bad quality, we're just totally blind, just giving money and burning it at the altar of Google. And that's just not gonna work at all."

"Yeah, and so when it comes to tracking and not tracking, just some things I've noticed for why people do this: either they don't know what they don't know, you know? It's not set up right or something. So you really have to test this, and my favorite way is to use something called Google Tag Manager. You could set it up, you could test that things are firing properly, and then you just have to be attentive to your account. You have to realize if things aren't tracking. It's not uncommon at all for conversion tracking to break at some point, and you have to be aware and realize that conversion tracking broke and that's going to create issues for you."

"So I think that's probably the most common thing that I see is people try to set it up, but it just doesn't work for whatever reason. And there's tons of little reasons, but you kind of have to at least be aware that it's not working."

"Yeah, and that's... it's probably unhelpful also to like go into how you can make sure that it isn't tracking. So what I do usually, or what I would advise doing, is have your form submissions go into, like, ideally, your CRM. And it's easiest if you just compare the lead count in your CRM with the platform, and they should be pretty close to equal numbers. If there's a difference, I would go through your tracking and make sure that all of the code is in the right place, it hasn't changed, that the form is going to the same thank you page that it used to, you know, all those things. But if those numbers don't match up, that's probably a pretty good indicator that your tracking isn't working anymore."

"Yeah, absolutely. Totally agreed with that. All right, what else in terms of big mistakes?"

"I think one other thing is, so when you first make an ad account in Google, it tries to like have you make what it calls smart goals to like track things automatically like page views, button clicks for like calls, those kinds of things. And those... like yes, having those track does help you know how people are behaving on the site, but they don't show much intent. And so that's gonna give Google some false positives that it's doing well. So a big issue I see is with people over-tracking things that are too early in the buying journey to actually be meaningful."

"Yeah, another example kind of similar to that is duplicated tracking. You have multiple things set up, they track at the same time, and a really easy way to see this is you look on a graph of all your conversion actions separated by day, and you can see that there's certain conversion actions that always fire at the same time. It's a good sign of duplication. Or you look at your search terms and you see where you have like one click and two conversions, and you think, 'How did I get two leads from one person?'"

"When you have unique... this is something to talk about too in terms of conversion tracking. You can make it so there should only be one conversion per person, and theoretically, if someone fills out your form 100 times, if you tell Google in the settings that you only want to count one per person, then it should only count one unless you had duplicated tracking somehow."

"Another little thing that this brings up in my mind too is, let's just say you have one of these problems and you do have a lot of duplication, or you had smart goals running for a period of time because Google will even turn this stuff on without you unless you actually turn off the setting that allows Google to automatically turn on the setting if they want to. Specifically to keep in mind with Google, oftentimes you have to turn off what you don't want and then you also have to turn off Google's ability to turn it back on without your consent later, because they just love to ruin your results. But what can you do if something like that happens? You realize you stop tracking for a period of time or you way over-tracked?"

"Well, first things first, I would get it fixed as fast as possible. And then there are ways to teach Google that a certain time period had incorrect tracking, so it won't take that into account as it builds out your account's learnings. It'll say, 'Okay, here's how people behave with this account, but we won't take into consideration this time period because it had bad data.' So that's one way. And then you also can upload leads from your CRM right into the ad account if there was a gap in tracking. That can help you to bridge the gap of under-counting."

"I understand. If anybody needs to look it up, what is this called? Is it called like a data exclusion period or something like that?"

"Yeah, it'll be like that."

"All right, so you can look that up, and Google has help articles. It's not super difficult to do, it's pretty easy. All right, anything else that you're seeing commonly in terms of mistakes? I have one idea that just came to mind, and it's that a lot of people don't understand the difference between a primary conversion action and a secondary conversion action. And this is basically where you designate to Google: is this something I want to optimize towards, or is it just something I want to track? A lot of people don't realize you can track as much stuff as you... you can track those smart goals, you could track different types of conversion actions, all that stuff. The main thing is you just only want to set things as primary conversion actions if they actually have value for you and that's what you've chosen to track."

"Yeah, just to go into that a bit deeper, so like you said, we only want to count things as primary if they are actually... if the action that they're measuring is an action that you care about as a business owner. For instance, like sure, it's great if this user spent an hour on your site, but like, did they submit a form? Of those two actions, I don't care about their time on the page, I care about the form. So I would only set things as primary if they matter."

"But one thing that I also would add as a caveat is you don't want to track things that happen so rarely that Google is not going to be able to get a handle on that as an action. So this is going a little bit ahead, but you can import like contracts or deals, but it might not be beneficial to count that as a primary action right now, like when you're just starting, because those deals happen so rarely in most cases that it's going to kind of give Google a false negative. That's not an action that your audience takes, and so it kind of de-emphasizes it."

"Yeah, absolutely. You have to think that Google's looking at tens of thousands of data points and it's trying to optimize, and if you feed it something that happens once a month, it's going to have a really hard time optimizing towards that, right? You want that frequency of action. So there's always that fun game of how deep do you track in the funnel, and you can always kind of optimize that by primary and secondary actions, and you can track more than you actually optimize towards."

"So let's talk about if everything's just good. Like, assuming conversion tracking is working exactly as it should for like your average person managing their own PPC or something like that, what does that look like? Basically, how do you do good enough?"

"Yeah, so it's basically doing what we talked about as bad and doing it good. So having forms count once, having them count accurately, having your primary actions be ones that matter. And then one other thing that we see really rarely that has a big impact is tracking phone calls. We see that calls are often very high-quality leads because they're high intent. They want to talk now, and they get on the phone with an agent immediately. There isn't that lag between the form and the context where they can call or like, you know, do other forms and kind of get distracted."

"And then if you answer your phone..."

"That's the caveat. You gotta answer your phone, people. But if you do, then yeah, you're right, it's guaranteed contact."

"Yeah, and calls are not a very... or call tracking is not a very intuitive or commonly known thing to track. It just doesn't really... it's easy to say, 'Oh, like on my site I have a form, I track that,' but it's kind of hard to think, 'Oh, I can track calls.' It isn't very intuitive, I think, for people, and so it's often missed as an action that can and needs to be tracked."

"Yeah, absolutely. So let's lay this out. I'm thinking most people should have at least three conversion actions, and I'll explain exactly what those are. The first one's forms, like you mentioned. The go-to here is just the direct leads, right? We talked about more advanced strategies like lead sculpting, and we'll talk in this episode about offline conversion tracking and all that stuff, but the baseline, right, you track your leads through the form. Super simple."

"Phone calls... a lot of people think they're tracking phone calls, but they're not fully tracking phone calls. And there's two different ways you could track it, and then we also have to understand what tracking means. The way a lot of people think about tracking phone calls is, 'I have a tracking number,' because Real Estate Investors love tracking numbers because they love to be able to say, 'I spent this much and I got these phone calls,' right? But the thing is, if that tracking number doesn't give information to Google about what's happening and be able to tie it back to a specific person, then it's not valuable."

"And if you just throw a phone number on the landing page, you don't know when those calls came in, which keyword the person clicked on... uh, but you don't click on keywords, but you get the point. You don't know which keyword they matched to, you don't know which ad they clicked, you don't know there are other audience characteristics. And if you don't know, the algorithm doesn't know, and it can't optimize towards those things."

"So this isn't just about having tracking numbers. This is about having tracking that works with Google, and there's two different types of call tracking, and you need both of them. The first one is called... it'll show up as 'calls from ads' is what it says with the conversion action because you should have in your Google account something called... I think they call them Assets now, not extensions."

"Yeah, in my mind it's called an ad extension. I think it's called an ad asset now. It's basically like these other little secondary things that can exist on your ad, and one of those is a click-to-call phone number where you can on your Google ad show a phone number there, and somebody can click to call there. And it'll cost the same amount for that as it does for a normal click, but then they're calling you right. So there's value there, and the way you track that is Google... do that automatically, no matter what you do, as long as you turn it on, right? But you don't do anything fancy."

"The hard thing is, let's just say they click there and they come to your landing page, and then they call the phone number that's on the landing page. How do you track that?"

"So there are a couple of platforms that we recommend using that are called call tracking softwares, where what they'll do is they'll look at where the click came from, whether it was from Facebook, from Google, from an organic search, from a referral, and based on the source of that click, it'll actually swap out the number on your page with the number that you've assigned to that source. And so when they call, they're calling that source's assigned number, not the base number that's on your page. And so by doing that, we know where they came from, and then we can record the whole call and then have that information passed back into the ad platform."

"And there's... yeah, I mean, there's different platforms that do this differently. Like Call Rail is one that's pretty popular in the industry that you can do this. You can use something called a dynamic number pool, and it'll make it so each person on your website at any given time has a different phone number that they're seeing. So then if someone calls, we know exactly which person they are, right? Because you won't have a different tracking number for every single possible combination of all UTM parameters and things like that that could exist for each click ID. You'd have a different... every single time someone clicked, you'd have a different phone number."

"So it's kind of like they have this rotating pool, and each moment a number could be assigned to something different. And then it can integrate with the ad platform. Right now, we use something called Call Tracking Metrics, and it does something similar but without needing quite as many phone numbers. And I honestly don't even understand exactly how it works, how it knows which person called, but it does, and it works. So that's... and you don't have as many phone numbers, which means you cut back on your spam calls a little bit and stuff like that. So that totally helps."

"And in some insight, form fills are valuable. Those calls from the ad extensions or ad assets or whatever you call them, those we find convert worse than form submissions because sometimes people just don't know what they're doing, they don't know who they're calling, you know? They haven't read a lot about your company. But they're cheap, so they're fine. The phone calls on the landing page, if they actually came from ads, which you have to remember, anytime you put a phone number out there on the internet, you're going to get spam calls for all kinds of different reasons, right? Bots will scrape it, telemarketers call your company, you know, robocalls and all that kind of stuff. And that could be stuff where you turn off your ads, if it still happens, it's just completely unrelated to your advertising."

"But if we look at the calls that actually came from ads, then those are our highest converting leads, even higher than form submissions. It's also the least common one for people to track. So it's really important to track that. So anyway, Call Tracking Metrics, Call Rail, both of those platforms you can do this. There might be others that we're just not familiar with. I don't know if you've ever used any other ones?"

"I know that there also are some CRMs that have their own built-in solution, but those are rare. And I think most people use those more out-of-the-box platforms that we mentioned because they're a bit more robust than the ones that are native to those platforms."

"All right, let's talk about how you... the way that we formatted all these episodes is you start with what's bad and what's good, then how do you do this really, really well, right? What's the best version of this?"

"I'll start with one note from my side. With calls, if you want to take that one step further, you also track based on call quality. So it has to be a certain length of a call or something like that, because you'll have a lot of calls that are just like one second ring time or something like that, or someone like clicks the number on accident, and then you track the conversion. So I think doing that is really important."

"Outside of that, the other thing that we had on the list that was big is offline conversions tracking, which is a whole different game. How it works... do you want to explain a little bit about how that works and why that matters?"

"Yeah, so it kind of goes back to what we discussed earlier, how each click on an ad platform is assigned a unique number string. Actually, it's numbers and letters, and this thing's like 200 characters long or something. It's ridiculous."

"Yeah, because there's a unique one per click that has ever happened on Google, so it's long."

"And this ID is how Google is able to assign or... it's how it's able to tie back to the ad level, to the ad group level, to the campaign level, what actions a click took. So when we talk about offline conversion tracking, we can have that ID pushed into your CRM from the calls or the forms where we can say, 'Okay, John is in our CRM.' As he changes his stages in the CRM, we can have those stages tied to an offline action in the ad account for lead qualified, appointment, opportunity, contract, deal. And then each time he takes those actions, because that lead is tied to that ID in

"And then each time he takes those actions, because that lead is tied to that ID in the CRM that's made in the ad platform, we then can know that that keyword, that ad, that ad group, whatever, took those actions offline. And like we mentioned, if Google doesn't know what's happening, it can't optimize towards it. And so by giving it insight into those actions that happened offline that aren't tracked by a cookie or by a script, we can give it insight into context that it wouldn't have otherwise. And it's kind of a complete game-changer to go from 'here's my cost per lead' to 'here's my cost per appointment' at the ad group, at the ad level."

"Yeah, absolutely. And I think the key thing here is you'll never get all the data out of Google. Like, you could pull campaign, keyword, out of date... out of Google. A lot of people don't realize how insignificant that information really is, especially like keyword data, for example, where you have a search term that could have matched to any one of 20 keywords. So you find you track bad lead quality to one of them, so you cut out that keyword, and really at the end of the day, you have the same search terms, they're just diluted amongst other keywords. You know, so you're kind of trying to optimize things in these buckets, but what goes in what bucket is different every day, so it's not really useful, right?"

"So search term is all we care about. You'll never get search term out of Google though, it doesn't let you do that. Not anymore. It used to, but these days Google has all this data that they'll never give you. So the only way that you can really have a close-up tracking system is you have to bring your data into Google, and then you can analyze a ton of stuff."

"I want to explain exactly how this works, because you explained it a little bit, but I just want to make sure it's super clear. So the click happens, that has this unique stream. You need to program your form so that it has what's called a hidden field in it. In that hidden field, it takes information from the URL and it pulls it into the form, right? So you would have a hidden field called like 'Google click ID' basically, and it would take that string. And you can do this with most form softwares, and then you're capturing the Google click ID with each thing. And then later, kind of like you described, there's that upload where you say, 'Here's a click ID, here's what happens.' Super valuable. I think there is no strategy that's more powerful at optimizing the quality in the long term. That's my personal opinion."

"And I think this goes... I mean, this extends beyond just digital marketing, right? It's kind of true for anything in your business. What you measure improves, and what you don't measure gets ignored. And it's... you can't expect Google to be any different, right? So ultimately, if you care about something, you should be tracking that and you should be giving that data to Google. And through that, you can get a lot more... a lot more optimized."

"Is there anything else you'd say with conversion tracking to... is something that you could do just do it on a very high level?"

"The other thing that I would probably speak to is, and this might be too deep of a cut, but giving those actions an assigned value. Because you know, as we know, not all leads are of equal worth to your business. But for Google, unless it's otherwise... it's going to assume that if it drives a form, it killed it and that was exactly what we wanted, and we want more and more of that. But if we can assign those different offline actions a value that is a rough approximation of how much more or less valuable one action is versus the other... it doesn't have to be like, 'These are the dollars that go into my bank account when this action happens,' but more it's more of like a relative value than an absolute value. That's going to help over time to teach Google which actions we want more of, because it can't base it off of like the name of the action, right? It has to have numbers attached to it."

"Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, that whole world of value tracking and bidding and all that stuff is something that I think we'll talk a little bit more about in the next episode. So to give people a little bit of an understanding of at least for right now what we have coming up here, we're going to talk about bid strategies, including some that are value-based bids, some different settings, and click fraud if you ever heard of that, and locations. And those are kind of like the last four items that we have as part of the core PPC."

"So anyway, definitely tune in next time, because we're going to talk about how bid strategies, and then following that, also how bids kind of build on conversion tracking, because all conversion tracking is kind of the foundation for all of those things. So that'll be super interesting. But as for today, hopefully nobody's brain is completely fried. That's it for the episode. Thank you for joining us, and we'll see you next time."

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Interested in optimizing your location targeting on digital marketing channels? Join Shaun Young, an account strategist at the Bateman Collective team, as he discusses effective strategies for improving location targeting. On this episode, explore how to maximize your locations, when to broaden or narrow down your scope, and what makes location targeting stand out from other channels.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is the best podcast on digital marketing for Real Estate Investors. Today I'm going to be joined by Shawn, who's a strategist on my team, and we're going to talk all about location targeting. This is going to be a great episode where we talk about some of those high-level strategic things. We're going to talk about how you can optimize your locations, where people go wrong, can you go too wide, can you go too narrow, what's different about this than your other channels, and a ton of other stuff. How are you doing today, Shawn?"

"Doing pretty good, thanks for having me."

"Yeah, awesome. Excited to do another episode with you. Thought you were just the right person for our topic today, which is number five out of eight of PPC best practices. As usual with these, we're going to talk about what to do, what not to do, and how to do it very well. So anyway, I'm super excited to get into everything today. The topic is location targeting, so without any delay, let's jump right into it. I'm really curious to pick your brain, Shawn, and see what ideas you have of how we do this right. How are you seeing investors potentially mess up their location targeting, and how would you do it instead?"

"Yeah, it's something that there's a lot of easy mistakes that can be made when setting up your location targeting because it's very different from a lot of the other channels that investors work in. Some of the biggest things are, I guess I've written down a couple things we can chat about, but one of those things is understanding what the difference is between going too wide and too narrow. Two very easy pitfalls that you can fall into. Starting off, we'll start off with the narrow side. Maybe with a lot of other channels that investors run, I see issues where they want to treat it like buying a list. They buy a list in an area and they know exactly what they're getting from that, right?"

"And in Google, it's in Facebook as well, it's very different where you can't just be like, 'I only want something here and nothing else,' because you're restricting. And I guess on the small level, when you say, 'I want, for example, just this one city and those borders, nothing else,' because you know that the ARV or something is what you want."

"Yeah, when you say city, you mean like city boundary?"

"Yeah, city boundary. A lot of people say, 'I target one city, I target Atlanta,' but that doesn't mean you target Atlanta. It means you target like the Atlanta metro usually, not the city boundaries, which I think for a lot of people, those are way tighter than they actually think they are. Like when we, when they ask us for it, we throw it on a map and we show it to them, and they're really surprised that it doesn't include a lot of areas."

"No, and that's exactly it. Where people think cities are bigger than they really are, and city boundaries exclude a lot that people think or that people forget about. And so I think going, part of the issue with going too narrow is you're limiting the algorithm of Google. Where Google is built on this whole premise, you're using AI to determine what works best, and the smaller you go, the less data you're giving that AI to use to be successful. And so when you're going too narrow and you try to control it, it ends up usually just creating more problems for you because you're now limiting what Google can do. And so allowing it some breathing room and allowing it to find, even if you give it a wider area, it'll still find stuff usually within right where you want it anyway. So that's what I would recommend, is not going too narrow because there's a lot of problems that come with that."

"And then also on the wide end, is it going too wide? A lot of people think, 'Oh, I'll just target the county, the whole county.' And if you target a county in middle of Texas or something, like middle of nowhere Texas, you're going to get a lot of stuff you can't dispo because there's going to be trailer parks in there and you don't want those. You'll be finding houses that have just been beaten away."

"Yeah, I guess that pretty much covers what my thought is there."

"Yeah, and I want to expand on a couple things you said. So with this concept of being too narrow, I have an analogy. Let's just say I'm the, let's just say I'm a flipper, right? And I buy my houses from wholesalers. Right, situation we all know really well. If I am located in Salt Lake City and I want to flip two houses a year, and the thing that we have to remove here is that it really doesn't take me a lot of time, assuming underwriting and everything like that's completely automated. I don't have to spend this time on the showings because if we're comparing this to Google, that's how Google is. Right, algorithm parameters and it works within those, and it's not like it takes you a ton of time to do this, right? To see more inventory."

"But as a flipper, just imagine that were the case. If I need to buy two houses, I could probably buy some really good houses at really good discounts. Right? If I want to flip 300 houses this year, then and I'm just in Salt Lake, then I'm probably going to have to buy like most everything I see because I don't really have the ability to be really aggressive on my bidding because then I won't hit the volume goals that I have."

"And this is why location targeting really matters because if you add in more locations, and that could be like maybe I was just trying to buy 300 houses in one ZIP code, right? You could probably find 300 houses in your ZIP code, but you'd have to pay an astronomically high price to be able to get all of those deals versus if you were to expand out a little bit more geographically. Then you'd have a lot more ability to bid low. I think of bidding in Google like putting in low ball offers on clicks, and the higher your offer, the more likely you are to win it. The lower you can go or the wider you can go geographically, the lower you can put your offer. So you can get a lot cheaper."

"So anyway, I completely agree with what you said. Help me understand this though. There's this phenomenon, the way that PPC works sometimes, unfortunately. If we're talking about the too wide side, the way that PPC works is you can have this tiny little leak in your bucket and it just becomes all of what you're getting. People see this where you're like targeting, for example, a city plus 50 miles, and depending on where your budget is, you might find that 80% of your leads come from pretty far outside of that city. And you get very few from inside the city, despite there being, like if you look at the total population in you're targeting, most of that population is centered around the city. In those further out areas, they are overrepresented in the leads. They might be 20% of the population but 80% of the leads. Why does that happen?"

"Yeah, no, that's something that happens to a lot of people. And a lot of times, honestly, like before I say what happens with that, I think it's something that a lot of people, it goes under their nose where they don't realize that this is the reason it's happening, but they think there's some other things and stuff. So when you're having issues, I guess it depends on how you see it as an issue because Google thinks it's doing great. And when you have locations and you're getting a lot of stuff from maybe the secondary, tertiary markets outside of the primary market you want to be targeting, it's a result of Google trying to find the cheapest leads and what's going to be... Which is awesome, right? That's..."

"Yeah, we always want cheaper cost per lead, but at the same time, this is a scenario where that might not be the best thing that you actually need. If you're in a bunch of markets and you have a $90 cost per lead, it's awesome, but they're all houses that you don't really want. There's no point in having a $90 cost per lead. And so I think part of that goes into understanding the metrics and also understanding where you want things. And this phenomenon is created by basically giving Google the wrong direction. If you are trying to push your bids as low as you can, it's going to start pushing your leads out further away from what you want."

"And so if you want an inner metro, for example, we'll say like Dallas for example, you can get leads out in Timbuktu like Cedar, Texas, where it's not far from Dallas, but it's not what you want. And you want stuff in Dallas, it's going to cost more. And so pushing your leads as far low as possible may negatively impact you. And sorry, not leads, pushing your bids as low as possible may negatively impact you when you have a location like this. And so it's a balance of understanding those two things. And there are options you can do to tackle that. One of them is setting up primary and secondary locations, which I think we wanted to chat about here in a second. But that's... there's some options to work with that. What are your thoughts on that too?"

"Yeah, I would say I agree with everything you said. I'll just say it with different words, and that's that just picture we're putting these lowball offers in on every click. Where are you going to win those clicks? It's going to be where you're still the highest offer, and that's going to be where your competition doesn't want to be. So that's the problem with Google, and this applies to keywords, this applies to locations. Trying to think of other targeting parameters it could apply to... like pretty much any targeting parameter. If you have one that's less desirable and another one that's more desirable, and your competitors know that but you don't know that, then what happens is things get really expensive in some areas. And then you naturally, Google's going to steer you away from those towards where it's cheaper because it always tries to find the cheapest thing that satisfies the goal. And that can create issues."

"This can also really depend on things like budget. Like something that can happen is if you have a really high budget and you target some metro areas, some rural areas, what you'll find is you'll get a lot of metro leads because you can only buy so many in the rural areas. So it just happens by nature. But if you have a smaller budget, then you might only get them from the outskirt areas because naturally you're just looking for the next best option, right? Every time you raise your budget a little bit higher, Google's just looking for the next cheapest lead to get you. At some point, that next cheapest lead is in the heart of Miami, but you have to have a pretty big budget where you're buying a lot of leads for that to be your next cheapest lead. That's kind of how it works."

"So you mentioned that it could be a bid thing, and it absolutely could be, right? If you try to push your bids down, that can happen. But I think if you're ever in a situation where your return on investment goes down when you lower your bids, then you probably just have a hole in your bucket anyway. If we're talking about locations, it could just be that the way you're bidding and the way you have your location set up, you have good areas and you have bad areas, and you just happen to be getting more leads from the good areas. And that's the thing, right? Intentionally doing that, it's just... it's happening by coincidence, and therefore you have good results."

"If you lower your bids and then you start getting more leads from those bad areas, it's not like there wasn't ever waste in the campaign. There was waste. It was just a small enough percentage that you didn't notice it. But the real problem is that you're targeting those areas at all, and it was just a diluted problem when you had a lot of stuff coming out other places. So I think locations is one of those things where there can be legitimate problems that are hidden by different campaign structures and things like that. But whether that problem is 10% of your spend or it's 50% of your spend, it's still a problem. It's still equally worth getting rid of. It's just... becomes really obvious in some circumstances."

"Absolutely. I think kind of along those lines where you're touching on competition a lot is understanding where your competition is in your area too because that's going to really push things out. If you have an insane amount of competition, but like you said, if you have a lower budget, this is one of those few situations where a budget really does matter. A lot of times someone with a $3,000 budget, monthly budget, can do pretty well in a market and things like that. It's not really impacted too heavily by someone else who has a really big budget, maybe like a $10,000 a month budget. But in this case, this is one of those few cases where it is definitely important. If you have a ton of competition and they're just going to beat you out on every bidding scenario in Google, then you're going to get all your leads pushed out towards the more secondary and tertiary areas and things like that because that's where Google's going to be able to find them rather than the heart of whatever primary location you want."

"Yeah, which I which I agree with, but I think it's another like symptom versus like root cause thing because if you targeted the right areas, then you wouldn't have that problem."

"That's true. Yeah, understanding what... which areas your competition are in, so understand that, be able to target it."

"Yeah, you just don't want high value areas and low value areas to be targeted together because you'll just get a bunch of the low value. Another thing with competition, I think this is something that people think a lot about with other marketing channels, and it really doesn't need that much diligence for PPC. Like for example, we had a client that we were talking with that has markets that's just really nice in the way that just spreads out, and you have all these suburb areas. Then you also have the core of the market, and it's one of those typical situations where in the core of the market, you're getting deal spreads that are 30 to 50,000. And then in these suburb areas, you're getting more of a 20 to 30,000 spreads. And they had done a lot of direct mail and cold call and texting, and they never gotten a deal in that core area, like ever. But in the outline areas, they did really well. So they focused their business there. So then they came in to PPC saying, 'We want to target the outline areas, not that core area.' Why do you think that logic doesn't transfer to PPC?"

"I think in this scenario, it doesn't really make sense because Google has a lot more access to information than a lot of these other things do. And just because it works in that channel where in their previous scenarios, it's worked where it's pushed it out towards the secondary markets or the outer markets, it doesn't necessarily mean they can't get anything from those primary markets. And it doesn't mean that they can't be pushed into there because Google is really good. You have to think about like, Google knows a lot more about the area than you do. And even though you may think, 'Oh, this area has done better for us, we can't really get into those areas, it's too expensive,' or things like that, Google can still find things. And so it's kind of like giving Google some handcuffs is where you're limiting what it can do, which is the whole point of Google to be an AI-driven system that allows you to find all this information about people and that it understands."

"You can target so well with it and the keywords too. Just because it's working in an outer area in a different channel doesn't mean that you shouldn't be targeting Google and or, excuse me, targeting in the whole area really with Google and letting it decide where the best leads are going to be coming from rather than you. I think that's a pitfall that, I guess we talked about a little bit earlier, where too many people try to take control, too much control over Google, thinking they know better than Google. And us as marketers, we even like you and I have a really good understanding of different areas and geolocations, everything like that, but we still revert and say, 'Let's let Google do its thing and see what it tells us,' because it'll understand. It'll find the data. A lot of our information is just based on what we hear and see, and Google has many more eyes and ears than we do. So yeah, I think that's part of... to partly answer your question, that's my opinion. I think it's something where just because it's working in one way doesn't mean that it's not going to work on Google."

"I think a core distinction to make here, to the untrained ear, it might sound like we're just contradicting ourselves or ever going... We're saying like, 'Oh, be really careful to not target those locations and stuff,' and then on the other hand, we're saying, 'Oh, just let Google figure it out.' But I think there's a really clear distinction here. I always think in my mind, is this something that happens before the lead is generated, or is it something that happens after the lead is generated? Because when... let's just say what you know that Google doesn't is that if you get a lead in that town, you might be able to get another contract, but you're never going to be able to disposition it. If you know that, Google doesn't know that kind of stuff because that happens outside of their view. Happens after lead is... it would take offline data for Google to figure that out with like loop tracking or... that's a good direction to go, always, but it's not really realistic for that particular type of thing."

"So in that case, you can count on Google to maximize your lead flow for whatever parameters you give it, but not necessarily your revenue flow because there can be items like that. On the other hand, why people might want to avoid the core of a market and only go for the outskirts, it has a lot more to do with expected competition. Because if I'm going to send direct mail, for example, it really matters to me if I'm sending this mail to this person and they already have 100 postcards in their mailbox and I'm number 101. That's going to be way less effective than if I'm number three, for example. And maybe in the core of that market, I'd be number 100, and the outskirts, I might be number three. So you could think, is your competition going to be there or not? Because you're going to have worse results accordingly."

"Whereas with Google, like you only pay once the person has already clicked, and there's only going to be so many people showing on the search. Whether you're in the middle of nowhere and you search on Google or you're in the core of a market, you're going to find the same number of PPC results generally because all that you can have at the top of Google is four results. And there's always at least four. No matter where you are, there's at least like four national PPC companies that are bidding on that. Right? In this industry, yes. Maybe you can find some other industry where that's not always true, but it's competitive enough that there's always at least four people that want to click."

"So anyway, it's like that competition doesn't matter, right? So a lot of people would say, 'Well, that core, that area, the cost per click average is $100, and in the outskirts, it's 30. Why would you advertise in the core?' Because you could bid 30, and if the average cost per click is 100, there are clicks that sell for 30, and there are clicks that sell for 200. Yeah, and you might just get a really small number of them, but that doesn't mean that you don't want them. It doesn't mean they don't have value."

"Yeah, and honestly, this is where the primary and secondary locations thing really comes in. Where like you said, like Google can understand the lead flow, but it doesn't understand lead quality. And so it's our job to figure out what lead quality is and give Google direction based on... and this is why we have the whole closed loop reporting system with all of our clients where we ask them for feedback on the leads and how they disposed because we want to be able to feed that back into Google and also understand on our side, is this market working better than this one?"

"And if you do have a situation like that, I have a client that I work with, and they have an awesome understanding of their area. They've been running PPC for a really long time, so they have a great understanding of what the quality is outside of what Google can see. And so they have these set up as primary and secondary locations with a shared budget. They share the same budget, but what we do is we say, '

"In this area, I'm willing to pay or I'm willing to bid this much, but in this area, these leads aren't as good and they aren't worth as much to me.' And we've proven that with data. That's the key aspect there is you can't just assume that you know what areas are good and what areas are bad. You have to use the data to understand that. And these guys have run for a while, so they do understand that. We understand that leads from certain areas are about worth only about a fourth of what they are in another. And their primary and so what we've done is we've set it up with these primary and secondary locations so that primary goes full on. That's its own thing. That's normal. But the secondary locations, we tell Google, 'I will take a lead as long as it's... as long as I'm bidding a fourth of what I'm bidding in these main areas.' And that allows us to say we still want leads here, but we're not willing to pay as much for them. So that's where the... that kind of situation comes in real handy because it allows us to control the leads based on quality more than just the lead flow side that Google has a visibility on."

"And that is a... I want to share some other details of the story. I think that they bring light to some things. This company, they had a really high budget for their market at a period of time, and they pushed it to the point where it just wasn't making sense from a diminishing return standpoint. So they brought back their budget. They were targeting 70 miles from this metro area, and when they did that, they found they got started getting a lot more leads in the outskirts. So this is an example of a problem that was always there, became obvious when it started to consume a larger percentage of our budget because we're only... we realized we're only getting leads from the outskirts, but they still like those, right? So that's the... what do you do? It's not exactly black and white. Some people... I still like those areas. I can still do business there. So I'll target them, but then you get a large percentage of your leads from there, and they're lower value opportunities, and you don't get any leads where you actually want them. And then the other way to think about that is somebody could think it's not my highest value thing, so I'm going to cut it out. And I think both of those are wrong, right?"

"What you said is the perfect way to do it, and what we saw is the amount of budget spent in those secondary areas compared to primary, it shifted a lot more towards primary just because, by nature, if you're bidding higher, you're going to get more volume there. They now have a fantastic ROI in those secondary areas and in those primary areas because we bid according to value. Because what is ROI? It's the revenue per lead divided by the cost per lead. So if I know area one has a higher revenue per lead than area two, then I just want my cost per lead to be say a fifth of that, and then in area two also to be a fifth of that. And those might be different numbers."

"There's one thing that I want to make clear though, in case anybody's self-managing this. It's like the sneakiest thing ever. I hate this, but Google has a way that people like to try to do this. It's called a location bid adjustment, and what you can do is you can go to your different locations and you can tell Google, 'I want to bid a certain percentage higher or lower.' And with the target CPA bid strategy, which is one that we really commonly use, if you go in and you put a bid adjustment on a location, it will accept it, it will show in platform, and it does nothing. So it's so deceptive because you don't realize that what you're doing is actually making no difference. So people get frustrated with that, that they make these adjustments and think that it never actually impacts results. So there is no way to do a bid adjustment like that."

"So what you have to do is have a separate campaign, and you have to set the bids differently in that separate campaign. What we like to do is still share the budget between those campaigns because ultimately you should care about ROI, right? If it doesn't matter how much budget goes to the primary versus the secondary areas because there's a certain lead cost that could be really low where we'd want all our budget to go to those secondary areas, we're going to have a way better return. And if you're thinking in your mind that's not true, then just make the lead cost even lower. And everybody just gets stuck on that. They're like, 'Oh, but I still want these areas.' It's okay. What if leads were like a penny in the secondary areas? Would it be worth it? There is a point where that turns, and it's finding out where that is and bidding according to that. So yeah, the primary secondary location strategy is awesome."

"So that's one example of where we've done that. We have the client where they have the core, their market that's primary, and then they will go up to 70 miles out, but those are all secondary. What's another application of that same principle from another client that you worked with? Like when... other when are you working with the primary and secondary locations for any of your other clients?"

"Yeah, honestly, those people who... aside from like a local market view, like this client is more of a localized thing. If you're in multiple markets, after getting some data as well, understanding leads in Florida versus Alabama or something like that are worth different to me, that's another great way to understand it. So a lot of it, in my opinion, a lot of it applies more on the lead quality and understanding that than just like where you are and what you're targeting because you can't really do a lot of this until you have a good understanding of what lead quality is going to be like. And so that's one of the caveats to that, but it's something that's an amazing tool that as soon as you're able to use it, definitely use it."

"So I will give one exception though. If, or maybe a different way of looking at it, if you're working with a partner that does have a lot of data, then that could allow you to implement some of these strategies faster."

"That's true. Yeah, and we do have a lot of that data across these different areas. And maybe it's not like... nobody ever has perfect data where they say, 'I know exactly everything that's going to happen here,' but you do know if you don't set up primary and secondary locations, then you're still making a decision, right? You're still assuming that all the areas are created equal. And maybe we don't know that area one is like exactly 30% more valuable than area two, but if we at least know that it's more valuable, then we can bid according to that, right?"

"Yeah, one thing I've seen for our national clients is... you'll see this all over the place. Like people love to add extra markets or cut out extra markets for reasons that don't make sense. 'I don't want to be in that area because the spreads are too low,' or 'I don't want to be in that area because I think the cost per lead's too high,' or whatever the case is. Where cost per lead, we already talked about that. If it happens before the lead, then you have very little risk of being in that market as long as Google's sufficiently trained on data, which for all of our clients is the case because we use cross-account bid strategies. But it might not be true if you're managing your own PPC."

"But the main point here is for some of our national clients, instead of it being black and white like 'I want these areas or I don't want these areas,' we'll often do like primary and secondary. And sometimes that's even just based on how much data they have. We'll work with national clients that come on and they've previously been advertising in six states, for example. Ask them like, 'Okay, you're doing Florida and you're doing Texas, but what about Tennessee? Is there a reason that Tennessee wouldn't work for you?' And the answer is usually, 'I don't have a history in Tennessee. I haven't seen it work. I don't have the data, but I do not know any reason it wouldn't work.'"

"And if that's the case, that's where primary secondary can also be good because I can make sure like in those core areas, we're spending the majority of the budget there. We are aggressive on our cost per lead, and then we add some of these other areas, and it just brings our cost per lead down because we might have half the cost per lead in those areas because we're bidding really aggressively. And then that's just dipping our toe into the market. And if we see that it works really well, we can add it into primary and become more aggressive. But it's a way to experiment with stuff without just destroying your campaign, which is how a lot of people test locations unfortunately. It's 'Let me add this and then I'll see what happens tomorrow, and then I'll add this different thing and I'll see what happens the next day, then I'll add this different thing,' and it leads to a lot of really poor decisions. We work with people that have like all years of information about what locations they're targeting, and it's all based on just horrible information from the start. And it's just... it's just not data-driven."

"Yeah, no, I think that's exactly it, is understanding what information you have and making sure that any of these... it's location... locations is no different than any other decision with Google Ads. It's data-driven. It's got to be data-driven. Don't just pull things out of the air and try it out and see what happens and then judge it based off that. There's got to be some data and some information behind making these decisions. It's the same with locations."

"Yeah, yeah. One other thing I'd say like on the data topic, because I've seen this bias in a ton of our clients. So the... we both know, maybe we should share that PPC tends to get stray leads. You target area X and then you get a lead in area Y, and it's really frustrating for some people. Personally, I find it refreshing that Google doesn't know exactly where every single person lives. The fact that they're wrong sometimes, at least a little bit, gives me some hope for data privacy. But anyway, that's... 10 to 20% of the leads being outside of the areas that you're targeting is really normal. So yeah, there... there's that. But then decisions made on that, I've seen so many clients that are national that want to constrain their targeting. They want to get tighter and tighter, and it's based on leads that they're getting that aren't even their targeted areas."

"Yep. So basically, when you're analyzing your leads and you're trying to decide what you want to do with locations, don't just use the leads you have. Use your targeted areas because if you just say, 'Well, I got this lead in a really rural area, so now I want to go even tighter,' it's not really going to fix that problem. So you want to... you only want to react to things if you're getting leads in areas that you are targeting and those aren't working for you. But the leads outside of that don't really make a difference."

"Yeah, it's going to happen. Google, there... Google doesn't have perfect tracking. It's not like buying a list where you know exactly where everybody is on that list. It's not perfect, and so it's... it's not going to be, you know, super common, but it is maybe one... one or two leads in every 10 or so be outside of your area. Somebody who commutes and works in one place and lives in another, Google might not understand that. So there's... there are situations like that. And so I think you bring a good point of making sure you're actually looking at the leads in your targeting, not outside, because the outside ones don't matter."

"Yeah, absolutely. One other thing I want to comment on, this is just like another application of some of the principles we already described. How do you feel about statewide or nationwide campaigns? When I say nationwide, literally nationwide, but there's a lot of people doing like 48 or just the United States, or targeting like statewide in different areas. And there's a lot of controversy around this because there's some people in the industry that promote like this is the only way to do it and could be really successful with this. And then there's all the people who have tried and failed and are really upset about it. And then there are some people that do really well with it. So what makes the difference? How do we know if that's a good idea or a bad idea?"

"I think a big gap between those who preach it in the industry and those who didn't... those who really struggle with that kind of idea, targeting the whole US or a whole state or something like that, is the fact that these people who are preaching it have gigantic budgets. And they can bid really high because of that. They can just beat out whoever is in those areas, and so they don't have to worry about a lot of the nuances that come with targeting because you can just throw money at it. And that's essentially what a lot of these people are doing, and they preach it. But what a lot of people don't understand is everyone else's... is their own budget isn't able to match what the preachers are doing, more or less. And so it's... it limits them."

"And I think if you have a limit, not even limited by budget, but if you don't have a ton of money to just throw at everything, which is 99% of us, right? We have to be more strategic about it. This is why in our targeting, we use things like light maps to understand where people actually live. Because there's no point in targeting... think of Texas as a great example. If you just target all of Texas, you're going to get all kinds of stuff because it's huge. And most people live within 5% of Texas's like geography. It's something where if you were to do something like that, it could destroy you if you... if you only have maybe even with maybe like a $10,000 a month budget. Like that could still destroy you because you're not able to be competitive with everyone in the state. So I think that's a big part of it and why we generally shy away from that because it's something that... it only the big boys can do it."

"Yeah, I... I uh... I totally get what you're saying. I think it's evident that some of those people that are doing that with really big budgets, they're coincidentally having it work instead of it being based on like true principles. Because you could take the exact same campaign, put it into the exact same area, you do it with a large budget, what will happen is you get a lot of leads in the primary area. If you do it with a smaller budget, you'll get a lot of leads from the other areas. And it's the budget that makes a difference, even though everything else is set up the same, just based on the... based on the bidding and everything."

"I'd add a few more thoughts to it too. I think it also depends on the state. Like some states are way more rural than other states. Florida is a classic... like one where you can do statewide targeting really well, especially if you're open to various exit strategies and stuff like that. Because there's a lot of really good areas in it, and the rural stuff is in the middle of a swamp where nobody lives."

"So yeah, you don't have to worry about that stuff exactly."

"So like classic states for this are like New Jersey, North Carolina, Florida. And then when you're in Nebraska, you can get really rural, right? And it's a different story. So I think it's... I think it matters where you're doing it. I also think it matters like what kind of business you want to run. Like some of these people doing this really wide, the way that their business functions is a lot of small deals and really hard dispositions, and they have a lot of contract fallout. And that's fine. It's just one way to run a business. You have to realize like different exit strategies work better for different areas. And I think we should... I think we should dive into that a little bit more."

"But just to finish things up with the... the statewide and nationwide campaigns, I guess the moral of the story is, I think a lot of times what's happening there is you're targeting good and you're targeting bad. And then dependent on various factors, some of which you might not even consciously be... you might not even consciously be controlling those factors, you could get a larger percentage of the good versus the bad. In my opinion, any percentage of bad is bad. So you have to identify like what works for you and what doesn't. And I think that mass of your own business and understanding those things rather than just be lazy and targeting a bunch of things because you might be able to make it work to have a massive budget and then just throw away some of your leads that don't work out. But that's not how you become a highly optimal company. That's like a way that it works technically, but it could be done better."

"So let's talk about how exit strategies affect this. What are you seeing in... in terms of where people market based on their exit strategies?"

"Yeah, honestly, with... when it comes to exit strategies, one of the biggest things that ties into location... understanding your exit strategies. If you can only do wholesale, you're going to want to stick to like pretty primary markets and things like that. You're not going to get a whole lot in like tertiary markets, for example."

"Yeah, but and with that too, you have to think how do you wholesale? Because if you're using Investor Lift, which most people are, Investor Lift's a lot stronger in some areas than other areas. So you could have areas of equal population, one of which you can dispo in really easily and the other one you can't. So it's understanding like where do you have more buyers than not? I've seen far too many people just buy Investor Lift and then just say, '

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Austin McCurdy from the Sharper Process Team joins Brandon on this episode of Collective Clicks. They discuss how to increase revenue and efficiency in real estate investing through a streamlined marketing-to-sales handoff process. Austin shares his business background and advice on how to avoid becoming overly reliant on large marketing budgets.

"Hello and welcome back to the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be joined by Austin McCurdy from the Sharper Process team. Austin is a systems and process consultant and works with a ton of different real estate investors. He has an awesome business background and a ton of value to add talking about how do you keep that handoff from marketing to sales efficient so that you can grow revenue without becoming overly dependent on a very large marketing spend. So I'm excited to get into the conversation and we'll jump right into that now. How you doing today, Austin?"

"I'm doing good, Brandon. Thanks."

"Awesome. See you got your brand new podcast recording studio. Plan on doing quite a few of these?"

"Yeah, we just opened it up. I think last week, I think it opened. So you may be first. Jacob, is this the first podcast we've ran from here actually? So we've been recording some video content, but you're the first one. So yeah, we'll have to remember this. Mark that down: first time with Sharper Studios podcast."

"So yeah, that's right. Honored to have it on the Collective Clicks podcast. I'm super excited to learn from some of the insights that you have today. Would you care to do a brief introduction to yourself and what you do for those listening that don't know you? I think most should know you. If you don't, you definitely should. So here's a chance."

"No problem. So yeah, I'm Austin Court of Sharper Business Solutions. Been here, man, four and a half years I think, maybe a little more than that, almost five with Sharper. Came on, I owned a business before as a Papa John's Pizza franchisee. So I had eight stores in the Chicago market and the University of Michigan, so throughout the Midwest here. A couple hundred employees through those eight locations, so heavy operations-based. And prior to that, I have a degree in education, so taught for a long time. When I sold my business in 2018, I was talking to Gary Harper, who's been a friend of mine for a very, very long time, and Gary said, 'Why don't you come over and we're helping me with Sharper?' At the time, it was just him and Susan, and they had a part-time assistant."

"And I, it became like the perfect marriage of my education background and it just, I really loved - I know it sounds weird - I love teaching high school and I love teaching math, but then I also like, love business and I loved owning my own business and being an entrepreneur. And I've owned my own business of some sort since I was 18. And so this was like the perfect marriage of that education and business background kind of coming together. Was new to the real estate space when I came in. Now I've been involved with almost, I think, a thousand real estate investors over the last four and a half years. Meet every - yesterday I had six hours of phone calls with real estate investors really digging into their business and talking about what's going on. I do that on Mondays and Fridays, and then during the week I travel and go on site with clients."

"So actually, after your meeting, I'm headed to Toronto, Canada. Sharper's first international client, so I'm working up there tomorrow and then headed down to Indianapolis to work down there on Thursday, and then back back home to Chicago here where I'm at. So spend a lot of time talking real estate, talking what's going on and probably talk about marketing more than I really thought I would ever talk about marketing. And it's interesting as a business owner, you have to sit in every seat in the business at some point in time or another, and you have to know what's going on and spend a lot of time talking about marketing, talking about sales, talking about operations, and then finance - kind of all the pillars of a business and what it takes to grow one."

"Yeah, absolutely. That's fantastic. I have to know, how many airline miles do you have under your belt at this point?"

"Wow, you know, I have an app that like tracks it all, like how many miles I actually do. I know right now in Southwest I have a hundred and three thousand miles, and I just used like 75,000 of them. So I think I had like almost 200,000 miles last year, something like that."

"So yeah, I know two new people that travel as much as you do."

"So well, that's kind of - yeah, I'm always on Southwest. If you understand it, it works. I'm always like A16, which is the first person to board, which means that I fly more than anybody else on that flight is what it means. So usually, unless I'm with Gary and Susan, then they're usually ahead of me, but they're about the only ones."

"So I know that because I, I think I travel way too much and every time I get where I'm going, you're there. And I know you travel outside of that too."

"Yeah, I know you do whatever I do."

"Yeah, every week meeting with somebody and so yeah."

"Well, that's awesome. I am, yes, like I said, super grateful to have you here on the podcast. I'm excited to pick your brain about a few things. So as we discussed before the show, we talk a lot about marketing and the operations behind marketing to help monetize it here, just because that's kind of what we're trying to accomplish. You know, those are a lot of the drivers to grow a business, as you know. Most everything else only becomes important if you can figure out this first part, and that's kind of the name of the game."

"So anyways, I'm really curious to hear, because you're spending so much time with investors, you know, both in person and on these calls that you're talking about, what are some common things that you're seeing that in your opinion they're not doing right when it comes to their marketing?"

"I, with when it comes to them with marketing, what I find is that, okay, there's not that many marketing channels out there. Everybody is looking for like the silver bullet of what's the newest, shiniest thing out there. I had a guy call me the other day, he's like, 'Can I just have a call with you once a month just to find out what's going on in the market? Like what are you seeing, what new things are out there?' Right? And when we talk about marketing channels, I mean really for everybody we've got, you know, TV, radio, PPC, you know, and mail. And I mean, that's kind of about it. Like there's, you know, there's not really much. And I mean, PPC I'd say is like social media. Okay, like those are really your channels. There's nothing else out there. I mean, I've got billboards, things like that, but you know, there's not a whole lot of options."

"And so I come in and they're looking for that silver bullet in marketing, and really the problem usually isn't their marketing, right? Or they don't like their vendor or something like that. That's usually not the problem. Not saying it's not sometimes. It's usually the next step in the process, which is how that marketing is getting handled, how it's handed off to sales, and what sales is doing with it."

"Often, especially right now in the market, we saw back in July, as a whole, as a country, we saw leads dip. Things went down, right? We had a little bit of a like a hesitation in the market for several months, probably the second half of the year into January. Okay, and then it kind of started to pick back up when we got into January again. And also now, as I'm looking at stoplight reports - we call them at Sharper - right, people's KPIs, the lead flow really isn't the problem, but we're seeing a problem with conversion at the end of it."

"And what's funny is that, and Brandon, you working in marketing, you probably always hear this: they always say, 'Well, if you could give me a qualified lead, I could close it.' Right? 'If I had better leads, I could close it.' I find that I work with a lot of people with hiring, and they're always like, 'Well, if I had the right employee, I can make this work.' And I look at it, I'm like, if I brought you the Michael Jordan of sales, you still couldn't make this work, right?"

"Like Michael Jordan - we use this analogy, I'm in, I live in Chicago and grew up in the 90s with Jordan - Jordan was with the Bulls for six years before he made a championship, won a championship. He was Michael Jordan for six years, one of the best players in the NBA, and couldn't win the championship. And you can look at like why, there's a bunch of reasons why, but the fact is the Bulls were a dysfunctional organization, and it didn't matter that when you brought them the greatest player on earth, it didn't change anything for them, right? Jordan went on to play for the Washington Wizards, didn't change anything, right? You go on and on for there."

"So really what to say that what I find is that when the organization has, like, it's dysfunctional, it doesn't really matter like how good the marketing is, it doesn't really matter like how good that salesperson is. It all has to work together in one team effort, right? All those things have to be firing right into a system to make it work."

"So I think a lot of people, you look at your marketing now, it's constantly something that you're adjusting, you're making changes, you're trying to improve, better, you're trying to get a better ROI on it. But you also have to look at the next step and say, 'Okay, when these leads come in, how are we handling those leads? What are we doing with them? Are we handling them in the right way?' And we can kind of dig into that a little deeper if you want."

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Wholesale industry leader Forrest Blackburn joins Brandon on this episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. Blackburn shares his experience on growing a company from $40K to $2M in just five months and offers tips on optimizing marketing strategies, implementing split testing, and growing your wholesale business nationally.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be joined by Forest Blackburn. Forest is most well known for taking a wholesale company from about forty thousand dollars a month in revenue to 2 million in just about five months. He is a fantastic leader, an understander of systems, all these different things that are important to kind of pour the gas on the fire to grow a wholesale company, especially on a national level. So I'm super excited for this podcast episode. We're going to talk about how do you optimize your marketing, even marketing for buyers, which is something a little bit newer to me that I was interested to hear about, and all kinds of other different things regarding split testing and stuff like that. How you doing today, Forest?"

"I'm doing well. How are you?"

"Yeah, doing awesome. Happy to hear you're doing well. You in California or Phoenix now?"

"I'm actually in Phoenix right now in Tempe, Arizona at the Green Elephant Development office with Cody Sperber. We were doing some podcasts yesterday. Always very high-level people, we had Robert Kiyosaki in the office last week or maybe the week before. You know, that's the cool thing about working with Cody Sperber, is that there's always, well I should say there's never a shortage of very high-level people coming through the office door. And that gives me an opportunity to meet and greet and develop relationships and have conversations at extremely high levels that give a different perspective on not just real estate and where the market's going, but just on the world as a whole and how all the pieces kind of fall into place and how that affects real estate and market trends and the ebbs and flows that we're all going through in pivoting through this new world of wholesale that is nothing like it was in 2020-2021."

"Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, you seem to find a way to be surrounded by celebrities in the real estate space somehow. Somehow or another that's been your whole experience."

"You know what, there's little things that I pick up from high-level people. I say there's a phrase that I use a lot, especially in wholesaling, to kind of alleviate the noise on your plate. A lot of people in the space are working with very small margins. They're picking up these three thousand, five thousand, seven thousand dollar spreads. And for the longest time, I didn't know who to give credit to on this statement, but I saw something the other day and ironically enough, it was Donald Trump. And he said the reason that he developed his wealth in real estate, over and above his father giving him a nice head start, he looks at everything and he says, 'The bigger the cookie, the bigger the crumb.' He looks at these larger-scale projects because even at a small margin, those large-scale projects give off very good-sized crumbs."

"And Richard Branson and Elon Musk both said, independent of one another, to circle back to your question - and I don't even know if they both know that they said this - but they said that if you want to be a billionaire, your top five friends need to be billionaires. So it's always been something in the back of my mind that you have to surround yourself by people that know more than you."

"When I was a kid, I was an actor, and my talent manager at the time, she said, 'Never go into an acting class where you're the best one because you'll learn the least.' So I'm always on the lower echelon of the knowledge base in a small room so that I can soak up and learn and really absorb what these high-level people are doing. And it's not necessarily our wins because we celebrate those, but we learn from our losses."

"So really getting to be personal with a lot of these bigger players and working in billion-dollar deals and such enable me to really learn. And in that learning, I can then transcribe that into the different companies that I work for, my own businesses. So yeah, I try to surround myself with the heaviest of people that I can because that's where I'm going to learn the most. So it's kind of a thing for me."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. So let's dive - for anybody that doesn't know you listening to the podcast - I'd love to dive a little bit into your story, you know, what got you here."

"I can tell you my story of knowing you is that, saying you're around for a while and then it wasn't until, it was in Houston I think we were both in an event and got to meet and realized that there's quite a few synergies between what we do and that sort of thing. And I've recommended that some of our clients work with you and I think you've done the same. So anyways that's kind of how far we go back, but you go back significantly farther than that. Do you want to talk about how you got into this real estate niche?"

"No, absolutely. I was in the entertainment industry as a kid and I was an actor and then I got into music. And I was signed to Capitol Records and toured around and had a lot of fun, but that didn't happen until I kind of took over the band situation. And previous to having the band that I had that got signed to Capitol Records, everybody was, you know, we were all a band. So everybody had equal input, there was a lot of infighting. I'm a lead singer and a writer, and amongst the other players, there was all kinds of drama. So I just figured I'd just nip that in the bud and I went out and hired people and really kind of turned it into a business. And that's really when I learned that if you treat things like a business, if you have people in their designated roles, that you can really build something incredible."

"So fast forward a couple of years and I got into marketing. I took a step away from the music industry. I was the music supervisor for the UFC out in Las Vegas and that kind of took me away from being on stage and it gave me some perspective on a lot of things that I wanted to work on. Previous to that, I was working for Paramount Pictures and doing a lot of their social media marketing. It's back in the MySpace days before Facebook really took off. And so I got into Google marketing and working with small and medium businesses and I grew a very large company very quickly."

"From 2010 until about 2019, we built a little more than 50,000 websites and about 24,000 app developments. Everything was full-stack development. And these were all small medium businesses in every niche across the country. And grew that from about seven agents to about 1500 agents nationwide with 17 franchises and really kind of grew a monster."

"But I started becoming a consultant for a lot of Fortune 100s and 500s and 5,000 companies to kind of scale their business, specifically online. UPS, Travelocity, Disney Cruise Lines, Keller Williams, 1-800 Dentist - there were a lot of big companies that I was able to work with. And in growing their revenue base from a marketing standpoint and then making sure that there was a sales infrastructure in place to service that influx of good quality leads, it kind of layered a blueprint. It gave a very specific blueprint that really kind of worked in every industry."

"I was approached by HGTV, specifically Tarek El Moussa and the show Flip or Flop, to help them really grow the business behind the show. The business needed a lot more houses, a lot more content for the episodes. So I had a big decision to make to go in and instead of working for all these separate companies as kind of a consultant, to go in and for two years work with just one specific company. And that was a big decision, but I'm really glad that I did."

"And the first changes that I made were to really make a hard pivot into wholesale because of the fast cash churn. Flipping has a much longer cash cycle. So with wholesale, you're able to get that fast cash churn and roll that into marketing. And I very quickly got up to between PPC, TV, radio, pretty much every medium you can think of, I was spending a half a million dollars a month. But within five months of getting there, we went from forty thousand to over two million dollars a month in assignment fees."

"And again, like we were talking about, it was 2020-2021. These were much easier times. There was no inventory, interest rates were on the floor. It was very easy to move properties. A lot of people were overspending on properties because inventory was so low, so things were selling like hotcakes. And you didn't have to focus so much on your buyers list because as long as you had a property, there was going to be a buyer on the other end because there really weren't that many properties out there."

"So I grew that company rapidly and successfully using, leaning on PPC very heavily. You know, PPC weathers all storms. If you're really focused on social media, you know, you have something like a Trump-Biden election and you cannot get any screen time on Facebook. But PPC, if you search for 'how do I sell my inherited home' or 'who cash buyers,' you're going to always come up in those searches. You're not going to see anything for Trump or Biden for 'how do I sell my distressed house.' So that's always been something that is a constant."

"And I do a lot with TV and radio as well, but as I got out of that contract where it was very exclusive - I couldn't work with anybody else or help anyone else - and I had a lot of people knocking on the door looking for guidance and assistance, especially with the numbers that I was doing. And I had people like Robert Wensley of InvestorLift, you know, touting those numbers because we were using InvestorLift quite heavily on the disposition side. It became widely known, those numbers that we were achieving."

"So I really made a decision to not renew that contract and become kind of a free agent so to speak and be able to help others and kind of pass along the wins and losses that I had had using OPM, using other people's money to spend on these marketing campaigns and then develop sales infrastructure around that influx of inbound leads to cultivate more properties and also more buyers as the market has pivoted."

"You know, I really focus a lot on cultivating more buyers and buyers that are asking for something right now, not just a buyer that buys things here and there and oh, they bought properties over in this area six months ago. But if you find somebody who's, you know, it's a hot lead when somebody raises their hand and says, 'I want a property in this area right now,' you can really speed up your dispositions process."

"So I had done a few deals with Cody Sperber and as soon as I became a free agent, we had a conversation and I signed a non-exclusive agreement with him to come in and make him my priority and really work with Green Elephant Development to build out their wholesale channel in a pivoting, changing market, which has always been a challenge. But what's really weathered that storm is our PPC bringing in good quality, high distress - whether it's a distressed property or a distressed seller - leads and then also targeting our PPC onto cultivating more buyers that are interested in buying right this second and developing buy boxes and funnels for those buyers."

"So there's PPC on the entire mechanism on the front end and on the back end for both acquisitions and dispositions. And I think that that's what's really kept us afloat. And I implore that into all my students - I'm a coach and a mentor now that I'm available to do so. So over the last eight months, I've cultivated a large base of people that I'm helping and it's really working. And it's able to keep people, to be able to weather this storm through this ever-changing wholesale market that we're in and a lot of innovations as well, getting past some of these investors that are offering very low based on fear. But yeah, PPC is always the biggest weathered storm for me. So that's kind of what catches us up to our podcast today."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, I it's great to have you here kind of saying that PPC weathers the storm because I always think that way but, you know, nobody believes me because I run a company that does PPC, right? So of course I'm going to say that, right?"

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In this episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast, Brandon Bateman and Garret Cragun talk about bid strategies in Google Ads. They cover the basics of the Google Ads auction, the different bid strategies you can use, and how to adjust your bids for different campaign goals. They also discuss a powerful PPC strategy involving shared conversion actions across multiple accounts that can help you get better results. If you want to master bid strategies and improve your Google Ads campaigns, this is the episode for you.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

"Hello and welcome back to the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I'm going to be joined by our Director of Paid Media, Garrett Kraan. We're going to talk all about bid strategies. How are you doing today, Garrett?"

"Good, how are you?"

"Hey, doing fantastic. Thank you. Excited for another podcast. This is number five out of seven in our series of the... what do we call them? The PPC Essentials?"

"Yeah, PPC Essentials."

"The seven PPC Essentials that make campaigns butter. That's right. So, super excited for this. As is my number one passion, my favorite channel, and so much of that comes down to bid strategies and auctions and how all that works. So that's what we're talking about today: bid strategies. And if you don't know what that is, then don't worry about it. We're going to talk all about that and how it works. But I think before we dive fully into that, we have to understand why bid strategies are even important and what they are. Because we've been in this changing world. If you think of advertising a long time ago, then what did you do? You buy like a billboard, and that billboard's in this place. And then comes TV, and then TV ads run on this certain channel, and whoever's watching that channel gets that. But then things have changed over time to where now, like, you open up Facebook for example, and you see one ad, I see a different ad because it's not like there's just an ad that's on Facebook, right?"

"And a lot of this has Google kind of pioneered a long time ago. So I think a great way to start, Garrett, would be if you could jump into the foundation of this, which is the Google Ads auction and what exactly is happening there. Why does it matter? Just so we can set the stage for what bid strategies are and why they matter."

"Yeah, for sure. This can get pretty in the weeds, and so I'll try to keep it as high level as possible just so people don't get bored. But it basically comes down to: every time a person makes a search on Google, it fires like an instant auction where everyone, like all of the advertisers, rush to the auction and they give their bid and say, 'This is how much I'll pay to appear on this person's search.' And Google takes into account the bid and also the experience that your ad and landing page gives to the user, and it takes those two data points, merges them, and then picks the best combination of bid and experience and gives that person... makes them the auction winner."

"And the reason why they take into account the experience is because they want people to get relevant and easy to understand information that answers your question. So if you give your searchers what they're looking for and it's relevant and people seem to get what they're looking for, then going forward, Google is going to reward you with auction wins at a lower bid than someone that gives a bad experience and might bid higher than you."

"Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it really comes down to... have you ever had that experience where you click on an ad and then what you get on the other side is not at all what you were expecting to get? So you click back, and when you do that, if that just always happens when you use Google, then you're not going to really use Google anymore, right? Or at least you're not going to click on the paid ads. I think some of us have already been conditioned to do that, right? On paid ads very much anymore because I always do it's just to get those paid ads people just to..."

"Yeah, just lower their conversion rates. Just one more bit and I'll read them and stuff like... I can pick out something that'll have a good experience behind it from something that won't based on the ad copy. But the point is, Google wants people to click on paid ads forever and always be getting the information they need there."

"So, but as it relates to quality, we're not going to touch on that too much today just because all this other stuff that we talked about, like basically all of the other pillars, relate really heavily to the ad quality, to the Quality Score as the technical term, or more simply as you said it, the experience that you provide someone. So really, that's just about making your landing page relevant like we talked about, and making the ad copywriting good, and targeting the right keywords."

"If you do all that stuff, then your Quality Score shouldn't be bad. But then the bids, how do you know what bid to put into the auction and all that kind of stuff is a tough thing to figure out. And it really comes down to bid... I think a foundation for this is just understanding some of the different bid strategies that existed, what they base their information on, and then from there we could talk more in-depth about when might it be more appropriate to use one bid strategy or another. But could you give an overview of like different ways that you can go about bidding?"

"Yes, so this is kind of like a history of Google episode, but when Google first started, all bidding was basically only dictated by the search being made. So like, and let's say in our industry, if someone searches 'sell house fast near me,' I bid this. If someone searches 'companies that buy houses,' I bid this. And that was based on a bidding approach called manual CPC, right? And so it was just purely, I think that this keyword gives me this quality, and so I can bid here and still see a profit."

"But over time, Google has rolled out what they call automated bidding, and that takes into account all of the thousands of data points that Google has on each person. And when we use an automated bidding approach in our account, we not only factor in the search but the searcher and what they have, like who they are, what they've been searching. And we have Google take that into account as it sets bids for us."

"And so those are kind of the two categories of bidding strategies. There's manual that only looks at the search, there's automated that looks at the search and the searcher and just basically a lot more information because they even roll down manual... like some stuff, right? Where you could target based on... actually in this industry, practically nothing because of all the Equal Opportunity housing regulations."

"I think there's some things that you can do it based on though, like you could change your bid by device or by household income, but it's so limited compared to the tens of thousands of data points that Google has that if they were to publish would probably scare everybody into never using Google again."

"Yeah, but we have on good authority that there's a lot of stuff there. Things like income data, demographic data that could be tied to someone's online history. Like maybe they just searched 'sell my house' in Google now, but two days ago they searched 'we buy houses.' That tells you something about what it could mean when they're searching for 'sell my house' right now. What websites they visit... if you just knew everybody in the world's internet browsing history, you would know a lot about those people. And Google knows that."

"Add on to that that they can connect that to like third-party data providers that have, for example, credit card data and what kind of things people are purchasing. And all of this stuff, it really helps you understand because what's most predictive of future behavior? It's past behavior. If you have a lot of the data about that past behavior, you can relatively simply predict the future behavior of somebody."

"So there's... I don't know if 'holy war' is the right word around bidding strategies, specifically automated versus manual, and I'll brief kind of the high level. I'm curious to hear your specific thoughts on it."

"Yeah, people who are hardcore manual basically are like... have this idea that like automated bidding is giving the reins to Google. You can't trust Google, they just want your money, and I know better than Google. It's like the consensus there. And automated bidding is lazy. People that are really pro-automated bidding might reference a lot of this data that could be used, they might reference better results, they might have different circumstances they worked on in different... that have caused them to like automated bidding."

"And this has been like a shifting game. I think everybody agrees pretty much that automated bidding is a lot better now than it's ever been before. It's been on that growth trajectory over the past several years. But still, many people fall on either side. What's your opinion on which bid strategy is best or which category of bid strategies? If we're speaking to like just this industry, just REI?"

"There's... I think one of the hardest parts of PPC in the industry is that there's not a lot of conversion volume and there aren't a lot of clicks in a given time period given the cost per click and the cost per lead that's common in the industry. And so given that manual is going to work better on low data volume accounts and worse as there's higher data volume, what I would argue is that if an account is only operating on its own data and it doesn't have a huge budget, I think it makes sense to run on manual."

"Like I think there's a point where you probably know more about your audience than Google does if you're getting four or five leads a month, right? Or even beyond that, like I still think that you probably know more than Google given that data size. But as there's higher spend and higher volume in an account, that balance shifts towards being in favor of automated because as Google has better volume, more data points that it can see like who your ideal audience is, then all of a sudden it can better make that like ideal searcher that best like responds to your ads."

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In this episode of the PPC Essentials series, Brandon talks to Garret Cragun, who is the Director of Paid Media at Bateman Collective. They discuss Google Ads bids, including the target CPA bid strategy and common mistakes people make. They emphasize the importance of finding the right balance between cost per lead and revenue per lead, and making decisions based on business objectives. This is the seventh episode of the PPC Essentials series.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

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"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be joined by Garrett Craigan, our Director of Paid Media at Bateman Collective. We're going to be talking all about bids, which are one of the main foundational elements of Google Ads. This is episode number seven out of eight of PPC Essentials. How are you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing pretty good. How are you?"

"Hey, fantastic. Thank you. Just welcoming in the sun and the 70-degree weather and happiness back into our lives. All that stuff that happens with the spring."

"That's right. Thank goodness."

"Yeah, I'm super excited to talk about our topic today, which is specifically bids. For anybody who's been following along, you know that last week we talked about bid strategies, which is a foundation for bids. Although I think it is so commonly said, not just in the real estate investing world but in so many other industries, anywhere that you can find somebody that manages Google Ads, I think it's said that this bid strategy works better than that bid strategy or whatever the case is. But the piece that's missing from that is that you have to actually work these bid strategies, and you could have a strategy that's awesome, but if you don't know how to manage it properly, then you're going to have some other strategy outperform you. I found that's the case a lot with these like heavily automated strategies. Some of the people that really, really lean on those, they just don't know how to run bids."

"Yeah, and basically if you do, then you can do better with some other strategies. Do you have any comments on that?"

"Yeah, I think it's less about what bidding tactic you're using but how you use those bids to dictate your volume, dictate your cost per lead. And as long as you're making decisions based on business objectives, in general, it'll work out better than if you're basing it off of just what's in the platform or based on gut."

"Yeah, absolutely. So a place that I think would be good to start with this is just to lay the foundation of what we're going to be talking about. I think that for the most part, we're going to be talking about the target CPA bid strategy in Google, just because that's the strategy that we're using most commonly. I know we're pretty excited about t-COS and maximize conversions value, and we have some clients doing well with maximize conversions and cost per click bidding and stuff, but really, when it comes to non-branded stuff, it really is TCPA that seems to be the biggest winner right now. And there's some specific things that need to be done from a bidding standpoint there that I think we should talk about."

"One good place to start is with maybe a little bit of a foundation of what it is that we're talking about on a more conceptual level. I see people making a lot of mistakes when it comes to how they bid. A really common one is that what people naturally want to do is they just want to bid really high because they think they're going to get better leads if they bid high. It's also pretty common to bid really low because you're cheap. You just think you can get... you don't want to give Google any more leash than they need or maybe not even give them the leash that they need."

"I guess I've seen people tend to fall into two camps. Basically, Camp number one is it's all about value, and what I mean by that is you're saying, 'I don't care what it costs, I just want the click that's going to turn into a deal.' And then the other camp is that it's all about volume and cost, and they try to minimize the cost. But the reality of the situation is that there's really two things that make up what you should... they make up return on investment, right? There's two metrics: there's revenue per lead and cost per lead."

"And really, that's what bidding comes down to. It's getting the bids in the right place so that you can have your cost per lead be proportionate properly to your revenue per lead. If you focus just on the cost per lead, then what's going to happen is you end up with perhaps a really low revenue per lead because the things that you do to drive that cost down, they hurt your lead quality. But if you focus just on revenue per lead, you have the underlying assumption that your competitors aren't."

"Because a lot of people say, 'I don't care what it costs, I just want that lead,' but you do care what it costs because there's a certain number where it's not worth that anymore. And like, you can't just make it so you only buy leads that are going to close or something like that, right? There's just a... like some of the things that generate the most qualified leads, they tend to be slightly more qualified or maybe even majorly more qualified, but majorly more qualified might be 40%, right? Where it's not like the other ones are useless. Do you have any thoughts on that dynamic that makes up a return on investment?"

"Yeah, I think it's like you were saying. It's important that you take into account not just 'I want to make my leads as cheap as possible' or 'I want as many leads as possible regardless of how much they cost.' If you can understand where the best margin comes from, that's where you can afford to bid higher. And in those areas where there's less of a chance of a good lead coming through, but there's still some in that mix that are quality, then you can bid lower and be assured that when there is a lead that does come through, its cost is still in a place where that margin holds true."

"I think probably the easiest comparison for Google Ads bids is it's just like wholesaling real estate. If you're wholesaling real estate, you could... there's different factors that tell you what a house is worth, right? It could be the number of bedrooms, the number of square feet, what location it's in, all that kind of stuff. But I can tell you a strategy that does not work for wholesaling real estate is either saying, 'I know I can sell houses for tons of money, so I'm going to go into a market and find the most valuable houses that I can sell for the most. That's how I'm going to make money.' But that's what some people do with PPC."

"On the other hand, you have people that... you could say with wholesaling real estate, 'I just want to get the cheapest possible houses, and that's how I'm going to make money.' But you and I both know that some houses are cheap, but they're worth even less than what they cost, right?"

"What really makes the value in wholesaling real estate is the discrepancy between the cost and the value. It's the fact that you can buy at a discount, not necessarily at a high price or a low price. And bidding on Google Ads is exactly the same. You have to identify what are the leads that are worth a lot and we're willing to pay a lot, or they're worth very little but we're able to get them dirt cheap. The whole point is you want to basically bid at a discount. You want to do the equivalent of low-balling Google, and when you come in with those low bids, sometimes you win them, and that's how you create the most value."

"Yeah, and so the whole... the key that I think goes unnoticed in PPC is that everyone has the ability to bid on the same searches. Everyone is playing in the same system. So the winners are the marketers that are able to identify those advantages that others don't, and that can come through your keyword, that can come through your bids, that can come through your ad copy, or even through how effective your acquisitions team is once those leads come through. But it all comes down to identifying where you can outperform people on what looks like a level playing field."

"And I guess what we want to do on this episode is help you to find ways to make that playing field skewed in your favor a bit more."

"Yeah, absolutely. So let's talk about the first common issue when it comes to bids, and that is probably the most common one that I see honestly, and it's that you put your bids too high. What do you think are some things that drive people to put their bids higher than they need to be?"

Certainly. Here's the next part of the transcript, corrected and formatted:

"I think people bid too high for a few reasons. One is they take the auction as a battle of who's the Big Man on Campus, when that's not really how it operates. The big man often is losing money. You think he's winning, but he's probably overpaying. And then the other reason why people bid too high is they don't understand their unit economics behind the scenes, and so they think that they can make this cost per lead work when in reality they can't. So I think it comes from one, a lack of understanding of how the platform works, and two, a lack of understanding of how those leads perform after they're captured."

"I think some of it could just come from understanding what your goals are as an advertiser, because where I've seen people go wrong with this is their goal is to be at the top of Google. And if that's your goal, you can get there, but it's going to cost you a ton of money to get there. I have clients reach out to us sometimes where they send like a screenshot and they're like, 'I searched this keyword. Why didn't I show up?' or something like that. And the answer is someone bid higher than you. So then they say, 'Can we bid more?' The answer is probably yes, but should you bid more? Because you're spending your full budget and we're getting great clicks at a great discount and the return on investment's good. So why would we overpay for something just so we can show up in one arbitrary place that makes your ego feel nice? It just doesn't make financial sense."

"I think everything has its point where it does have value though. This is why there's diminishing returns with scale. People talk about it all the time, where you have a diminishing marginal return as you scale your advertising budget. A lot of people don't understand that the reason that happens is because as you scale your budget, you actually have to bid higher because those clicks... think of it like your... there's a target, right? And your budget's going to take up a certain amount of the target, and if you have just a small budget, you really just want to be in the bullseye of that target. These are like the absolute most discounted and qualified clicks that you can find in a market."

"As you start to scale your budget more, now you have to go a few rings out, potentially, or maybe even a few rings further out than that because you can't spend all your budget just in the bullseye. So now you have to pay a little bit more than you want to for some stuff, or you have to buy some stuff that you might not have bought before. And that's what can degrade your lead quality and potentially your lead volume as you start to scale your budgets."

"And so maybe at some point that does make sense. That extra lead that you could buy for $400 when your average cost per lead is $200 with a certain amount of budget, it doesn't make sense, but it just might not make sense if you have a small budget. And pushing yourself and trying to optimize for impression share when really what you're trying to care about is return on investment, I think can lead you down that road of just over-bidding."

"And then what you end up doing is you overpay for some of those clicks, but you end up having to miss out on others that are a much better opportunity because you have a finite budget."

"Yep, exactly. So how do you know if you're over-bidding?"

"Great question. Where I would look to see if I'm bidding in the right... at the right level is I would look at what's our cost per click and what's our cost per lead. And that's probably where I would look first. Like if I'm seeing that my cost per lead is too high, the easiest place to bring that down is to bid lower in an intentional way. I wouldn't bid lower across the board. I would bid on the ad groups or the keywords where I'm seeing the biggest... like misses from where I need that cost per lead to be."

"And then the other area that I would look at is like, how's our budget pacing? Are we like way overspending relative to where we're comfortable? If we are, we're probably over-bidding. And then... and that's one other area of if we're overspending, let's pull back a little bit."

"I think it's worth... I think you're trying to keep it a little bit higher level, but I want to give somebody some like really actionable information that they can look in their account for. Because there's some metrics that kind of surround bidding that I think are really commonly misunderstood because Google kind of has this rhetoric that they want you to understand about it, and everybody just followed it. And I feel like I'm the only person like screaming in the wilderness saying you should look at this, and everybody's just doing what Google wants them to do."

"And the metrics I'm specifically referring to here... if anybody's ever looked at your Google Ads account and you see this big like orange or red thing that says 'limited by budget,' that shows up... that's a pretty clear signal. But there... there's some metrics behind it. The first one's impression share, which we talked about before. It's basically the percentage of the time that you're showing up when you're eligible. Then there's this other thing that causes limitation by budget where it says 'impression share loss to budget,' and it's basically what percentage of the time are you not showing up because your budget has cut you off."

"So the way that Google wants us to understand that is we need to raise our budgets because our budgets are not sufficient for what we're trying to accomplish right now. And that's a viable option to... to address that, but the thing is, it's arbitrary based on where you put your bids. So what this is really saying is your bids and your budget are incompatible. You have bids that are high and a budget that is low, and therefore you should have a budget that's higher or you should have bids that are lower. You just shouldn't have that budget with those bids."

"So what Google wants us to do always is raise the budget, but the other option is you could bid lower. And I see this all the time in our audits that we're looking at this account and let's just say it's spending $110,000. And I don't want to bore everyone with all the math and stuff like that, but we might find that they have... like everybody knows you get a diminishing return as you spend more money, but they might have the diminished return of a company that spends $100,000 a month because they're bidding as if they spend $100,000 a month, yet they only have $10,000 a month to spend."

"So they're getting cut off, and what that does is it means that you're just... you have a way higher cost per lead than you could have. Even if the number makes sense for you, right? Let's just say for the return on investment you need to pay 200 bucks a lead and you're at 200, a lot of people would say okay, we're good. But what if it could be 100? You could have double the return on investment, and I think that's totally worth doing, right?"

"So anyways, I think the... is there anything you'd add to the dynamic between those metrics, the impression share and the lost impression share to budget?"

"Yeah, I think a good rule of thumb is if your cost per lead is too high and that impression share loss from budget is also high, that means you're probably bidding too high. If the cost per lead is in a good place and you're losing volume due to budget, that's where I actually would just bump up budget because we're seeing that the only reason we lose volume is because there just isn't enough spend available to reach the full audience that's already being reached at an efficient place. So I think those two metrics can help you have a budget problem or if you have a bids problem."

"Yeah, absolutely. And as you can imagine, this gets pretty strategic, right? There's a bunch of different ways to handle it because what you're talking about is maximizing your value or your volume that you can drive with your bids in a specific place where you get a certain return on investment. Which, let's just say you need more leads in your business, that's absolutely the way to go. But what if your team's too busy and you can't handle more leads? Then you might just want to go even lower with bids."

"So the important thing to remember is it means that the bids and the budget are incompatible, and how you approach that... it could be that you scale the budget if your return on investment's good. What most people want to do there is scale their budget, and I think that makes a ton of sense. But if the return on investment's not good, that's only going to make it basically the same but at a higher volume, right? And the same at a higher volume, I would not call a move to make if you don't have a good return on investment."

"So yeah, it... it goes both ways. However, I think the one thing you shouldn't do is just completely ignore it forever, which is what we find like 95% of people do. It's oh, you're just over-bidding a ton. I'm just going to leave that there for the next year and not actually do anything about it. So now I'm getting the diminishing return of a company that has a much larger budget than I have, yet I have the volume of a company that has a smaller budget."

"So if you think about it like when you scale, what's the upside and what's the downside? The upside is you have volume, the downside is you lose efficiency. Whereas if you get smaller, you get more efficiency, less volume. But if you bid too high, you get less efficiency and less volume, and it's just the worst of both worlds. Just doesn't make any sense."

"All right, so that's bidding too high. Let's talk a little bit about the flip side of that. Like, how do you know if you're bidding too low?"

"Bidding too low, I would look... the key metric that I would look for, I guess this is two. The first one, like we talked about, is your cost per lead. And then the other one is going to be your impression share due to rank. And rank is a black box with Google, but in general, it's going to be a pretty good... a pretty good metric to indicate your bid... like level."

"So when there's a high impression share loss due to rank, that means that you are losing impressions due to not bidding as aggressively or not having as good of an ad rank as other advertisers in your space. An ad rank is composed of things like your ad relevance, your page experience, and your bids. But in... in this case, in this podcast, let's just say it's mostly bids. And so... which if you're maximizing the rest, is... you're probably safe. It's not like you see that you have lost due to rank and then you suddenly... huh, I should write better ads or I should make a good landing page, right? Like, you should already have... regardless of this, trying to maximize those things."

"Definitely. And so if you're at a good cost per lead but you're losing a lot of rank-tied volume, then that's probably a bid issue. In addition, if you're underspending your budget, that's probably also due to your bids being too low."

"Yeah, that's like the dead giveaway, right?"

"Yeah, because Google will just go up to whatever constraint it can. So you could have a $10,000 a month budget. One way to explain this is, let's just say you had an infinite budget in Google. With your bids at a certain place, there's a certain amount of money that you would end up spending even if you had no cap on your budget. And if that number is, let's just say, 50 grand, and your budget's 10 grand, that's called limited by budget and over-bidding. If that number is two grand and your budget's 10 grand, then you're going to only spend two grand and you're underspending, right?"

"So really, where things are optimal is you just have to somehow know the exact number to put the bid at to where even if you had no budget, you would end up spending your budget. Because that's like the most efficient place to be. It's just easier in theory than it is in practice. But just to like, boil... boil this down to the brass tacks, that's what it looks like."

"So if you are underspending, what do you... or if you are under-bidding, what do you do?"

"What I do is I look at what we could afford to pay for a lead or for a click, depending on how you're bidding, and try to set it as close to that maximum as possible to get things back in... in a place where you are maximizing that volume."

"One other thing I would say too is to be careful if you're going to make these decisions just based on the loss due to rank. Loss due to rank, it's like the metric that summarizes what we talked about before where you search and you don't see your ad and you think that something's wrong. That's actually a metric that shows you how often that's actually happening, which is really insightful. But there's situations... we have clients that have a 90% loss to... to rank, which is super high, and it's completely fine because maybe they advertise nationally or something like that. And with their budget, they're... if they were to... if they were to get 50% impression share with their budget, it'd be impossible, right? They'd have to be spending $500,000 a month to get there."

"So a lot of loss due to rank is like a really natural thing. It just means that you're bidding really aggressively low. But key sign there is, do you have lost due to rank and are you under... under budget also? Because if you're hitting your budget and you've lost due to rank, then who cares? But if you are under budget and you have lost due to rank, then it shows that if you could turn that lost due to rank into impression share, then you can scale. And that has a lot of value."

"What else do people do wrong that we're seeing in our audits when it comes to bidding?"

"I think the other factor is how often to adjust bids. I see people make two very different errors when it comes to bidding change frequency. It's either they're changing it daily, hourly, or way too often given their budget, or they're just not as reactive as they need to be to changing numbers, and they're losing out on efficiency or volume because they aren't making those changes as frequently as they need to."

"Yeah, I think the way I would... summarize it, and this is true for most things in Google Ads, you have to change things as frequently as you possibly can with sufficient data to make those changes. The problem is people who do it really frequently, they don't have data to be able to make those decisions. But I just did an audit of an account where I saw a year and a half with zero changes to bids, all the while the limitation by budget was going up and up, and the whatever company was managing it just didn't... didn't never look at it or care."

"One thing I really see that's common is if bids need to be raised, then companies tend to raise them. But if they need to be lowered, they tend to not lower them. This is just... I'm not trying to throw shade at our competitors or anything, but it's... I think it's a natural thing that arises from like the lack of knowledge that companies in general have about Google Ads."

"So if you... let's just say an agency ends with spending half the budget, they're going to get an angry call from the client saying, 'Why did you only spend half my budget?' And it's going to cause them to raise the bids. Let's just say they had a 20% higher cost per lead than they technically could have gotten because they over-bid. No client calls you up and says, 'Hey, I could have gotten a 20% lower cost per lead based on all these metrics that I see in the account. However, we were over-bidding, and I noticed that there's a limitation by budget, and I'm upset about that.' Right? Nobody ever says that."

"So agencies are incentivized to just always have bids too high because what happens when you try to play really close to the line of getting them... because really, the game is how low can we get bids without it being too low given our certain budget? But when you start to play close to that line, you end up under budget sometimes. So I think a lot of agencies just... they really clear but they lose efficiency because of it."

"So maybe it'd be helpful for anybody that does manage their own PPC if you could just explain... like in... in short terms... like what our happy medium is there. What do we... what frequency do we use for adjusting bids? How do we adjust those bids?"

"Yeah, so we base our bid schedule based on the number of clicks that an account gets in a given time period. So what we say is that if an account gets over, I believe it's 150 clicks in a week, we make... uh, bid changes every three... three or four days. Then if they're under that, we in general make... make those changes weekly. With the caveat that we... that we don't make changes as if there's been a major change in the account like a budget change, like launching a new campaign. Those kinds of things can impact the data that we're looking for to assess where bids need to be. And so we wait a little bit longer to make those bid changes until there's enough data post-major change to assess where those bids need to be given the new landscape of the account."

"Yeah, there it is. If anybody wants to copy the exact process, that's what it is. And then how much we change the bids is all based on a formula of these different metrics, and we track if we change bids this much, how much of an impact does it have on those metrics? And we try to get better over time at changing it through... right amount. Although it's worth saying this is a different game every day, like sometimes you raise bids a little bit and it just does crazy things to the volume, and sometimes it makes no difference. And it's... so that's where we also in general ask for... ask our clients for a little bit of grace on the amount of spend because we try to push the efficiency as high as possible."

"But we say something like 75 to 100% of your budget being spent is really typical because you'll have some days where we predicted that there's going to be a certain amount of search volume, we predict that there's going to be a certain amount of competition, and all based on that, we're going to bid this exact amount and it's going to be perfectly efficient. And then the competition's higher than expected or the search volume lower than expected, and what happens is you end up under budget. But the next day is a new day, and you can set your bids differently."

"And anyways, with some days that are lower volume, it's really normal to be at least a little bit under budget, but you gain a lot of efficiency. So I think most people would be better off setting, for example, a $15,000 budget and then averaging 13, then they would setting a $13,000 budget but having to hit it and therefore they... they have to over-bid and end up with a higher cost per lead at the end of the day."

"All right, so that's the way all of these episodes have been structured is we talk about what do people do wrong and how do you do it better. I think if you just do bid changes with the right frequency and you understand trying to get them as low as you can without going under on spend, I think you're good. One caveat for that is I've seen people destroy their results on accident by doing that. You really need the right foundation beforehand. How do I... how do I explain this?"

"Sometimes in a Google Ads account, you have some activities in the account that are generating waste, and then you have other activities that are generating good leads at a good price. And the percentage between the waste and the good stuff is a certain thing, like maybe 90% of the budget's going towards good things and 10% is going to waste. But then when you change your bids, even though the bad stuff and the good stuff that were both there from before, nothing's really changed there, it changes the dynamic between them. So now you're spending 90% on the bad stuff and you're spending 10% on the good stuff. And really all it does is it just exposes a weakness that you already had by changing the amount exposes a weakness that you already had by changing the amount of volume that goes towards it. So it's not really bidding that's the problem, but people think it is, right?"

"I'll give you a classic example for this. You could have someone targeting a lot of different geographic areas including some that are really prime and competitive and others that are very inexpensive and also very low quality. We'll take an example of, let's just say I'm targeting Utah and I target the entire state of Utah, and then we have the Salt Lake City metro or maybe St. George, these different areas, Park City that could be good, and then we have the boonies where it's not good."

"So what people do sometimes is they were bidding just really high, and what happened is they got mostly leads in Salt Lake. But if you use these metrics like we're talking about and you start to put those bids lower, then what you'd see is a greater percentage of your leads start to come from these out-of-the-way places. And there you have a really low revenue per lead. So your ROI actually suffers from this."

"But it's important to note that if that happens, that's just an example, right? That the same thing could happen with keywords, it could happen with whatever. You always had that weakness and that waste in your campaign. You're just exposing that waste by changing the amount of your budget that goes towards it inadvertently by lowering your bids. If that's the case, what you need is to be bidding properly. We'll talk about this in the... when we talk about best-case scenarios of bidding the right amount per thing."

"But anyways, basically what I'm saying is lowering bids gets a lot of flak for a lot of stuff when it's not really the cause of the issue most of the time."

"Yeah, do you have any comments or notes on that?"

"Yeah, I think that's... that's right on where if you are confident that your ad copy is strong, that your keywords are strong, that your landing page is strong, that those things aren't the issue, then it's safe to work on bids as your main lever of in-account optimization. But if those things aren't in a good place, then just changing your margins isn't going to help you drive better performance. Those areas are... are going to need to be addressed before you focus on just your bids."

"Yep, I 100% agree that there's a time and a place to... to focus on these bids because you don't want to double down on the wrong part of your campaign, right? But that's a foundational issue with the campaign."

"Yeah, so on that topic, let's talk about how you do this the best. What are some examples of bidding on a really high level in your opinion?"

"Yeah, I think it's important to... to understand that within a campaign, there are various ad groups that you have built out in your campaign with different themes of searches, and those different themes... different levels of quality that over time you'll see patterns of which ad groups bring in the best margin and which ones tend to have a better... like quality ratio. And so it's important to bid based on those ratios of quality and not bid equal across all of them because they all aren't bringing in an equal number of deals at an equal... like level of return."

"And so the gold standard of... of bidding for me is bidding on quality at the ad group level as well as at the location level where you're bidding based on where you see the best results and being able to balance that... that line between volume and efficiency at as granular level as Google will allow."

"I love what you're saying. I think that some people misunderstand that sometimes because they have a different mindset going into it, and it's the... best way I would describe it is it's a black and white mindset where the way that they would make it work is, let's just say this one keyword has a much higher cost per lead than this other one. They would just cut the bad one and keep the good one, or they would keep both and just hope it gets better. When what you're talking about is basically everything gray."

"So a lot of people would look at a search like, for example, 'sell my house' and they would say that's not motivated. If someone searches 'sell my house fast,' they're motivated. If they search 'sell my house,' they're retail. Which, by the way, you have no data to say that, so you're just... you're just throwing random stuff into the universe and hoping that you're right. And most of the time you're not."

"But let's just say you do have some data for that. Let's just say keyword one is 'sell my house fast' has a 30% higher chance of being motivated than keyword two. What a lot of people would say is you cut keyword two and you keep keyword one. What you're saying is you change the way that you bid on those so that you're bidding more on one of them that's better quality and less on the other that's lower quality."

"The same could be true for locations, right? Maybe I really love leads in Salt Lake City, but I can also close deals in Dallas. It's not that it's black and white like I either want to be in both or I want to be in one. It's that I probably want to make sure I'm really aggressively bidding in Dallas... aggressive from a low bidding standpoint to reflect the fact that those leads have less value to me. And then I'm more aggressive in a positive way in Salt Lake where I reflect that those leads have a very high value to me."

"And it's this tiered approach to bidding that makes a really big difference because it gives you everything. If you go one way or the other, basically... let's just say you have the two locations and you just bid the same on them. You're going to be overpaying for the location you don't want and you're going to be underpaying for the location you do want. But let's just say you cut the one. Now you have more of a diminished return in the other one and you do get all your leads there, but you actually decrease your return on investment compared to if you understood all the dynamics of the different locations and you're able to bid appropriately to value, right?"

"And I think this goes back to what I was saying earlier about being able to identify where you can win where other people can't in... in your market. And so if you only bid on... on those terms or in those locations where everyone's bidding, then you're going to get caught up in... in a low margin game. But if you can find efficiency on those terms or in those locations where... where people aren't bidding because they think they're a waste, then all of a sudden you're... you can find these high margin, low volume plays to help offset where you might see lower return but higher volume in those more... more expensive areas. And so if you go all in on... on just the high cost terms and locations, sure you'll be okay, but you're losing out on these low volume plays that can be very effective as well."

"Yeah, yeah. I think one way to... to look at that is that there's a lot of gray even when it comes to what price things go for. Like, it's so common for people to just follow the market and just say the average cost per click for this keyword in this area is this, therefore that's what I'm going to bid, as if that's a smart way to understand what the value is going to be to your business, right? It probably correlates at least a little bit. If other people are willing to pay more, yeah, then it's worth more. But the real value is understanding what are people underpaying for that was more valuable than what they think it's worth?"

"That's where data comes in so useful to know, for example, what is the search term that has more value than what other people are willing to pay? Or what are the search terms that other people are over-bidding on and I'm going to bid low? And then also understanding that there's everything in between. If, let's just say, the average cost per lead in a market is $300, there are going to be leads... I know I'm oversimplifying by even saying that leads sell for a certain amount, but you know, humor me. There's going to be leads that sell for $600 in that market, and there's going to be leads that sell for 500 and 400, 300, and $100 and $250. There's going to be... at every one of those price points, there's different leads. It's just they average out to 300."

"So it never hurts to put a lowball offer on a lead, basically is my opinion of it. If you say that that one lead with whatever parameter it is, be it a keyword parameter, be it a location parameter that makes it less valuable to us, the question you have to ask yourself is: What if it cost x% less? Would it still work for you? And I can guarantee there's a price where it works. Maybe it's like 1% of the price or something like that. Maybe it's really low value. But there's a price where that works for you, and it's about bidding that. And you might not win all the volume, but when you do, you win it at a great price. And being more spread out and sending more lowball offers on more things gets you a better return on investment than over-bidding on a smaller number of things."

"Yeah, definitely. And I think it all is... it all comes down to bidding based on your own data of how you and your business performs and not based on the market, not based on gut, is going to help you to find the best balance between volume and efficiency."

"Yeah, absolutely. Do you want to shed a little bit of light into our strategy for this? Because I could tell you one thing that people really struggle with on this is it sounds great in theory until you realize how much data you actually need to pull that off, right? For me to know that this keyword has a better value for me than this other keyword, I don't think a lot of people really... how much data that takes. Because you're splitting your data like 60 ways across 60 different keywords, and the real value is going to come from the deals and their spreads at the end of the day. And I see people like quote-unquote like optimizing based on this, but they have five deals across 60 keywords, as if you can even know what's working. So I think that's the overwhelming part of this is yeah, theoretically if I spent a million dollars every month on ads and had tons of data coming in, I could actually know the necessary information to bid properly. But if I don't have that, what do I do?"

"Yeah, so how we do it is we pull in all of what's termed the offline data from all of our clients. We can pull in the lead volume, the cost per lead, the lead to appointment ratio, the cost per appointment, the cost per contract, the... all of those metrics from all of our clients historically, which I believe up until now we spent... believe $12 million in our Google MCC. So there's a ton of data."

"Yeah, that's probably overly conservative if anything."

"Yeah, probably. So with... with all of that volume and all of that data that... that goes beyond that lead being acquired, where're... we're able to break down at the keyword level and at the ad group level which... which themes bring in the best efficiency. And then what we do is we set our bids initially based on those proportions of which ad groups bring in the best quality versus wh... which ones bring in the worst quality. And we bid in that gray and... like you were saying, an average investor is going to need a lot of spend to get the volume of offline data of deals especially to be able to set bids based on actual closed and not just what you estimate you can close a lead at. So we're basing these bids off of volume that the average investor probably won't ever get on their own."

"Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think to say the same thing more simply, it would just be that in Google Ads, the... especially for real estate investing, the ultimate advantage that you could have is knowledge and data about what these things are worth. And nobody has that much data on their own side, right? That's why it's so important to work with a partner that has more data than you have. That's the value that a partner brings to the whole partnership is they can understand those values in ways that you wouldn't be able to."

"Theoretically, it has been said with Google that if you did nothing right other than bid properly, then you would be fine. And it's true. Like, to think about a crazy example, right? You could say, let's just say we're talking about keywords. You could... you could accidentally bid on a keyword that is somebody searching for a divorce lawyer in Memphis, and you're in Salt Lake City, right? And one person who searches for a divorce lawyer in Memphis between now and the end of time is going to be someone who also has a house to sell in Salt Lake City. It's such a small likelihood, right?"

"So there's a proper bid for that, and if you actually knew what that was, you'd probably know that bid is one/100th of a penny or something like that. And then if you bought it at that price, you would just get the right person when they came, right? So theoretically, you could bid on every single keyword, and if you bid the right amounts, then you would be driving value from it because bidding is what creates return on investment. Because your cost per lead and your revenue per lead are what make your return on investment. If you can understand your revenue per lead and how to predict that, then you know exactly what your cost per lead could be. And if you're using the target CPA bid strategy, then you can set your cost per lead to exactly that to make sure you get a certain return on investment."

"Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, is the heart of... of paid search is your bids."

"Yeah, that's it for today's episode. That is number six out of seven on this series of the... what are we calling it? The uh... PPC Essentials?"

"Yeah."

"So embarrassing. I think I've asked you that on every single episode that we've had about PPC Essentials. So anyway, that's 6 out of 7. Next time we're going to be talking all about some of the settings. Spoiler alert: there's certain buttons that if you don't press in Google Ads, this could be a... something as simple as unchecking a box that makes a difference between every lead you get being spam and having great quality of leads. It's not the sexiest topic, but it is so important. So we're going to talk about that, and I think there'll be some great nuggets there. So I will see you there next week."

"Awesome."

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Join Brandon and Shaun in the final episode of our PPC Essentials Series, where they discuss the crucial aspect of getting your Google Ads settings right. They stress how even a small mistake can lead to poor results, and offer valuable insights on how to avoid this. They also touch on the intriguing topic of click fraud and its different types, providing tips on how to protect yourself against it. This episode is packed with practical advice and emphasizes the importance of getting your Google Ads settings right for a successful ad campaign.

Part 8 of 8 in the PPC Essentials Series

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Shan, our account management team lead. He works with more of our clients than anybody else on the team here at Bitman Collective, and we're going to talk all about Google ad settings. How are you doing today, Sean?"

"Doing pretty good, thanks for having me."

"Yeah, of course. Excited to have you here again. I think you've been on a couple of the episodes of this series and added a ton of value. Today's a fun one, although if I do say so myself, probably the least sexy of our topics."

"That is true, but very important still."

"Yes, we're going to be talking about things today where just a single button you could press in Google Ads could make the difference between absolutely amazing results and poor results. It's the kind of stuff you don't think about and you don't care about until you're on the wrong side of it and it's hurting you. So it's something that I think is a conversation that has to be had, even if it's not the most fun stuff in the business."

"For sure."

"That topic is all about Google Ads settings, and this is where all those little miscellaneous things that didn't fit into any of the other categories that we talked about are going to fall into. We have just a couple things, so it's probably going to be a shorter episode, but like I said, everything that we're going to talk about today has potential. If you get it right, you'll never notice; if you get it wrong, it'll destroy you. So it's important stuff."

"It's also when it comes to settings, there's a little bit less room for creativity and doing magnificent things. So there's not going to be really anything in the 'best' category, so to speak, today. Like, you get it right or you don't get it right. So we're going to talk about some things mostly just focused around some of the big things that you can mess up and go from there. Kicking us off, Sean, what's the first thing you'd like to share in terms of settings that you can get wrong?"

"Yeah, one is a really big one that took us a minute to figure out. About two years ago, we had this weird issue with spam where it seemed like we were just trying all these different things. Spam was a frequent issue with a lot of people, and we made tons of different adjustments. We were going through every channel just trying to figure out what's going on, and eventually, we figured it out. The setting was a single checkbox, kind of like you mentioned earlier. One checkbox can make or break your campaign."

"It was search partners and using that network to advertise. For those who aren't familiar with it, Google essentially has two different routes you can go. You're advertising on Google, and you're also advertising on search partners, which if you're ever on sites that have like Google search integrated with their searches, or there's a large number of other browsers that use Google but a secondary version of Google for their stuff. Advertising through that channel was bringing in tons of spam, and we figured out turning that off actually prevented, I'd say, probably like 90%, maybe even more, of our spam that was coming through at the time."

"So that's the one thing I would say. If there is a 'best' thing for this conversation, it is not using search partners because it's just the Wild West in search partners. There's a setting you just have to go into your Google campaign settings, you can turn off, just uncheck the box for Google search partners. But yeah, that's one of the biggest things. A lot of spam was coming through that channel, and it seems that it's probably easier to target through that channel for a lot of these click farms or other spam sources."

"That's where I figured I'd start here, talking about those search partners and just not utilizing it. It's very easy, just uncheck it and make sure you're not using it in your campaigns. For us, it seemed like it could make or break our campaigns, and it wasn't something that was always that way though. I think that's one thing to point out: it's something that kind of grew over time."

"Actually, one thing I would say is to pay attention. If you are using search partners right now, measure what you have and check. We haven't used it for a long time just because it became a large issue, and we have had a few instances where we've tried enabling it, and it just seems to produce still the same issues with spam. I think in its current state, it's just not a tool that we can really use in this industry. So I definitely recommend turning off search partners."

"Yeah, absolutely. I also want to open up the conversation to a little bit of a broader view on things, and it really just comes down to click fraud in general. Because I've seen a lot of people that we talk to that do have this issue with search partners, they're going about it a different way, like they're trying to solve that problem by blocking IP addresses and stuff like that. So I think it's worth us having a conversation about what different types of fraud are out there and how do you prevent those types of fraud, because this applies even to Microsoft or Facebook as well, pretty much all online advertising."

"What I would say to set the stage is that click fraud is a bigger industry than some people think it is. It's one of the largest organized crimes in the world, and click fraud is basically someone else profiting by generating fake traffic. The foundation of it usually is that Sean, for example, has this website, and this website's about whatever it's about, and he might run ads on that website, right?"

"And by running ads on that website, you know, when I go and I click on that ad off of his website, he gets paid by the network because someone else is paying to advertise there. That's a basic foundation behind this, and that's all good until Sean decides that he has bad intentions and he realizes that he can actually fake people being on his website and they don't have to actually be there. Those fake people, the better he can do at making them look like real people, the better he's going to do at monetizing his website with traffic that he doesn't actually have."

"And what do real people do? They click on the ads, they don't just look at them. And when they click on them, they might fill out the forms, etc. So they behave like normal people, but if he was faking this, he might just also fill out those forms with complete garbage information, and you might have low conversion on the people that click and all that kind of stuff."

"So that's the foundational element here. Let's just say we're talking about Google. Google has no incentive to have any fraud on its platform because it doesn't want its advertisers to get bad results. So that's where, if this is Google itself, the only person generally you could say that stands to benefit from someone else clicking on your Google ad is not usually Google. It would have to be some other platform that's not also selling the advertising because when you have the same company selling the advertising and also owning the platform where the traffic is on, you don't really have these problems."

"But where you have the search partners, where you have Google and then you have these third-party websites that can make money by selling that advertising to Google, and then Google sells it to you, that's where you run into issues. So that's where specifically for Google, this is search partners. Microsoft has something really similar. Facebook has something called Audience Network, which is basically the same thing, and you're going to find that there's a lot of fraud in all of those platforms because it's not actually owned by the main company."

"The other thing that people run into though is they try to attack that fraud in a different way. Really common is through IP blocking. Do you want to talk a little bit about IP blocking and when is that a good solution and when isn't it?"

"Yeah, essentially the IP blocking allows us to go, for example, in Google you can go up, I believe it's up to what, 500 or so IP addresses you can go in and add."

"Yeah, you can do ranges so you can block 100 of one if you want to."

"Exactly. But yeah, the basics of it is it allows us to make sure that the people who are seeing your ads are unique people that aren't coming through and have negative intentions. The pros of the IP blocking is exactly that: you can make sure that you have unique people coming in, filling out your forms and things like that. As well as it allows you to find anybody who was bad leads and things like that, you can pull them out of there and do what you can."

"It's not a perfect system, there are definitely ways around it, and I think that's something we'll talk about here in our click fraud discussion. But at the same time, it's a pretty good solution that will get the majority of people, prevent issues from coming from that route. The cons of using IP though is actually, I was talking to somebody earlier today where we were having a lot of duplicate forms coming in through their form fills and everything, but at the same time we're like, 'Hey, we could add these IPs in, but at the same time that also means that if they ever want to come back, if they're not fraudulent, they can't.' If you're blocking someone, and so there are some downsides to it where you have to give up some potential traffic that you may have in the future that might be good because it's not a perfect system."

"So there are some cons there, and it's also another con with IPs. A lot of click farms and things like that, they're pretty aware of how to get around it at times, which is why you have to bring in some other tools as well that automate the process. Because it's impossible for you to go into your campaigns and add 500 negative IPs every single day that could potentially be harmful. That's just - you don't have the time, it's not possible."

"There are tools and things like that. One of them we use is called ClickCease. It's a great option, it's something that we provide for all of our clients because we understand the value of having that where it can make that process - it watches everybody, tracks those IPs, and I believe sometimes even reports them back to Google, tries to pursue refunds and things like that through some of the management fees for ones that do get... So it's a nice tool that we really like and we like to - that's why we provide it for all of our clients. But yeah, those are some of my thoughts on stuff we want to do there, and you can expound on ClickCease and stuff too."

"Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts."

"I know you do."

"I think we have to recognize what is ClickCease and what is not ClickCease. Too often people try to solve a click fraud issue with ClickCease. It only works if their IP address is the same every time, and these people who are doing click fraud on this massive scale, they're not dumb."

"Yeah, click farms are a thing and people know what they're doing, and usually they'll be clicking from new IP addresses every time. So you're on a wild goose chase just trying to exclude things with IP addresses and ClickCease if it's an actual sophisticated fraud. If it's not, then ClickCease can be effective, and this is common. Like the scenario of 'Are my competitors clicking on my ads?' Right, Joe down the street who also owns a wholesaling company, he might search and he might be like, 'You know what, this is going to cost Shan money if I click on this ad,' and he might click a few times. So if he does that and he keeps on repeatedly clicking, then you can block his IP address and it does work in those circumstances. But that's in my experience the minority, the small minority of fraud."

"So ClickCease, I'm trying to think if I was managing my own Google ads, would I do it? I don't know. For us, it's a no-brainer across all of our client base because we build it into a process. It takes an extra however many minutes to set up for each account. We pay like a dollar per client per month for ClickCease or something, because we have one account that's the same in price as anybody would pay, but we can use it 150 times over. I don't know if I would or not. Maybe only if you have a significant problem with it."

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Join Brandon as he interviews Trevor Mauch, CEO of Carrot as they discuss the real estate market's future, online marketing strategies, and real estate's evolving landscape. Get ready to dive into the shift towards PPC and SEO and the future of search engines. Trevor will also be sharing his thoughts on the importance of expertise, authority, and trust in Google rankings. Whether you're a seasoned real estate investor or just getting started, this conversation is guaranteed to be insightful and informative. Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks! We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here. If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

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"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be joined by Trevor Mock, who is the expert in online marketing in the real estate investment space. Trevor is the CEO of Carrot, a company that, honestly, I think probably 90 percent of real estate investment websites are created with. He has tons of insights about running a business, online marketing, where this market's going, and how you can make sure you end up on top. How are you doing today, Trevor?"

"Brandon, I'm doing great, man. Good to see you. Shoot, a few weeks ago, a month ago in Tampa, dude, it was fun."

"Absolutely. It's good to see you getting out of your Oregon shell. I don't think you traveled that much. You haven't traveled that much recently, right?"

"I've been working in the business a lot. Not for work, I travel a lot personally. You know, family-wise, we travel quite a bit. We've gone on a number of vacations the past year all over the place. But business-wise, that's kind of part of when I started Carrot. That was part of my thing. I said I want to be able to build the business that doesn't require me to travel for business, but I travel when I want to for business. So that's kind of the mix I have. I'll go out once or twice a year to a business event."

"Okay, that's awesome. And that's kind of how I thought about it because we actually originally met, probably two years ago if I had to guess, at an Investor Fuel event. And then not until a month ago in Tampa. I kind of think of you like the... because there's... you start going to enough of these events, you start to see the same people over and over again in this real estate investment space. You're like the event unicorn that just like pops up here and there, just once in a while. If you can catch them, you've got a line of like 50 people that want to talk to you because people know this is a rare sighting, right? You want to suck all the knowledge that you can."

"It was funny on that topic. So we were in Arizona in January for our company retreat at Carrot. We flew, you know, 60-some odd people in there, and I knew Pace, so Pace Morby. I knew he was having his Mastermind, and on the way to the airport, I texted Pace. I'm like, 'Pace, I know you got your Mastermind. Mind if I stop by for a few minutes, say hi, and I gotta hit the airport?' So I come in there with my videographer, and we're packing our suitcases into his Mastermind in there. And I go in there, I was just going to literally say hi to him, say hi to Jameel, say hi to Cody, and bounce. And Pace is like, 'Dude,' he goes, 'Now that you're in here, like, do you want to go up and speak?' I go, 'Sure, like, what would be most valuable?' And he goes, 'Well, you pick the topic. You've got half an hour, and how about 10 minutes from now? Does that work?' I'm like, 'Okay, let's put something together.'"

"So that kind of stuff, man, like I've had dozens and dozens of people who've hit me up from that event talking about, you know, the concept that I taught there was life-changing or whatever it is. But yeah, these random occurrences, man, like I think it's destiny sometimes when you're able to get with certain people to go either... either they need to hear a message, it's going to help change their trajectory, or maybe there's a connection that's going to be amazingly beneficial for both. So guys, go to live events. I went to a lot of live events in the early days for sure."

"Yeah, there's definitely a time and place for that value. And honestly, I see, like, personally, I see that our clients that do that progress faster than those that don't. I don't have any information here, I don't have like any special data showing this, but it's kind of like my personal experience, kind of having seen it. There's a lot of benefit from that for sure."

"So Trevor, you are a wealth of knowledge, and I want to get into as much as we possibly can. So let's get into some of the meat of this. And I personally, I kind of view you like, in my mind, as an expert in a few different things. And this is probably just based on different presentations that I've seen of yours and things that I've seen that you're passionate about. The first one being basically entrepreneurship and growing a business. And I think that you have a really unique perspective into that, which actually, by the way, I see reflected really well. I was talking with someone on your team the other day when we went through Carrot's core values, and I was like, 'Yeah, that's Trevor. Like, that's exactly what Trevor is.' So that's the first aspect, and then also, for those that don't know, Carrot is... I mean, you should probably introduce what Carrot is, and that what kind of leads to your secondary expertise, dude."

"Yeah, for sure. So Carrot right now, if I were to kind of fast forward to today, Carrot helps our clients basically launch highly optimized websites and all the marketing tools behind those. We power, you know, many if not most of the biggest investors around the country. More online leads come through the Carrot platform than any other platform out there. I don't want to make certain claims I can't prove. I'm always like a proof guy, but in some of the data that we have, there's more top five rankings across the top 225 markets from Carrot sites than all other website systems combined. And the next two behind us are WordPress as a platform, like WordPress custom sites, and then you have a whole host of everything else. So Carrot clients just dominate online with Google, and you work with a lot of our clients, right?"

"And that's something that is such a joy to be able to work with great people like you guys because you guys leverage our platform with our clients, drive traffic using the skill set we don't drive traffic. So that's where Bateman Collective and amazing companies like yours come in to go, now you guys work with the clients who aren't able or willing to, don't want to do the work themselves, and really amplify it. So we provide the platform, and amazing people like Brandon plug in to help people amplify it."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. Someone asked me the other day, 'What's the difference between you guys and Carrot?' And I was like, 'Well, I don't know, like, everything pretty much, right?' I think of Carrot like the technology behind everything. Let's just say you're cold calling, Carrot's the phone system. Or the way to get the list, or you know, something like that. But then we're the company that kind of builds all the pieces around that so that it functions, right? But there needs to be some base foundation there. You need a website if you're going to do online lead gen."

"And on that note, really cost-effective product. And it's something we've been recommending for a long time. So anyways, I think that's part of why you have so much market share, but that's actually a really impressive stat that you shared. Because I would guess if you did that in any other industry, it would be WordPress by like 90% and then everything else like 10%. So it's definitely backwards in the real estate industry."

"It is. In that study, we run it quarterly. So that's one of the things that we do here internally because performance is such a big deal. And in this podcast, guys, this isn't a Carrot commercial. We're going to dive into data, we're going to look at what's happening in the market right now. Brandon and I are going to kind of riff on what the heck is going on with the lead gen, what are the opportunities. But we looked at the primary couple keywords, so that's like your 'selling my house fast' type of keyword, and then across the top 225 MSAs. So if you look at other keywords like cash buyer keywords, yeah, there's going to be a lot of other sites and Carrot's not dominant. It just happens to be on the highly motivated seller, house seller keywords across America, which is pretty cool."

"Yeah, which is, I think there's a really understandable reason for why that would be the case, just considering who it is that tends to buy your product. So let's talk about that if you don't mind. I'd love to dive into some of your marketing knowledge, you know, specifically for online for motivated sellers. So if we kind of chop that down, one place I'm really curious to start is your perspective on where things are going. I think a lot of people would say that the market has been... I don't know if challenging is the word. It's been really, really different from quarter to quarter over the last little while, right? So it's required a lot of adaptation, and a lot of people are changing kind of where they're shifting their marketing channels. And what I've seen kind of anecdotally is it seems like in this space, the amount of investment as a percentage of the total marketing investment that's going into online channels seems to be growing really significantly. So I'm curious about your take on that, why that's happening, and with all this increased competition online, the companies that really do exceptionally well, what is it that they're going to be doing differently?"

"Dude, such good question. So the way that I tend to think, just like in general, is I think vision, strategy, tactics. Right? So vision is let's say three, five years out or more. Strategy is what the heck's happening this next year to year and a half. And tactics are what are the things we're doing now to be able to execute that strategy. So I'm gonna take people up vision, we're going to go into strategy, and then some tactics everyone can do right now in this market based on that. Because if I just give you guys tactics and you start going and applying tactics, you don't know why you're applying them, right?"

"So looking vision-wise, it's probably five, six years ago, Brandon, I was seeing in the market that the adjustments that were happening with retail and wholesale... Right? So I've told this story a million times. I think it's so relevant though because so people can see where the industry is going. I, according to where I feel it's going... So just like with any commodity market, there's a wholesale side of the market and a retail side of the market. You look at cars, cars are maybe not deemed a commodity, maybe they are, but there's the retail side where you go down to the car lot and pay retail for the car. There's the wholesale side which is when they say, 'Hey, do you want to trade this in?' and they offer you a discount on that car, or you can go to the auction and buy the discounted cars. So there's a wholesale side, there's wholesale to groceries and retail to groceries, there's wholesale to real estate, retail real estate."

"What tends to happen in markets is as soon as technology catches up with the markets to make it more efficient, you start to see wholesale and retail squeeze together. This is what happened in travel, this is what's happened in stocks and stock brokers, right? You started to see the retail... 'Hey, I pick up the phone, I have to call a broker to place an order,' and here's the price, it's 10 bucks an order for a stock. Then you start to go, the wholesale was way discounted price. That's where your E-Trade came in, Charles Schwab came in. They took the two and said, 'Well, why can't we make it simpler and easier for someone to buy a stock and make it way cheaper, get it closer to wholesale?'"

"Right, and so same thing happened on travel. So you had... you used to go to get a hold of a travel agent and then book it and they'd take their cut of it. Well, when technology caught up with that, it made it to where they could go out there and technology could scour the internet and create an advantage for the searcher and make it so they were in control, not the travel agency. They cut the travel agency out and got prices down for the searcher, and now they're mashing the two together, right? But it always makes opportunities still."

"So real estate, it took a little while longer because real estate's a more complicated transaction. It's not just buying a stock or taking a vacation. It's the last three to five years is when we've really seen technology start to really disrupt real estate and especially disrupt the retail side, right? And so the retail side has historically had a lockhold on the industry. It's like if you want to sell your house, you pretty much had to go over to a real estate agent. You didn't like... everyone knew 10 real estate agents. We saw the person on the bus, you know, the bus stop sign. We are... we have three buddies, we have an aunt Betsy who's a real estate agent. Everyone knows 7, 8, 9 agents, but how many people in mainstream America five years ago could name one person that was a direct cash home buyer? Hardly anybody could."

"The wholesale side was oftentimes seen as what people called the underbelly. It was the hidden part of real estate. It was the part of real estate who's going to come in like under ball you, right? Or low... low volume and make a low offer. And so as technology caught up though, and websites made it easier for people to get in front of the right prospects on Google and someone who could go directly search for someone to buy their house directly instead of having to ask their friend for a realtor reference... or you start to see Open Door and Offer Pad pop up and they come in the middle of the industry. They're not wholesale, they're not retail, they're trying to be in the middle. They're trying to grab both sides of it and yank it in towards the center and let the seller or the buyer control the process rather than the agent or the investor. They accelerated the drive towards the middle."

"And so I'm going to wrap the vision part and it's probably three to four years ago we were starting to tell people, 'Hey, investors, you're going to start to see state by state, the real estate agent lobby gets scared and they're going to start to go to Congress and all this stuff and they're going to get laws over and over and over again making it harder to wholesale properties.' They're... you're going to do it because they're going to be fearful that you're taking their business. We're seeing that happen all the time."

"I was looking in the data six months ago and you would think that the pharmaceutical industry spends more money lobbying in Washington DC than the real estate industry, right? No. The real estate industry and the realtor industry by far spent more money in, I guess 2021, might have been 2022, lobbying in DC than the pharmaceutical industry did, which is insane because they see the industry changing."

"Okay, so a couple more things. We'll go into strategy. So if you're an agent and you see the threat of the investor and Open Door and Offer Pad taking that, and if you're an investor and you see the threat of Open Door and Offer Pad, and they also... you see the opportunity in capturing more of the traditional retail market, you have to move towards the center. Agents should be investors, investors should be agents. We call it hybrid. Right? That's not the future, that's the today now."

"So now let's bring it towards strategy in the next year to two. If you're a hybrid provider, meaning I have a license or I'm partnering with someone who has a license, I'm marketing for motivated house sellers now. Now I take those leads and I don't just take the lead and say, 'Cool, if it fits within my pretty little box, I'll list the property for you because I'm an agent, but if it doesn't, I've got to go the other way because you're not serious, you're not a serious seller.' Or if it doesn't fit my pretty little box as a wholesaler at 65, 70, 75, 85, whatever your percentage is of ARV, then you're not serious and I'm going to go over here and that person just isn't realistic about their price."

"You need to present them with the options to solve their problem. Whether they want full price, take them retail. If they don't want full price and they're willing to get speed and convenience, take them wholesale. If they want full price but can't sell because they have no equity, which is going to happen a lot now, Brand... This goes into like current times now. You're going to see people who bought their house three, four years ago, great interest rates, maybe lost their job, prices went down, they have little to no equity, they need to sell now and they can't because they'd have to pay their real estate agent forty thousand dollars on the house they overpaid for with really good interest rate to be able to get rid of the property. Who's gonna solve that? Not agents. Investors are, through creative finance, through subject to, through things like that."

"So let's go into the strategy part now. Is you have to step into hybrid in order to make, I feel, in order to make the best ROI of all of your paid marketing. So when you're working with Brandon and Bateman Collective and you are a pure wholesaler working against a hybrid like one of my clients I just got off the call with named Troy in Minnesota, Troy's going to crush you all day long because he can take far more of those leads and turn them into revenue than you can as just a wholesaler."

"Or if you're an agent and you're just an agent, you're gonna have a way hard time doing direct to seller or motivated seller marketing because your time to deal on a traditional listing is too long. You're not going to be willing to sit and stick in the marketing for long enough, you're not gonna be willing to spend as much, and your biggest profit deals are the investment deals you're leaving and saying that they're not serious. So you have to be hybrid."

"Okay, so now let's get into like really right where the market is right now, where and what I call a shoulder market. And this is crazy critical for the way that you guys do your marketing right now. I was on a call with our epic plan members, it's our highest plan, and a guy named Marco, Marco Padilla in Florida, Carrot camper, amazing dude, multiple seven-figure business. He owns properties, he's like 26 years old, seven-figure a year wholesaling flip operation as well, and he has a great team and he only works like 20 hours a week now. When he first started working with us, he was working like 80 hours a week. We got it down to 20, helped him optimize his team."

"And Marco came on the call last week, and he said, 'Trevor, dude, the advice you gave me last month on our epic call was awesome because I was getting ready to pull my Google pay-per-click marketing spend back because of the shoulder market.' And I'll explain it here in a second. I told him to not pull his spend back, to step into it harder because others are pulling their spend back. And I said, 'Marco, because this market dynamic I'm going to explain here in a second, I think you're going to get more deals, but you might need to be more patient. As long as you're breaking even on it right now, keep it going because I think you're going to see a massive ROI in three to six months.'"

"It was way quicker for him in that market. He locked down 10 contracts just from Google pay-per-click and his market in Florida in the past 30 days after making a change to increase his ad spend when everyone else is decreasing it."

"So here's why the shoulder market is this: We had high prices, people got used to high prices, low interest rates, and we're in between the phase where the market's still trying to adjust where sellers are now okay with and they've come to terms that they can't sell the property for what their neighbor sold theirs for eight months ago. Okay? We're not there yet though."

"So you might be getting a lot of leads through Google pay-per-click or through SEO. Your lead to deal conversion ratio is lower, right? You're looking at it going, 'Man, I used to get one in five or one in ten or one in 50,' or whatever your numbers are, 'leads turn into a deal. Now I'm getting one in 25. Does this mean I need to stop my marketing? This means it's not working as well?' Heck no, it just means your lead to deal conversion ratio is low."

"But in general, we're finding, and we did a survey, we're gonna be putting out some content with this hopefully in the next two weeks now with you and a handful of others who are running a lot of traffic. Cost per lead, in general, has gone down pretty markedly in many markets. Lead per deal ratio has gotten a little bit worse in many of the markets. So it doesn't mean demand is down, it means there's still people looking to search to sell. Actually, it's even potentially getting better. Your leads are lower cost now, right? But fewer of them are ready to sell now because they haven't come to terms with the new price that they can sell at, or the pain point of the adjustment in the economy. Maybe they haven't lost their job or whatever else, the business they're working for hasn't been affected yet. There's a million different things that are likely going to happen as the economy gets worse."

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In this episode, Brandon sits down with Sean, a successful real estate entrepreneur based in Columbus, Ohio. Sean shares his experiences and insights on team management, marketing to motivated sellers, and the delicate balance between control and delegation in entrepreneurship. They also delve into the world of virtual assistant services, exploring the benefits and challenges of working with remote teams. From understanding the real estate business to making data-driven marketing decisions, this episode is packed with actionable insights and valuable lessons.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be joined by Sean. Sean is a real estate entrepreneur that has built, over five years, a successful wholesaling company in Columbus, Ohio, and more recently launched a VA company to help more investors find motivated sellers through cold calling and texting. Sean is your stereotypical visionary, a brilliant person, and has a lot of great insights about how to run a team and how to get the most out of your marketing. We'll dive into that today. How are you doing today, Sean?"

"Doing fantastic. How are you doing, Brandon?"

"Hey, doing awesome. Super excited for this podcast episode. It's great to finally get together and do this. I know we've been talking about this for a little bit. So for anybody not familiar with you yet that's listening, could you share a little bit about you, how do we know each other, your background, and kind of where you are today?"

"Yeah, so I think we've gotten connected pretty strongly in the last six months or so. You took over our SEO PPC, helping us through the online streaming thing for our real estate company, and then we're also in a couple different masterminds together. And yeah, that's it. And then I know we got a skiing trip planned this winter."

"Yeah, that's right. I told you you got to come out to Utah. Remind me where you're based?"

"Ohio."

"Okay, yeah. Columbus, Ohio. Just not too far from pretty much anywhere, right? That's the... at least in the United States. Is that the advantage?"

"Awesome. So tell me a little bit about your real estate company."

"Yeah, so I started doing real estate five and a half years ago and started off just wholesaling properties, not really knowing a lot about real estate. Kind of just fell into it, not really knowing I wanted to do real estate but not knowing which niche to get into. And luckily, I fell into wholesaling because, as far as my opinion, it's a very well-rounded education. Like if you can find good deals, you can do land development, you can do flipping, you can hold rentals, but everything starts with finding that good deal. So we ended up doing nothing about wholesaling for the first two years, and then after a couple years of doing it, we started to get more into the flipping side, building out about 70 rentals, long-term and short-term rentals over the last three years, and using the wholesaling business as the core thing that funds everything else."

"Yeah, I love that strategy. Like you were saying, if you could start with the deal, then there's a lot of different stuff that you can do based on that. It seems like most of the clients that we worked with, they have taken kind of a similar path. You start out by learning to acquire properties for wholesale purposes, and then you start being able to branch out into everything else. And throughout that, speaking of branching out, I don't know if this falls into that or if you call this like a completely different thing in your business, but as I understand it, you've taken some of the things that you were great at in the business and turned that into a service or a product for other real estate investors. Do you want to share a little bit about that?"

"Yeah, so like eight months ago, I started doing a real estate virtual assistant business. And that was just for... I've always had really good relationships with my virtual assistants. I've been using them since I got into real estate, and I went to Egypt like two years ago, became really close with one of my guys, and as he kind of moved up through our company, he got to a point where we were using a third party to do our cold calling and texting. And he pretty much told me, 'Hey, I think I can do this better for you than these other companies.' And I'm always about split testing stuff, even if I was a little bit skeptical at first. I was like, 'All right, man, let's give it a try.' And gave him a little piece of our business, and within a few, like two months, he was doing better than the third party service I was actually happy with at the time. And then from there, I just started having him do more for my business. And then like some of the masterminds I'm in, I started sharing with people what was working within my company, and people started asking if I would do it for them. And so that's kind of... and now it's like we're doing stuff, so it's just grown organically from that. But it was all about trying to do some crucial part of a service or part of my business that I needed that I thought could be done better."

"Yeah, I understand. Well, that's awesome. I love that story. I think there's a lot of investors that are looking to start some type of service business or product for investors because it just... I think for a lot of people, real estate investing is kind of their first branch into the business world, and then you start seeing all these other businesses, you get curious, and you start doing that stuff. I'm really curious for you, what's so far has been unexpected? Like you saw this clean, seemingly simple path - I don't know if you thought it was simple, I know a lot of people do when they first start going down that path with the second business - but has it gone like you expected to, or have there been bumps along the way that you didn't expect?"

"It definitely had bumps along the way. I'm fortunate enough to where my partner with the company, he runs all of the operation side, and then I'm more, you know, like making sure that our product is good and that it works well for my business and telling people about it. But like, kind of the sales and marketing side. And I thought, you know, like I've been doing sales and marketing non-stop for the last six years, I think of myself as being really good at it, and then I just realized like I'm really good at sales and marketing to single-family homeowners, but then like in the business-to-business world, it's just so different. And I know I've talked to you about this in the past, it's like trying to wrap my head around... like one of the masterminds we're in, going there and just realizing how deep it goes and just how clueless I really am to that whole side of sales and marketing."

"Yeah, it's a different world. It's in some ways way more complicated, in other ways a little bit more simple. But it's... yeah, I've had to recalibrate some of my team, and that where they come from, those other places, then we get into this marketing to motivated sellers, it's like, calm down, this isn't that crazy, right? They're... it's... you're not going to have these really weird... like in the wholesale business, you're not going to have a case where a lead should be attributed to like 10 different marketing channels. In a business outside of that, where people have these long decision-making cycles and you overlap in a ton of different places, it can get really complicated, and there's a lot going on, you know, in terms of lifecycle marketing and all that. So I think... I think you're talking about Family Mastermind, right, when we were there?"

"Yeah, um, yeah, it was a good experience."

"Definitely. Like I always like to be in the, you know, feel like the small fish in the big pond, and I just felt so completely clueless there, especially the first day, because it was this real eye-opening experience like, 'Oh man, there's so much to learn and so much room for growth.'"

"Yeah, yeah, totally understood. And it's a different... yeah, it's a different world out there for sure. But it's awesome that you, you know, you understand who you're marketing to and that whole situation. I think that makes a big difference. It's something I wish I had when I first got into this industry five years ago was, you know, if I knew how real estate businesses functioned, then it would have made it a lot easier of a learning curve. So there's value to that."

"So tell me about these VA services. What kinds of things are your clients utilizing this for? And a follow-up question to that would be: how were they doing it before they worked with this service? And because of that, like, what are some of the differences that they're seeing? Or... you know, I'm hoping that we can get some actionable insights out of this as to like, this is how you can do this better. And obviously, working with your company is one way to pull that off, but I'm curious kind of where people are going wrong and how they're fixing it."

"So I think like one thing that I didn't realize... like I hired different... so we do cold calling, we do texting, we do lead management or follow-up specialists or junior acquisition person, kind of whatever you want to call it. And like I had done... I had hired people myself when I was early, you know, gone on Upwork and tried to find some experienced cold callers. And like the issue I ran into then, where I've really seen, I think, the biggest value or challenge for somebody kind of doing it their own, is just that whole management piece. Virtual... like unless you're tracking your KPIs really tight, it's just kind of hard to make sure that somebody around the world is doing what they say they are as much as they're doing. And I mean, like with cold calling, you can track metrics, but there's just also like, you know, lots of different things that can go wrong. Like you know, there's... you have a cold caller in the Philippines and a hurricane comes through and knocks out the power for a week, or you know, connectivity issues, or dialer goes down. So a lot of that, I think, when I did it on my own maybe three or four years ago before I started using different services, that was like where I fell short, was just thinking, 'Oh, you know, this is just like hiring somebody in the office, and this won't be that tough.' But I know a lot of people do it on their own, and it's definitely nice because you can have more... you know, obviously, like we all want control over our process and being able to have that control of 'This is exactly what the script is going to be, if I want to do live transfers I can do live transfers.' So that's like a big advantage of people who go out and do it on their own. But there's just like a lot... I've learned there's a lot of stuff behind the scenes that you don't necessarily think about at first."

"Yeah, and the more of it that you control, the less freedom you have from the details of those things as well, right? So it's good and it's also bad. I think for me, I've shifted as a person a lot in terms of that. Like at the closer to the beginning of my business, I wanted that like detailed control of everything. And then as you start elevating your business, you really just want... you want those details managed, but you don't want to be the one that manages them. So then your options become some type of third party that's doing that or somebody on your team that's accountable to those things, and all those things are difficult, and all of those involve you relinquishing some level of control. And it's... yeah, it's interesting just thinking about my own journey through that. I'm curious if anybody feels similar kind of hearing what you're talking about, or if you've gone through a similar experience yourself where you kind of valued that control more at the beginning, and then at some point, if you could just get the results without having to control every detail, that's the real thing, right? Because you have so many opportunities that you can be chasing."

"Yeah, there's only so much time in the day. So like, you know, what's like the first thing you can get off of your plate, or you know, what's something that somebody... you know, because in a perfect world, like if you would have people in the U.S. sitting here cold calling every day or, you know, but that's just not scalable and it's too expensive. And if you can reach so many more people... but yeah, it's... that's always something I struggle with too, is holding on to stuff for too long. And hindsight's 20/20, it's like, man, if... if I would have known what I know now, like I would have let go of this quicker, I would have let go of that quicker. And that's been kind of like the fun part in this new venture the last year, has been like taking a lot of this stuff that I've learned over the last five, five and a half years and all the mistakes I've made and just be like, 'Okay, well this round I'm not gonna do this, I'm like, you know, I'm gonna try to hand this off as quick as possible.' So yeah, it's a constant struggle."

"Yeah, yeah, but completely believable. Here's a question, because there's kind of two different things you hear around this a lot. You hear this idea of like, you have to hold on and be patient because it's going to improve, and you have to let the process do its thing and get to that point where you're having success with something like... maybe let's just say cold call marketing right now, for example, something that you're familiar with. And then there's the other side of, you know, cutting your losses quick, right? Like the whole 'fire quick' mentality or whatever the case is. How do you know when to be either way? Like, have you seen situations where you've held on too long and it's... or not too long, but you've held on for a long time when you didn't want to, and it's actually benefited you well? And what's the difference between those situations and the situations where you did hold on too long and you should have let go?"

"Yeah, I think like... you know, I part of... like being an entrepreneur, I think an entrepreneur in general, and I know me personally, like I'm very emotional. Like I like to make fast decisions. If a marketing channel is not working, like you know, like I'll pull the plug on it. Where like something like that, it just... it takes time. Like you're not gonna be able to really get the metrics, you know, that you need. You're gonna make an emotional decision instead of something that's data-driven. So I know I've like... like we've sent mail for like four years, and then last year we started doing TV commercials, and we cut our mail because our mail had slowed down a bit. It was still good, it was very consistent, but we had cut it off, and we cut it off for like almost like eight months because we were spending just a ton of money on network TV ads. And that was like a horrible decision because for us, TV didn't work well, but then we also took away resources from our mail, which is, you know, super consistent, steady. You know, it's not like... I think maybe it's like a five or six return on a dollar. It's not like super crazy, but it was very little work, kind of like PPC for us is like, you know, it's just inbound leads generated consistently without having to get lost in the weeds. So that's... that's definitely somewhere where I've, you know, like pulled the plug too early, just like, you know, just made more of an emotional decision instead of really waiting for drama or reacting on the drama."

"And then I think like the one thing I've always learned too is like... that's like where it is kind of good for my own experience to not wait too long and to just make that fast decision, has been with like personnel. Like every... like I... all... every time I felt like there was somebody on our team who didn't fit our core values or just weren't a good fit, like my tendency is always to like try to get things to improve. We're gonna put them on a performance plan, we're going to do their quarterly review, and we're going to coach them back. And I don't know if it's because I'm a bad coach or just, you know, what it is, but it's... it's always been... I've never gone back from feeling that way and been proved wrong. It's always been like, 'Man, like why did you wait so long?' Probably because of the emotion behind it. It's hard to let people go, but that's like one instance where it's always been like cut the cord quickly and move on."

"Yeah, so... so would you say it generally with marketing, you've got to move slower than your gut, and with people, you have to move faster?"

"100%."

"Yeah, that's interesting. And everybody's got's going to be different, of course. So that's... but... but that's interesting to hear kind of for you what your experience has been. That's... and I've had, by the way, similar... very similar experiences. So... so I don't think... I don't think you're alone in that at all. If you... because we do focus on marketing more than anything else in this podcast specifically... if we're talking about what you've learned from a marketing standpoint specifically regarding cold call, because I imagine you have a lot of insights there that you didn't have before because you're able to see not just what's happening for your own business and the granular details of that, but then also what's happening for other people's businesses as well. What are you... what are you seeing right now? And kind of as a follow-up question to that, what is the difference between those that are performing really well with those channels right now and those that aren't doing as well?"

"Yeah, so I'm... I'm not a very good detailed person. My partner is, and like he can explain like the metrics of what's working. I... one thing though with that... like one thing generally in cold calling, like it's obviously coming... just like any... anybody who's getting marketing, it all comes down to your sales process and having a really good sales process in place. No matter how good your marketing is, if you're not... you know, if you're not managing those leads well, that's probably like the biggest thing I see with people who are performing well versus people who aren't. So it's gotten to the point too where like, you know, we're not taking on people who haven't been wholesaling or marketing for properties for at least a year, like ideally two years, because we just... we just found they don't have a sales process in place, and it just sucks the energy out of us. So we'd rather work with people who've been doing it a lot longer."

"But I... I know one thing is like on the texting side, we've always been really good with texting. But when we started doing it for other people, it really just made us go so much deeper because it's one thing like, you know, having you know, like four or five Launch Controls for my own company, but if I've got like, you know, five or ten Launch Control companies for good friends who I'm like telling them that like, 'Hey, we can do this' or 'This is going to perform, trust us,' it puts us... like pressure on it, really puts pressure on me and my partner to know it... like, 'Okay, like let's get this right, like what can we do to revamp, you know, our process mapping and our templates?' And like we use Launch Control, so we'll jump onto performance reviews with Launch twice a month. They're just like, you know, get really in depth on like, 'This is what we're... you know, we're going to split test this template, we're going to split test this way to kind of close the call and get them online.' And so that's... that's been a huge benefit to just the real estate side and, you know, the service thought."

"I don't mean for this question to be upsetting to you. I'm just gonna say kind of like how I've seen it, and I'm ready for you to tell me what I'm seeing wrong or if I'm like spot on. But what seems to have been the rhetoric for a while with texting is that it's dying, and every time I look at it, I'm like, 'How is it still not dead?' Because it just keeps on going. I don't know if you felt that same way, like if he seems like there's always been like these different deadlines, like by this date it's going to be dead, by this date it's going to be dead, and then it just doesn't happen. What the heck is going on with it, and what do you think the future looks like?"

"But I... I know one thing is like on the texting side, we've always been really good with texting. But when we started doing it for other people, it really just made us go so much deeper because it's one thing like, you know, having you know, like four or five Launch Controls for my own company, but if I've got like, you know, five or ten Launch Control companies for good friends who I'm like telling them that like, 'Hey, we can do this' or 'This is going to perform, trust us,' it puts us... like pressure on it, really puts pressure on me and my partner to know it... like, 'Okay, like let's get this right, like what can we do to revamp, you know, our process mapping and our templates?' And like we use Launch Control, so we'll jump onto performance reviews with Launch twice a month. They're just like, you know, get really in depth on like, 'This is what we're... you know, we're going to split test this template, we're going to split test this way to kind of close the call and get them online.' And so that's... that's been a huge benefit to just the real estate side and, you know, the service thought."

"I don't mean for this question to be upsetting to you. I'm just gonna say kind of like how I've seen it, and I'm ready for you to tell me what I'm seeing wrong or if I'm like spot on. But what seems to have been the rhetoric for a while with texting is that it's dying, and every time I look at it, I'm like, 'How is it still not dead?' Because it just keeps on going. I don't know if you felt that same way, like if he seems like there's always been like these different deadlines, like by this date it's going to be dead, by this date it's going to be dead, and then it just doesn't happen. What the heck is going on with it, and what do you think the future looks like?"

"Yeah, so it's... I remember like when I... like four years ago, I was at... I was at a mastermind or a real estate event, and the guy up there was talking about how it was his best channel, but you better, you know, strike the iron when it's hot because it's not going to be around much longer. You know, there's going to be all kinds of regulations, and geez, I know one of the bigger text services just got shut down a week or two ago. But like the service that we use has like always been extremely cognizant of doing everything in a TCPA compliant way, not even allowing you to... you scrub it... like not having you scrub against the DNC list but personally doing it and then just making sure that it's in a way that's done well. So you know, we'll see what happens, like you know, anything can happen, and I've been hearing it for so long, but what I've seen is like... like over the last four years that like our biggest dollar in, dollar out has consistently been texting every year. And then as we've dialed in our processes more, it's gotten better. But you know, that's... that's misleading too though because I know like for... to get a cold caller, a text contract, it's about half the price versus a web or PPC. But when we ran our first quarter numbers, those PPC and mail leads are converting in an average of 50 days into a... or five days into a contract, where our outbound marketing is taking 50 days. So you know, and then there's all kinds of costs, you know, included in all that follow-up and everything."

"Yeah, I mean, there's cost there, and then there's... you know, what I'm really curious... have you seen a difference in your spreads? Do you have larger spreads, do more inbound channels, or are you pretty consistent across all channels? Or do you not know?"

"A little bit more... no, I know absolutely. It's a little bit more on inbound, maybe like... like 10% more."

"Okay, yeah, that's helpful to know. Usually people tell us 20 to 30% is kind of normal. It's going to be so different on each... in each market, you know, and in sample size as well. But it's... it's interesting to... to say... I was just doing some writing, some internal documentation for like us and our team because we're bringing on some new people and stuff like that, and you know, teaching, you know, what are the things we need to know about our clients? And kind of did the rundown on all the different marketing channels, and for texting, it was like, 'I don't know what the heck's going on with it. It might be dead soon, like next week, and it might live for 10 years.' I know it's really cheap though from a per deal basis, and that seems to have always been pretty true. Like so many companies, it's like their lowest cost per deal and, by extension, usually a pretty great return on investment. But it's really hard to measure the real cost in terms of like, you know, focusing the company, depending on the quality of the leads and how do the spreads affected and all those kinds of things. Like we know for sure like a lot of people would say a 10x return and in texting is the same as like a 6x return on PPC when it comes to like what is equally beneficial to the business, but so many opinions out there. It's hard to... it's not apples to apples at all."

"No, no, it's... yeah, and I... I don't know, like our philosophy has always been having like, you know, so like we do a pretty high volume, and we're only in one market. So it's always been like, 'How can we maximize our marketing dollars as much as possible?' Other than TV, because I was just burning money, but you know, it's... yeah, it's like, you know, this balance of you can only do so much outbound marketing or... yeah, outbound marketing. You eventually run out of data, skip tracing. And then with the inbound stuff, it's, you know, usually your budget, and then also just when are you going to reach that point of diminishing returns? So we've always been like, you know, let's just have this balance and have a lot of lead managers to, you know, help get through all these outbound leads we have."

"Yeah, that's... that's awesome. Yeah, the... the standard advice that I've given people is that there's kind of two ways to grow a wholesale company. The first one is going to be one market, many marketing channels. The second one is going to be one marketing channel in many different markets. We have clients that do both of those. What is your opinion on one of those models versus the other, and why did you choose the one that you chose?"

"So I got some advice pretty early on... I've had... I've been maybe wholesaling for a year, and I was having some success, and like a mentor of mine was just like, 'Man, go... go deeper, not wider.' I see all these people who like go into other markets, and you know, like there's... for... he's like, 'Man, Columbus is this honey hole. It's a great opportunity. This is where all your connections are, or your buyers, your title company, you know, your contractors, everything.' Like, 'If... if you put energy into going into other places, that's going to take away from, you know, your opportunity here, and there's more than enough here.'"

"And then I think the other thing for me is that like, my style of sales is like, I'm a big advocate of getting face to face with people. If we sign contracts over the phone, but like I always tell my salespeople, like, 'If somebody's texting us, they have the advantage. If we're over the phone with somebody, you know, we're on neutral ground. But when we get face to face with people, there's just this huge advantage that we have because, you know, we can read body language, you know, we can touch somebody on the shoulder, we can make this emotional connection.' So I think it's kind of been a combination of, you know, my experience or the advice I got early on and then just my own style of selling. But you know, I... I know it... I know the virtual model works really well, especially if you're getting, you know, inbound leads where you know, there's generally a lot more motivation. And I see so many people do it, but for me, it's like, you know, I... I'm constantly want to, you know, chase squirrels and all these different directions, and it's just like, you know, like just focus on one thing and try not to get too distracted."

"Yeah, yeah. I... well, I think both models are really valid. I see a lot of people with a lot of success in each of those models, although one interesting differentiator is it seems like COVID was kind of a time where the virtual model became a lot more possible. It became a lot more normal to buy a house virtually, and... and so... so many of the companies I know that have started after COVID, they are more virtual across many markets, and they can pull it off. And then the people that have been around for 20 years, it doesn't make sense to branch into other markets because they're so good at what they do. I see... I definitely see pros and cons on either side."

"A lot more scalable too if you're... if you're doing that virtual model. You're not limited to having boots on the ground, and you can go into the other markets and do it from a central location."

"Yeah, yeah. And I've... I've seen people get absolutely destroyed trying that though, and I've seen people do too well. I think it's just being the best at what it is that you're doing is what really makes a difference. And speaking of which, you mentioned before that you don't really take on anybody as a client that you don't think has a good sales process, and one of your metrics for that is, you know, how long have they been doing that? And that's usually an indicator, although there's... I mean, you... you probably would agree, I'd assume, that how long someone's been doing something is often not a great indicator because there's a... I mean, just... just think about it, right? You can find people who've been specializing in one thing for 20 years in their life, and they're still horrible at it because some people are just those people, right? And different companies have better processes and things like that. So... so I'm... I'm just curious, like, what your thoughts are... like, if someone's listening to this and they're just wondering, 'Well, I don't actually know if I do have a good sales process,' how do you look at your own business and realize, 'Do I have a good sales process, or am I lacking there?'"

"Yeah, so it's... I remember like when I... like four years ago, I was at... I was at a mastermind or a real estate event, and the guy up there was talking about how it was his best channel, but you better, you know, strike the iron when it's hot because it's not going to be around much longer. You know, there's going to be all kinds of regulations, and geez, I know one of the bigger text services just got shut down a week or two ago. But like the service that we use has like always been extremely cognizant of doing everything in a TCPA compliant way, not even allowing you to... you scrub it... like not having you scrub against the DNC list but personally doing it and then just making sure that it's in a way that's done well. So you know, we'll see what happens, like you know, anything can happen, and I've been hearing it for so long, but what I've seen is like... like over the last four years that like our biggest dollar in, dollar out has consistently been texting every year. And then as we've dialed in our processes more, it's gotten better. But you know, that's... that's misleading too though because I know like for... to get a cold caller, a text contract, it's about half the price versus a web or PPC. But when we ran our first quarter numbers, those PPC and mail leads are converting in an average of 50 days into a... or five days into a contract, where our outbound marketing is taking 50 days. So you know, and then there's all kinds of costs, you know, included in all that follow-up and everything."

"Yeah, I mean, there's cost there, and then there's... you know, what I'm really curious... have you seen a difference in your spreads? Do you have larger spreads, do more inbound channels, or are you pretty consistent across all channels? Or do you not know?"

"A little bit more... no, I know absolutely. It's a little bit more on inbound, maybe like... like 10% more."

"Okay, yeah, that's helpful to know. Usually people tell us 20 to 30% is kind of normal. It's going to be so different on each... in each market, you know, and in sample size as well. But it's... it's interesting to... to say... I was just doing some writing, some internal documentation for like us and our team because we're bringing on some new people and stuff like that, and you know, teaching, you know, what are the things we need to know about our clients? And kind of did the rundown on all the different marketing channels, and for texting, it was like, 'I don't know what the heck's going on with it. It might be dead soon, like next week, and it might live for 10 years.' I know it's really cheap though from a per deal basis, and that seems to have always been pretty true. Like so many companies, it's like their lowest cost per deal and, by extension, usually a pretty great return on investment. But it's really hard to measure the real cost in terms of like, you know, focusing the company, depending on the quality of the leads and how do the spreads affected and all those kinds of things. Like we know for sure like a lot of people would say a 10x return and in texting is the same as like a 6x return on PPC when it comes to like what is equally beneficial to the business, but so many opinions out there. It's hard to... it's not apples to apples at all."

"No, no, it's... yeah, and I... I don't know, like our philosophy has always been having like, you know, so like we do a pretty high volume, and we're only in one market. So it's always been like, 'How can we maximize our marketing dollars as much as possible?' Other than TV, because I was just burning money, but you know, it's... yeah, it's like, you know, this balance of you can only do so much outbound marketing or... yeah, outbound marketing. You eventually run out of data, skip tracing. And then with the inbound stuff, it's, you know, usually your budget, and then also just when are you going to reach that point of diminishing returns? So we've always been like, you know, let's just have this balance and have a lot of lead managers to, you know, help get through all these outbound leads we have."

"Yeah, that's... that's awesome. Yeah, the... the standard advice that I've given people is that there's kind of two ways to grow a wholesale company. The first one is going to be one market, many marketing channels. The second one is going to be one marketing channel in many different markets. We have clients that do both of those. What is your opinion on one of those models versus the other, and why did you choose the one that you chose?"

"So I got some advice pretty early on... I've had... I've been maybe wholesaling for a year, and I was having some success, and like a mentor of mine was just like, 'Man, go... go deeper, not wider.' I see all these people who like go into other markets, and you know, like there's... for... he's like, 'Man, Columbus is this honey hole. It's a great opportunity. This is where all your connections are, or your buyers, your title company, you know, your contractors, everything.' Like, 'If... if you put energy into going into other places, that's going to take away from, you know, your opportunity here, and there's more than enough here.'"

"And then I think the other thing for me is that like, my style of sales is like, I'm a big advocate of getting face to face with people. If we sign contracts over the phone, but like I always tell my salespeople, like, 'If somebody's texting us, they have the advantage. If we're over the phone with somebody, you know, we're on neutral ground. But when we get face to face with people, there's just this huge advantage that we have because, you know, we can read body language, you know, we can touch somebody on the shoulder, we can make this emotional connection.' So I think it's kind of been a combination of, you know, my experience or the advice I got early on and then just my own style of selling. But you know, I... I know it... I know the virtual model works really well, especially if you're getting, you know, inbound leads where you know, there's generally a lot more motivation. And I see so many people do it, but for me, it's like, you know, I... I'm constantly want to, you know, chase squirrels and all these different directions, and it's just like, you know, like just focus on one thing and try not to get too distracted."

"Yeah, yeah. I... well, I think both models are really valid. I see a lot of people with a lot of success in each of those models, although one interesting differentiator is it seems like COVID was kind of a time where the virtual model became a lot more possible. It became a lot more normal to buy a house virtually, and... and so... so many of the companies I know that have started after COVID, they are more virtual across many markets, and they can pull it off. And then the people that have been around for 20 years, it doesn't make sense to branch into other markets because they're so good at what they do. I see... I definitely see pros and cons on either side."

"A lot more scalable too if you're... if you're doing that virtual model. You're not limited to having boots on the ground, and you can go into the other markets and do it from a central location."

"Yeah, yeah. And I've... I've seen people get absolutely destroyed trying that though, and I've seen people do too well. I think it's just being the best at what it is that you're doing is what really makes a difference. And speaking of which, you mentioned before that you don't really take on anybody as a client that you don't think has a good sales process, and one of your metrics for that is, you know, how long have they been doing that? And that's usually an indicator, although there's... I mean, you... you probably would agree, I'd assume, that how long someone's been doing something is often not a great indicator because there's a... I mean, just... just think about it, right? You can find people who've been specializing in one thing for 20 years in their life, and they're still horrible at it because some people are just those people, right? And different companies have better processes and things like that. So... so I'm... I'm just curious, like, what your thoughts are... like, if someone's listening to this and they're just wondering, 'Well, I don't actually know if I do have a good sales process,' how do you look at your own business and realize, 'Do I have a good sales process, or am I lacking there?'"

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Brandon sits down with Chris Burrow, a successful rehabber and wholesaler from Atlanta, Georgia. He shares his journey and the valuable lessons he has learned in his five years in the real estate business. They discuss the importance of humility, growth mindset, and transparent communication in the industry. Chris also shares a poignant story that changed his perspective on helping others and treating them with dignity.

‍

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be joined by Chris Burrow. Chris is a rehabber, wholesaler, innovator - whatever you want to call it - outside of Atlanta, Georgia. He has been crazy successful in his past five years in business and learned tons of lessons along the way. We're going to talk with him about what he's learned about seller appointments, different marketing strategies, and exit strategies that have brought his business to the next level.

How you doing today, Chris?"

"I'm fantastic. How about you, Brandon?"

"Hey, doing fantastic. Thank you. It's awesome to have you here. I'm super grateful for the time that you set aside for this podcast. I think an awesome place to start would be in your own words - can you describe what you do and a little bit of the background, how you got into it?"

"Sure. My background is door-to-door sales, and I've tried to start many businesses and failed at many launches of businesses and scaling those. Ultimately, it was just kind of in a place of desperation. I came across wholesaling through a lot of the podcasts that existed at the time and the information that was out there. I thought I would take a swing at it and luckily found something I ended up being really good at. I just feel really blessed to be kind of part of this business and all the opportunity it provides."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. You know, it reminds me of our mutual friend Cody Hofhein when he was talking about how you can pound doors on insurance all day, but it's not the opportunity vehicle for you. I'm sure you learned a lot of things from door-to-door, but it's great to kind of level up those skills into something that's a little bit more lucrative."

"Yeah, I think that experience helped prepare me for some of the opportunity that came our way. I've been told 'no' a thousand - more than a thousand, a million times - so it's been good to build kind of that muscle and work that out. But yeah, when we met a couple of years ago, we were ready to kind of take things to the next level. You've been super instrumental to the growth of our business, and it's been a pleasure getting to know you. Looking forward to talking through some of this stuff."

"Yeah, I'm just super impressed with what you've accomplished over this time. You went from - well, I think you - I always look back at myself like a year ago and think what an idiot that guy was and I can't believe I'm like embarrassed that I ever was that person. I think you're - I don't think you're probably exactly the same way, but I know that you, as I see it, have come a really long way as a person, like as a business owner and in terms of your success. You want to share a little bit about what you guys have been able to accomplish in your business in the past year in terms of whatever you're comfortable sharing like deals, revenue, and what the business looks like from a team standpoint? Like those kinds of basics?"

"Yeah, absolutely. Last year was our biggest year. We've been fortunate enough to grow year over year. We've doubled our revenue and our deals and our business, so we always set these lofty goals and we figure out in the moment how do we get there. You know, the path isn't always super clear, but we know that we've got the ability to get there. So last year we ended at 83 deals. That was 3 million - 2.985 in gross profit or revenue. This year our goal is 180 and that's 8 million. Some of those are going to be rentals, but that's been over the course of five years. So we started in February of '18, so we're a little past the five-year mark now."

"Yeah, that is crazy impressive, especially in a competitive market like Atlanta that you're in, to be doing those kinds of numbers. That's fantastic. And I have my personal beliefs on some things that have contributed to your success just based on conversations we've had and based on what I understand about you, but I'm really curious to hear from your side. As you've looked back and you say these are the things that made a major difference in my business - I'm sure there's several of them - but what would you say contributes most to that growth that you've seen over that time period?"

"Well, I think - I don't think I chose this, but there's been multiple times where I've been very humbled in the business and just where - like our first year in, we did 35 deals. I think we made about 350 grand that first year. Well, I was feeling pretty good about myself, pretty proud of myself, right? And I had the opportunity to meet other people that were doing, you know, twice that. So me and you met, I think, at the beginning of '21, and I actually had a conversation with Cody Hofhein. I went to Cody's scale event and once again walked in kind of like - I don't want to say arrogant, but a little bit complacent and proud of myself, like, 'Hey man, maybe I've arrived.' And once again got kind of dished a huge slice of humble pie. And so Cody actually challenged me at that. He said, 'Hey man, act like you belong here. Like, you've got so much more potential. Like, dude, the sky's the limit. You can go get it, but dude, you're not there yet. Like, go accomplish this.' And so I've taken those moments to heart and really kind of made it part of our core values for the company. One of those is growth, and so if we're not always striving, achieving to be better and achieve more, then we're complacent. And what I found is - I don't think you're ever gonna arrive, but I've looked - hey, I guess maybe you were wanting a thing of like, 'Hey, we've used this tool or that tool,' but that humility and that striving for growth and learning new things has kept us pushing in a direction that's been positive."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. And I do remember that event because I think that's where we met, and that was - yeah, over two years ago, I think now. I can't remember where exactly it was, but it's been a long time."

"Beginning '21. I'm glad you know because I don't."

"So yeah, maybe two and a half years or two and a quarter years from now, which is crazy. So that's one humbling point, but you referenced that there are multiple. Were there other points that were kind of humbling to you throughout this journey that you've had?"

"Sure. I think there's times that we fail on a flip. I'm a little overconfident. One of my friends said if you've never lost money on a deal, you're probably not taking enough risk. But obviously, we try to limit those. There was one last year that - I used to set foot on every single piece of property we bought and we flipped. As we scale, it's impossible to go to every single house, so we rely on photos, we rely on information from acquisition managers. And ultimately, the decision came down to me to purchase a property. On paper, man, it looked like we were gonna have a huge - we thought it was maybe a double or triple. We'd make maybe 125 grand with the projection. In the end, we lost 60. And that was the most money we've ever lost on a flip. And it was once again one of those moments of, 'Man, you made' - we can look back and say, 'Hey, we made these three critical errors in the process,' and it really shaped the way that we do our underwriting on our flips as we're purchasing properties. So we've put some safeguards in place because of that specific event. And once again, like it - and I have to answer to the team also. I have to look at people and say, 'Guys, this was on me. I made the mistake, and because of that, now we're doing this, and here's how we protect.' It's not just my income; it's the income of our team. Like, we've got - I think 13 employees at this point. They all have spouses and families. So anytime we make a critical error, it's not just affecting my pocket, man. It's putting everybody's livelihoods in jeopardy. So it's a much, much bigger deal than just, 'Oh, we lost a little bit of money.'"

"Yeah, I understand. That's crazy. What was - if you don't mind me asking, what was the critical error that led to that big of a discrepancy between what you thought you'd make and what you actually did?"

"We went back and looked at the photos that the acquisition manager took, and this is not on him, but the photos show the house that looks like it's very secluded. There were two or three points where we had an opportunity to identify that this house was actually in the front yard of another house. So like, literally, I don't know, 40 feet away is another house. They both have a shared driveway. At no point in our purchase and leading up to that did we know it was a shared driveway, and it really looks like it's in someone else's front yard. And we're thinking about, 'Hey, this is a super premium flip.' It was a higher price point. It was also in a county that was way more rural. So we did too high of a price point in a rural county, and those things compounded to equal a big failure."

"Yeah, that's a bummer. I guess learn from it and move on, but that's crazy. Well, super helpful to know some of the things that have been influential for you over the past, Chris. Let's just say we were to look at a little bit more skill-based, right? Because I love the humility, but I'm also curious because I'm sure that humility's kind of led to a lot of different skills that have served you really well. When you look at kind of where you are now and the things that you are good at that are contributing to the success that you're having, compared to where you were before, what are some of those things that are the biggest change? Like before we were doing this, we're doing that, and now we're doing this, and that makes a difference for us."

"Yeah, the temptation in this job is to walk into a property and feature sell, and that can be, 'Hey, we're the fastest, the easiest, the best. You know, we have a five-star rating,' or to try to convince someone that we have the best price or the best offer. And that's also feature selling. And as salespeople, so if you're coming from car sales, insurance - I came from door-to-door - that's what we're taught is, 'Hey, our product beats this other product by X, Y, and Z.' And when I try to use that in this industry, I fail. We have a sign downstairs in our office that says 'Get Real,' and what that means is, 'Hey, let's cut the BS. Let's stop trying to talk fast. Let's approach this opportunity, let's lower the walls and just get real with people. Let's get transparent.' And so that starts to encourage some vulnerability. And it really occurred to me - there were two moments that I can tell two stories. I'll just pick one. Is it okay to tell you a story of when I had this like realization of what this job is actually about?"

"Of course."

"When our industry really should be about - there was a lady that called me that said she needs to sell her house quickly. She was facing a foreclosure, and this is coming up in like two weeks. I talked to her a little bit on the phone. I asked if I could come out and see the house, and she was very, very apprehensive to let me come to the property. It took almost 30 minutes for me to convince her, 'Hey, it's okay. You know, I - there's no judgment.' I wasn't exactly sure what I was going to find when I showed up. I knew it wasn't going to be good, but I showed up to this property, and it really looked - we see a lot of houses that look abandoned. This one really, really looked abandoned. The yard had grown up so much, like the weeds turned into trees kind of thing. The stairs had rotted out going up to the stairs. I knock on the door. She opens the door, and she's in a wheelchair. And a lot of the houses that we go to and the people we meet with are somewhat unaware of the condition that they live in. So you might find a house that has, you know, the dog has used the bathroom all over the house. People aren't fully aware that that's not how other people live, and so sometimes there's just this like - they're just unaware of how other people might perceive the way they live. That was not the case here. So she opened the door, I step in, and there was a smell that hit me that I've never smelled before. It really very much smelled almost like a dead body. Like that's the only way I can describe it. I don't even know what that smell is like, but it's the only thing that hit my mind. And I looked at her, and on her face was shame. I mean, just pure shame. And that was different than what I'm used to. Like I said, most people aren't fully aware of how bad something is. That was not the case here, and she was so embarrassed of this house and her condition. And so I made the decision right there, like if this was my mom sitting here in this wheelchair, how would I treat her? How would I want someone else to speak and treat her? Am I going to try to make her feel bad about this and feel extra shame? She's already feeling it, so that's not the purpose. The purpose is to help her feel some dignity and that she should be treated like anybody else. So I stepped in, I'm wearing sandals - I don't want to get too graphic, but I stepped into carpet that - this lady had a medical condition where her legs leaked fluid, and she's literally been confined to this property for 10 years. She's not left the house once. Once a week, her daughter would come and deliver a case of Coca-Cola and a pizza. And so all of this is in this house, including what I'm stepping in. And there's just nowhere to sit, so I'm like, 'Hey, I'm just gonna kneel down beside her.' And that was like the moment clicked that I needed to hear her story. If I needed to get real, 'Hey, let's talk about it. We both are aware of what the situation is, but let's figure out a solution together.' And so it was this moment of like, I don't have to tell her who our company is. I don't have to show her reviews. I don't have to, like, you know, put our competitors down. It's not about any of that. It was about treating her with respect, hearing her situation, and really getting real on what needs to happen next. Can I provide that solution that really makes a difference in her life? And we were able to do that. We bought the house. We got her into a one-level, like single-level apartment where she can actually get out of the house. She was able to buy like a wheelchair-accessible van with the money from the sale of the house. And it really solved a real problem. So I feel like that's the difference between how most people approach it and what it really should be about. And it's about letting them tell their story."

"Yeah, that is really neat. So would you say you put more emphasis on like the rapport building part of the sales process than other people would?"

"I actually hate that word. I hate rapport because people feel like the temptation is if someone likes you, they're going to sell us their house at a great price. It's not the case. It doesn't matter how much people like us. It does matter how much people trust us, and the only way that people trust us is by us allowing them to get vulnerable with us and kind of vice versa. So we try to not focus on rapport. I know it's a semantics issue a little bit, but we try to not focus on rapport because that insinuates like I want someone to like me. No, we want people to trust us."

"I understand. That's super interesting. So you understanding that and you having that experience obviously changes your mindset around this, but I know you're not running out there into sellers' houses that often these days, right? You have a team of people who are doing that, who are kind of held accountable to using that process. So how do you take this insight that you have about like, this is what acquisitions is really about, and have your team reflect that in the way that they're doing their appointments?"

"I think there's a moment for everyone where it clicks, and the stories do help, like that story and the other stories about where we realize - I actually tell my team, if you walk out of the appointment and they say, 'Hey, hold on before you go. Robert, what's your last name again?' or if they say, 'Hey, by the way, what's the name of your company?' That's how you know that we've done our job the right way because we've not made it about us. So it does take some time, and I do think it's kind of the anti-sales approach to this job. We don't want like - the more we're talking, the more we're losing, the more it's not about what it should be. It really should be about the person we're sitting across from."

"You say it takes some time. When you started thinking about your appointments this way, do you have any idea like how things shifted in terms of how long you would spend at the appointment?"

"That's a great question. It really - it's going to extend the appointment, and there's just no way around that. If you're there for less than an hour, you're not doing the right thing. You're not - it's not going to be effective. Now, you might walk out without a contract in less than an hour, but we all know that there are things that arise that create challenges like getting a contract to closing. If you spent less than an hour, you're borrowing trouble. You're asking for trouble later on because it's not enough time to build that connection. So it really pushes into the like two-hour, really close to two hours or more sometimes, of an effective, meaningful like relationship and appointment."

"Yeah, that is - yeah, that's a long appointment. I don't think a lot of people think like when they first get into this, like I'm gonna spend two hours with sellers in their houses. But that's - yeah, that's insane. But I do have other clients that do that too in terms of like their amount of time that they have in appointments, but it doesn't seem like it's the norm by any means that I'm hearing from people. How do you - obviously one aspect of that is making sure your acquisitions team isn't too rushed. How do you kind of figure that out in terms of is this like a certain number of leads that people are allowed to manage that allows them to do that? Or is it gaps in between when the appointments are scheduled? Like, how do you make sure your team doesn't fall to that pressure of 'I've got to keep on moving, I gotta go get more contracts'?"

"We space out their appointments. Our acquisition managers are really only responsible for being in the house and negotiating. We're not asking them to lead gen. We're not asking them to cold call. Their only responsibility is running two up to three appointments a day, and that is it. So we've separated the follow-up. We've separated the appointment scheduling. We've separated a lot of the stuff so that they're singularly focused, and they know their only opportunity or their best opportunity is when they're in the house. So the quicker you get out, the less likely you are to have a deal."

"Yeah, I mean, when you say that, I totally get it, right? If I'm an acquisitions manager and I've got two, maybe three appointments today, and that's literally my entire job, I don't do anything else, I'm going to invest some time into that, right? I'm not going to just be in a rush running from one to the next because if I wasn't, I'd have an extra four hours that day to do something else."

"That's exactly right. And there is a balance between having too much and not enough, and we're still figuring all of that out. We're not perfect. We're still a young company, but I have found that that's been the most effective. Once we added a lead manager that is the first line of response to an inbound lead, and they're working on getting some of the motivation out and scheduling an appointment, making that separation has made a huge difference in our conversions."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. It's good. I mean, people struggle to do multiple jobs, right? If you don't have a lead manager, then your acquisitions manager is your lead manager, and they might not be good at both jobs. It could be different. I, you know, I don't know how other companies and wholesalers are doing it. The thing I hear the most is they're asking their acquisition managers to cold call. So they're generating the lead, now they're responsible for maybe going out and seeing the property and negotiating, and then sometimes there - I mean, there's other responsibilities of getting it to closing. I just don't see how that's a scalable operation by any means."

"I haven't heard that very much myself in terms of like acquisitions managers cold calling. The exception is - I do know companies that do it to keep their acquisitions managers like hungry, if that makes sense. Like they have a certain amount of like self-prospecting that you have to do in a week, and it's not a ton, and it's not even going to generate that much business, but it makes them appreciate the warm leads that they do get, if that makes sense. Like it keeps them, you know, keeps them grounded so they don't become that person that just thinks that like every seller owes them the house because they're just so high and mighty and willing to meet with them, you know?"

"Yeah, there is - there's something to be said for people, you know, hustling or at least having the perspective of how hard it is to generate a lead. Like you've got to be able to know - like it's one thing to look on paper, 'Hey, we spent 250 bucks on the lead,' but to feel how much effort it takes to generate that same lead if you're cold calling - like yeah, I think there's maybe value in that. Maybe we'll add that to our training."

"Yeah, I don't know if it's a good idea or not. I know people do it, so I don't - yeah, I don't know what to - I don't know what to tell you, but I do think there's - I do think there is some value to that. And they obviously would commission them significantly better on leads they self-source. That's an important piece of it too, not just a lot more work for no benefit."

"So I'm curious to hear - oh, sorry, go ahead."

"Oh, I was just - yeah, I was just gonna agree with you that I think most of the people that get into the like the paid lead generation - you're paying for leads - very quickly abandon having their acquisition managers like generate leads. It's just not a very efficient thing. But I think - I mean, I think that's actually the majority of your local wholesalers or investors out there. I think they're trying to do that. They just are either misguided or - I don't know specifically."

"Yeah, that is - yeah, I agree with you. Let's talk about marketing. This podcast is a little bit more focused on marketing than anything else, obviously because that's something I know more about than anything else, and I'm practically useless in every other area. So I'm curious to hear about your marketing journey because you say you've been at this for about five years. You're too humble, Brandon."

"Humble or actually dumb in other areas is also a very plausible reason why I would say what I just said. But I'm really curious to hear like your whole journey you've gone through and what has worked for you over time. I know - is it five years? Have you been doing this? Did I hear that right? So I imagine things have changed majorly over that time period, both in terms of like your market, in terms of how you're running as a company, and also in terms of the marketing that you're doing. I'd love to learn a little bit about that journey and some insights that you've learned along the way."

"Sure. '18 and '19, we started at the beginning of '18. '18, '19 were primarily like outbound, just hoofing it, generating the leads, closing the deals. I was a one-man band operation. We started off wholesaling because I didn't have - it literally did not have a penny to my name on that first wholesale deal we ever did, and that was five grand. That five grand got us into the next month, and then we did 10, and built from there. But yeah, we transitioned into flips, like whole tails initially, and flips getting into '19. And for some reason, the fall of '19, I kind of had the idea that, 'Hey, we need a website.' We didn't even have a website. We didn't have a brand. We'd have a website. We had an LLC, but that was it. So one night, you know, just picked a random name and built a Carrot website and launched that. And I think we turned on some ads with another company, but it was very, very like ineffective. We were spending like a very, very low amount of money, and I didn't see any results from that. And then COVID hit. We're moving into 2020. We were doing a lot of foreclosures, and that just dried up overnight. There were moratoriums. All of our outbound stuff just kind of like tanked immediately, and we shut down. We sold everything we had, all of our inventory, all the flips that we were doing. We sold everything, and we went to zero. And I was anticipating the entire real estate market crashing. I was, in fact, convinced it was going to happen. And from March to June, kind of sat on my hands and sat on the sidelines waiting for something to happen or waiting for a sign. And I eventually got tired of doing that and said, 'Hey, I need to learn digital marketing,' or 'I need to learn how do we build this business back up without the outbound stuff that we were doing.' We turned our ads back on, and I was kind of riding solo. I didn't - me and you had not linked up at this point. We turned on some random

"We turned on some random ads. I didn't know what I was doing, but we knew the importance of it. So we started - we started getting deals, started scaling. At Texas into '21, when we met, and I handed you the reins and you cleaned up a lot of stuff for us. So luckily, we were able to rebuild the business from zero again, just with a different strategy. And now that, you know, there are some foreclosures and we're doing a little bit of outbound now that we have that back, it's kind of - now that a cornerstone, a cornerstone of the business and the lead gen is inbound. That's our philosophy. We've been able to do more."

"Yeah, that's really interesting. Really interesting story, Chris. So what would you say if someone's thinking like inbound versus outbound, what should I focus on? What's your opinion on different things that you could think through? I know for you, you've chosen to focus more on inbound, but I'm also really curious to hear in what situations you think focusing on outbound could make more sense than inbound, and then where are people getting that wrong?"

"It's the ultimate question of what do you have to give or trade - is it time or money? Initially, I didn't have money, so it had to be time. That's the only way possible. And I think that helps you learn the ropes and learn what works. So when there's low, relatively low stakes in messing up an appointment, messing up a negotiation, it's not like, 'Hey, we've got 15 grand invested into this thing that should convert.' So it helped me work out some of the kinks of our operation and learn how do we negotiate. But it's not a scalable thing. I really - I disagree that you can have a million boots on the ground and run a large-scale cold calling center. I just - I'm sure there's some people out there, but it is not a fun thing for me. It is the ultimate form of like torture to think about running a cold call center or team. And I said, you know what? I would much rather pay a little bit more money for a deal and not worry about that and let's just talk to the people that actually want to sell their house and talk to us. And just honestly, skipping that step, I think, accelerated our growth tremendously. I think people end up here anyways. We just happen to like make the right decision out of me hating cold calling honestly."

"It's probably one of the biggest motivations people have for talking to us. I was just talking to someone earlier today. It's like, look at all these great things I've accomplished with cold call. They're just saying they made like nine million calls last month or something like that. It's like ridiculous numbers of cold call, and they're like, 'I absolutely hate it. Please save me,' because it's a grind."

"Well, on the topic of inbound, obviously there's different channels that are inbound. One thing that I've always appreciated about you is in the two and a half-ish probably years that we've worked together, you've always been a consistent investor in SEO, which for a lot of people, it's almost like this weird elephant in the room of marketing for real estate because everybody knows that it matters, but nobody wants to do it because it's this long-term game. So I'm really curious to hear for you what your journey has been with that channel compared to the others, just because it's - if you ask me, it's underutilized, but it's also - a lot of people really struggle. I think if people knew that SEO has a return for sure, then it wouldn't be as hard. But anytime you increase the amount of time between when you have to put money out for something and when you get the reward back, it also increases the perceived risk of 'Will I actually get it back?' And that's something that a lot of people struggle with. So really curious to hear your thoughts on that."

"It is the one channel that I guarantee has kept us in business. Everything else fluctuates. There's six months to a year that's really great with AdWords. Facebook has fluctuation. There's lots of fluctuations in the business, but the website SEO has been so consistent in the returns. If we had not started when we did, if we didn't invest that money, we would be - I'm sure like I - I'm not saying we'd roll over and give up, but it's helped us really, really make the numbers work. I was actually thinking about this earlier. We looked at our returns. We're at like a 2,000 percent ROI, like a 20x return. So dollar for dollar spent on the SEO versus what we get back, and that's still probably conservative. We've made millions, literally millions on organic SEO search terms. And in a market like us, I mean, it's hard to rank. It did take time, but that money - there's no better investment."

"I'm so glad you see it that way. That's fantastic, Chris, because the other thing is, let's just say you did roll over at some point in this time, you'd still get SEO leads, right? That's the other thing that that doesn't include, right? Because when people calculate SEO returns, they're looking back at like the last two years, and they're looking at how much money did I spend, how much I make. But it doesn't include like if you stopped investing in it right now, what's all the money you could make in the future from it, you know? It's the leads that are still consistent even - like obviously, you want to be consistent with your investment because otherwise, it will kind of trail off over time. But I think that's like - there's no other marketing channel that works like that where you just turn it off and it still generates leads. It's crazy."

"It does take some blind faith, especially if your cash is tight. But you got to make the sacrifice. I mean, it's like a savings account. It's like an insurance policy for the future. You're going to wish you did it now. And I - I didn't even track it honestly, like the first year, year and a half, like we weren't - I wasn't expecting anything. I think you did a great job of setting my expectations the right way where I did - I expected nothing off of SEO. We only counted - we only like ran the dollars and cents based on PPC and all of that. Obviously now we track those KPIs, and it's - it's ridiculous the return that we get. And they're the fattest deals too. I mean, they are - they're the absolute best, biggest money-making deals that we get. So thank you. I owe a lot to you for helping us get there."

"Yeah, I'm - and I'm super grateful to you as well, Chris. It's awesome that we've worked together for so long, and yeah, I definitely think of you like one of the people that's been instrumental to our success and be able to figure things out. Because two and a half years ago, we started working together. You were one of our earlier clients in the real estate space. We technically had been working with Cody five years or so, but only with them for a little while. And then we started getting some other referrals after that, and then some other referrals after that. And you were - you were in that - you were in that chunk somewhere before I decided to go 100% in on real estate and only do that. So I'm really grateful for you kind of supporting our business to the point that we could decide that this is all we want to do, and we could afford to cut out all the rest and decide to just double down here."

"One other thing - like this is - this is like common digital marketing philosophy, but I don't think - I don't think it's like well accepted in the real estate space. But whether you know it or not, and you probably know it, it really embodies kind of the way that you think about things, which is this concept that whoever can afford to pay the most money to acquire a customer wins in most marketing scenarios. And that's something I really respect about you. I mean, it doesn't take a lot of math for somebody to kind of go backwards and realize like your spreads are pretty good based on the amount of revenue you have and the amount of deals that you do. And you've taken a little bit of a different approach than a lot of companies have in terms of really focusing on exit strategies that maximize the potential value from the deals more so than the quick cash conversion cycle. I'm really curious to hear why you decided to shape your business that direction and what you think someone else should think about when they're thinking about like, should I mostly wholesale? Should I flip? Should I do novations? Like, what is the right - even though no such thing exists, but like, what is the right strategy for them?"

"We saw our cost per conversion or cost per deal start to rise. So tracking back to '19, on the PPC side, I think it was averaging around five grand, and we were primarily wholesaling at that point. So our average profit per deal was in the 15, upwards of 20,000 range. So the cost to acquire a deal went from five and crept towards ten. Well, my profits stayed at that like 15. And it's not - it's not - for me, it was - it didn't make any sense. So I thought, okay, well, how do I like triple or quadruple the number of deals I'm doing? And I was like, 'Hey, I'm not thinking about this the right way. What if I continued to do the exact same amount of deals but I tripled or quadrupled the profit I made?' And that's - that was the spark of like, I have to stop wholesaling. It's just not - in my market, it is not a profitable proposition."

"So the next logical step was whole tailing, where we still take title on the property. We know that, hey, if we take it to MLS, that's your - that's the biggest buyers list. Hey, guess what? I have to do like half the work now. I don't have to worry about having a dispo team or department or manager. Like, I can literally take it to MLS. It's going to sell for way more than my buyers list. And we were selling at a much higher price. So now I doubled my returns. Now I'm making 30 to 40 grand a deal and doing less work. So it's this natural like transition of, okay, now I have the capital to flip. Okay, now our profits - we're averaging 60 grand every time we flip a property. So it was a natural like evolution of gathering all these exit strategies."

"And I don't know that someone can go out and say, okay, I'm going to start with like five exit strategies and be good at all of them. I do think it's kind of a natural process. But we've been lucky enough to develop these, and it has led to novations. We added novations in the fall of - 22. Someone mentioned the word to me. I was like, 'I actually have no idea what that means. I don't - I really am not following what you're - what you're talking about.' We went through Eric Brewer's Novation course, learned exactly what this method is. Do you want me to talk kind of talk a little bit about novations and what we found?"

"Please, yeah. I think - I think I would love to hear that because so many of our clients are looking to add them, and so many are already kind of in that process. But I think a lot of people are in this stage where they've done like a novation or two amongst our clients, and they like know it kind of and sort of have it available as an exit strategy, and they kind of know what it means and they get why it's valuable. But but like actually steering the ship and getting that happening at scale is a really hard thing to do and something that I think you've done pretty good at. So I'm really curious to hear, you know, your whole - your almost back perspective on it."

"In the fall, I think we made about 325, 350 grand just on novations. And whereas other people were having a really, really bad fourth quarter of '22, we excelled. We've made more money than we've made because of this additional exit strategy. What that's looked like for us is when we're walking into a property where the numbers just don't line up for whatever reason - maybe their payoff is too high, maybe our negotiations stall and fail - this gives us one more opportunity to do a deal at a higher number that we really should not be putting our money on the line for. We should not be taking title, buying the property, and taking this much risk for a percentage that is not a sound investment. We have to stick to certain percentages if we're going to take on all this risk."

"So novations allow us to pay a higher price, but we're not assuming all the risk. If the market tanks, we're not the owner of the property. So it's - for me, it's a fancier form of wholesaling, but it gives us the same advantage of going - using a whole tail to go on market with MLS. It also allows us to do higher price properties. So we really stay away from your million-dollar properties here in Atlanta. Like our median price is like 350, 375, something like that, you know, a little flip. Million-dollar properties - but it's a lot easier if we're not taking title, if we don't have the holding costs of a million-dollar property to pull 50, 75 grand. That's a much easier proposition in that price range. So it really allows us - like there's a solution for everyone that calls us, and we're taking a shotgun, a much broader approach. We're in lots of houses. We really have something for everybody."

"Yeah, and I think - I think when it comes to exit strategies, you kind of alluded to this, but I'm curious how you would think through what do you do and what do you not do? Because the - if you just think about it theoretically, more exit strategies is always going to be better, right? Because you do have a solution for everybody who calls. However, in practice, that's not always true because you're not going to be great at every possible exit strategy. It's hard to train your team on all those things. So there is really this kind of fine balance to strike. So with somebody like - wherever they're at in their journey as a wholesaler or flipper or whatever the case is, how do they know like for them at this point, are novations a shiny object or are they a good strategy to implement? And so they don't like stretch themselves too thin - like at what point is - at what point is it the right fit?"

"I think the rehab part is maybe the part that you should save for last. That's a whole different skill of knowing - managing a construction team and a renovation. More people get that wrong. I think it'd be way more beneficial to add novations on the front end. So if all you had was whole tail, like wholesale, wholesale, novation - man, you can do 90% of the deals out there and still make money. So can you squeeze every penny out of a property that should maybe be renovated? No, but you don't have to. Who cares if you're making, you know, 60 grand instead of 80, and you just saved yourself three months? Like that's a - that's a win. It keeps your - you know, keeps capital in your pocket. It prevents you from taking, you know, exposing yourself to too much risk too quickly. So I think it's a great building block, a tool that helps you like learn the market, learn what things are selling for in your market with very little risk."

"Now, the flip side is we really have to be careful. I think novations - I think there's going to be some regulation with wholesaling, and novations have the potential to get really messy really quickly. I think we as investors have to encourage the community to be very responsible with these. The more irresponsible we are and the more promises we make that we can't keep - like, it does nobody a service. So we don't need to be lying to people and saying, 'Hey, you know, I - I'm gonna get you this,' and we, you know, we're taking it to market trying to innovate, and it doesn't happen. It's just - I think it has the potential to get people in a lot of trouble. So I would - I would actually say if you're going to do novations, I highly recommend Eric Brewer's Novation course. I would not recommend you winging it and just figuring it out as you go. It's one of these things that you can get yourself into trouble more so than any other exit strategy. I would recommend spending the money to go through that course and learn how to do this the right way."

"Yeah, and it's actually pretty cheap, isn't it? Like five grand, six grand, something like that?"

"Five to ten. I don't know exactly where - where it lands, but it's worth every penny. If that's a barrier of entry, you probably shouldn't be doing this anyways. So that's how you know - if you can afford the course, then you're ready. It comes down to you not being able to pull the trigger on that - you're maybe not - maybe not ready."

"I'll give you an example to not - not be around the bush. I'll give you an example where it can potentially get messy. We have an agreement with your - with our original seller. We have an agreement for a price. We're carrying out the novation. We've listed the property, and now we have an agreement between seller A and our end buyer, buyer C. Well, if the seller decides they no longer want to sell, there's a - there's a contract there. So like ultimately, when someone backs out on us, well, we get to decide are we going to sue - we don't - we don't do that - but are we going to sue? Are we going to like pressure them to follow through? Like it's in our control. Well, we have a third party buyer on the line that - hey, if they decide to sue seller A for backing out of the deal - like now there's"

Robert Wensley, the CEO of Investor Lift, joins Brandon as they take a closer look at the rise and fall of national wholesaling. Together, they examine real-life examples of wholesalers who experienced million-dollar months and discuss the factors that contributed to their success. Additionally, they analyze the challenges that led to the downfall of some national wholesaling ventures, offering valuable lessons and insights for aspiring wholesalers.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This week I'm joined by Robert Wensley, the founder of Investor Lift. We're going to talk about the national wholesaling model, why you should have less diversity in your exit strategies and specialize more, and marketing that companies are using to get to one or two million dollars per month in wholesale assignment fees.

"How you doing today, Robert?"

"Excellent, excellent. Thanks so much for having me on, Brandon."

"Yeah, super excited. Sounds like today is day number one for you in the DR, right?"

"So we will at our new office. You know, a lot of people, they look at investors, they see we're moving billions of dollars of deals every year, and they assume that we have this massive office with hundreds of employees. We've actually been working out of like a couple little apartments here and there for the last few years. And actually, I'm sitting now today in our first official office that we just opened. I think there's gonna be... I'm gonna post an office tour video on YouTube pretty soon, but officially just moved in yesterday, so pretty excited about that."

"Yeah, cool. That's fantastic. Why the DR of all places?"

"You know, so my co-founder is Ukrainian but was born in Russia, lived in Ukraine for the last 15 years. And as a result, a lot of our team is Russian-Ukrainian. And when the war started, I was like, 'I got to get you out of Ukraine.' He didn't want to leave Ukraine, so I played a little trick on him. I'm like, 'Hey, for my birthday, why don't you come down to DR and we'll rent a yacht for the week?' And he said, 'All right, cool.'"

I'll continue with the rest of the text in this format. Let me know if you want me to proceed.

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks Podcast. This week, I'm joined by Robert Wensley, the founder of Investor Lift. We're going to talk about the national wholesaling model, why you should have less diversity in your exit strategies and specialize more, and the marketing that companies are using to get to one or two million dollars per month in wholesale assignment fees. How are you doing today, Robert?"

"Excellent, excellent," Robert replied. "Thanks so much for having me on, Brandon."

"Yeah, super excited. Sounds like today is day number one for you in the DR, right?"

"Yes, we're at our new office. You know, a lot of people look at Investor Lift, they see we're moving billions of dollars of deals every year, and they assume that we have this massive office with hundreds of employees. We've actually been working out of a couple of little apartments here and there for the last few years, and actually, I'm sitting now in our first official office that we just opened. I think I'm going to post an office tour video on YouTube pretty soon, but we officially just moved in yesterday, so I'm pretty excited about that."

"Yeah, cool. That's fantastic. Why the DR of all places?"

"My co-founder is Ukrainian but was born in Russia and lived in Ukraine for the last 15 years. As a result, a lot of our team is Russian-Ukrainian. When the war started, I thought, 'I got to get you out of Ukraine.' He didn't want to leave Ukraine, so I played a little trick on him. I said, 'Hey, for my birthday, why don't you come down to the DR and we'll rent a yacht for the week?' He said, 'All right, cool.' So we came down on February 21st for my birthday, and of course, while he was down here, Ukraine got invaded. I was like, 'Called that one,' so I had him got him out. He came down here for a week for my birthday and ended up never going back after the war started. Over the last couple of years, we've moved our entire team, everyone from Russia and Ukraine, to the DR because you get visa-free access from all countries, and it's on the same time zone as we are on the East Coast. I do not want war interfering with my business."

"That's crazy."

"Yeah, well, that's a unique solution, though. So you actually took these people and moved them from their home country into the Dominican Republic? Was there resistance to that, or were they happy to get out? I'm sure you got a mixed response from different people."

"Now everyone is happy. I mean, we have two guys who stayed behind because they have older parents or grandparents they are taking care of, so they're kind of stuck behind enemy lines, so to speak, taking care of their older family members. But everyone else was like, 'Yeah, this seems like a good opportunity.' I mean, we live in a beautiful place. We're a few blocks away from the beach here, and we have swimming pools, soccer fields, a gym, and pools. It's not like we're in a third-world country; we're in one of the nicest areas in the Caribbean, so it's a good place to run a satellite office."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, good for you. I'm excited. I'm honored to be your first podcast appearance in your brand new, not studio studio or whatever you're calling that place you're recording from. I'm honestly just really grateful and excited for this podcast episode overall. It's funny; we were just talking before we even got started about what to talk about because the overlap between what we both believe in, what we care about, and what we teach is just so massive. I feel like making this podcast shorter than eight hours is probably the biggest challenge of them all."

"We both believe in the gospel of making millions of dollars."

"That's right, but believe it or not, there are different gospels of making millions of dollars. We subscribe to a specific denomination that tends to be really effective, but it's newer, and that's why people are less into it. In many ways, I think that every big movement that happens will always have a few companies behind it, enabling it and making it possible. I think of Investor Lift like that for the virtual and national wholesaling model, where it makes it so much more feasible."

"On the chance that there's somebody listening that doesn't know you, your background, or how you got into this, I want to spend the meat of the episode just talking strategies, tactics, and all that kind of stuff. But I think it'd be super helpful to know kind of like, who are you, what is Investor Lift, what are you doing here, all that kind of stuff."

"I was born in—no, I'm just kidding. We'll go back a little bit but not too far back. Growing up, I always wanted to make a ton of money, and my friend whose dad made the most money was an investment banker. So I actually grew up trying to become an investment banker. I asked him, 'How do you become an investment banker?' He said, 'Go to a top school, preferably Harvard, study economics and finance, work on Wall Street, and try to get a job at a big investment bank like Goldman Sachs.' That was the ladder I was trying to climb for the first part of my life. I got into Harvard, got Mark Zuckerberg's dorm room, did economics, did finance, graduated dean's list, but I was doing summer internships at finance firms, and I realized I didn't really like doing finance. I'm like, 'Yeah, I'm going to make a few million dollars a year, but I'm working for some other rich person.' I was more of an entrepreneur. So right before graduation, I turned down all my job offers and decided, 'Hey, I'm going to learn how to be an entrepreneur.' But I didn't have a good idea at the time. It wasn't like I had some billion-dollar idea that I wanted to kick off, but I remember looking at this one stat from the IRS that said 90% of all millionaires make their money in real estate. I'm like, 'Well, a safe bet would probably be to learn real estate.' So I started cold calling house flipping companies, pitching them on coming to work for them, and ended up taking a job on Brad Chandler's team at Express Homebuyers in Washington, DC. I came in thinking I was going to learn how to become a house flipper. Little did I know that would really turn into me learning how to wholesale, which I didn't even know about, and then not just how to wholesale but how to create this new era of mega wholesaling that we've never seen before. I believe it really is the future of real estate investing. You're going to have this split between the guys doing the construction and the guys sourcing the deals. That split has started to emerge, but it's just going to accelerate more and more."

"I worked on Brad Chandler's team, took his team to over a million dollars a month, then after I left there, I worked on another team and took them from about $150,000 to over a million within, I believe, about six months. Then five months later, we broke two million a month in assigned fees earned. I thought, 'Hmm, done it twice, let's see if I can do it a third time.' I started working with a few other companies, like Charcoal Moose's team, took them from pretty much zero wholesaling to over two million a month, and I believe we did that one in about seven months. We started doing it over and over again, taking these companies that had some real estate experience and were maybe making a few hundred thousand dollars a month flipping, a lot of times keeping the existing team in place or even shrinking the team to a much smaller, leaner, lower overhead team with less burn and pivoting them into wholesaling. We turned them into these mega wholesaling machines that pump out millions of dollars a year and have super high net margins. We were doing this over and over again, and every time we tried to do it, we did it. But of course, dispositions were always our bottleneck, right? Acquisitions, you know, you get..."

"It's somewhat easy to crank up Google Ads, you know, to come and double your budget," he said. "I know it's a little bit more complicated than that, but you know, if you want twice as many leads, double your budget. You're going to have some diminishing returns, but you're going to get more leads."

"Um, you want to double your sales team? Hire twice as many salespeople," she added. "On dispositions, when you start scaling out into multiple markets, you have a really good core buyers list in one market. Then, you start scaling up into other markets. A lot of times, you get kicked in the ass real hard because you don't have the buyers you need to move the deals at the numbers that make sense, and you end up having a high contract fallout rate. You end up not making the assignment fees you should be making."

"There are a lot of issues you run into," he said. "So, after getting kicked in the teeth a few times myself trying to branch into multiple markets, I built this product called InvestorLift originally for myself and my friends."

"Originally, it was just kind of like our secret sauce, right?" he explained. "I'm just like, 'This is just going to be our secret sauce. I'm not opening it up publicly.' And we used it to allow ourselves to branch out into multiple markets and become nationwide wholesalers."

"Then, a couple of years ago, about a little over two years ago, I opened it up to the public, and it just took off," he continued. "We now move more real estate investment deals than anyone else in the world. Last time I checked, we were doing two and a half times more properties per month than all the iBuyers combined."

"Um, and generating just, you know, billions and billions of dollars of offers and selling billions and billions of dollars of deals," he boasted. "So, we got a lot of data, and we're changing a lot of businesses."

"And also, the cool thing is I see a lot of trends in the data because we have, we're spinning off over a quarter billion data points per month," he stated. "So, what that gives me is a little bit of a crystal ball on where things are headed, where things are going. And, um, to be honest, I haven't even talked about much of that on a podcast. I don't think I've talked about very much of that at all on a podcast before. So, we'll dive into some of that today, and I think it's gonna be a great episode."

"Yeah, I'm, uh, I'm really excited to do that," she replied. "And for what we've, uh, yeah, you may not have talked about this on podcasts, but I know we've certainly talked a lot about it and used some of those insights and everything to kind of drive our location strategies across our clients."

"Um, because it all starts with the product that you can sell, right?" she continued. "You need to get contracts that are sellable and ideally with larger gross margins. And to do that, I mean, understanding the dynamics of what produces that, I think is, I think is huge. So, that's fantastic."

"So, InvestorLift, if I were to simplify it," she asked. "Let me, let me see how I see it. You can correct me because I'm sure you've thought about this a lot more than I have. I think of it like access to this list of cash buyers along with the technology and some of the tools required or needed on a day-to-day basis to kind of manage that whole piece. You know, whether it's like emailing or texting buyers or whatever the case is and accepting offers. So, it's sort of like the data is the list and then, and then some tools for contacting that list. Um, and that's what I view is like the bulk of the product. Is there anything to add to that?"

"Yeah, I mean, the main thing we're trying to do is give you liquidity on your deals," he explained. "Give you liquidity in your contracts. We're going to help you sell your deals faster at higher prices."

"The average wholesaler in America typically off of InvestorLift will have an average assignment fee of 14 or 15 thousand dollars," he noted. "But our guys consistently clock average assignment fees, and last month nationwide, um, I believe was 32.1 thousand dollars nationwide across the entire InvestorLift network, which is huge, right? Like that's, that's over twice as much money per deal."

"So, people ask you, 'Okay, how the hell do you get assignment fees that high?' The way we do it is just by giving people access to better tools to drive more demand for their deals, better data, more buyers, putting more eyeballs on their deals," he elaborated. "So, you know, if you had one deal with one offer on it and you had the exact same deal with five offers, which one's gonna make you more money, right? And on a half a million dollar house, it's really easy to make another five, ten, fifteen thousand dollars per deal, right? For the buyer, they're only paying a fraction of a percentage more for that property to secure that deal. But for you, the wholesaler, if you go from a fifteen thousand dollar assignment fee to a thirty thousand dollar assignment fee, you've just increased the profitability of your business by 100 percent."

"So, that's really our goal," he said. "To like really shed light on like the real money in wholesaling is in nailing dispositions. Everyone focuses on acquisitions, but you can do everything right on acquisitions, but if you don't get dispo down, nothing on marketing and sales and acquisitions matters. It's always, you gotta cash that check at the end of the day."

"Yeah, in my opinion, it seems like there's way too many companies that just focus on selling the deal, right?" she observed. "And that's kind of the focus of dispositions is we're going to do this until we get an offer, and it's accepted, and we have found a buyer for the property, and not nearly enough effort put into how do we sell it at the highest price we could possibly sell it for. So, I think that's, I think that's super interesting. Like you, like you said, the distinction of InvestorLift could be, in some cases, the difference between one offer and five offers. You know, in both circumstances, you may have sold the property and you would have made a profit, but you can make significantly more profit if you can, um, if you can sell it for more. And you've already gone through all that hard work of acquisitions, and you've already gone through a lot of the hard work of dispositions and all that stuff to make that happen."

"Um, that's fantastic," she continued. "I kind of think of you as, as sort of leading the change to more of this virtual model, um, because so many of these people that we talk to, they've been in a local market model for a long time, right? You talk to these real estate investors that say, 'I'm a Salt Lake City or a DMV or Orlando, Florida, you know, whatever the case is, real estate investor. What I look for is more deals in whatever that study is, and then I have a variety of exit strategies for those deals.' That's like the standard model right now."

"Um, some of those people lean really heavy towards flips, do some wholesales, some lean heavy towards wholesales, do some flips, like everybody seems to release a little bit of everything. Novation is getting really popular, et cetera," she noted. "So, I'm really curious to hear about your, like what would you say to that person about different ways that they could go about their business?"

"Yeah, so I'm gonna go through, I'm gonna shoot straight on all this," he replied. "Everyone's up on, okay, if you think about how to make a ton of money really fast, the way that most people are looking at their businesses right now is they're like, 'Hey, I'm gonna go nine out of ten, like I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be in the top 10 at what I do.'"

"If you're in the top ten percent, you fast forward three to five years, you're out of business," he warned. "Okay, and there's some guys that are gonna be like, 'Okay, I'm gonna go 10 out of 10. I'm gonna be the best, right?' If you're the best, you're gonna do okay, but you're not gonna absolutely crush it. What you really got to do, what I always tell everyone on my team, is you got to go 11 out of 10. 11 out of 10. You got to be better than the best. You need to develop some sort of competitive advantage where you literally are the best in the world at one specific thing."

"And the problem I see with so many of these real estate investing businesses is they're all over the place," he stated. "They're doing buy and hold, they're doing development projects, they're doing fix and flip, they're doing wholesaling, they got a coaching program, they got affiliate sales, they got a podcast, they got a million different things going on. They're a jack of all trades, but they're a master of none."

"And you know where you see that?" he asked. "You see that on their net profits at the end of the year. You'll see that on their tax return. You'll see that on how much do they actually take home to their family. Because when you're doing a million different things, you're never going to develop a sustainable competitive advantage on one thing. You're never going to really dial in the numbers on one thing."

"So, like I remember when I was working at Express, we had 70 rentals, we were doing 60 flips at a time, we had development projects, we had a coaching business,

and we had a ton of wholesale stuff going on," he recalled. "And it was just, like, so hard to really dial in the numbers on any one of those."

"And it took a long time," he continued. "It took me about three years of getting kicked in the teeth trying to figure it out before I got it dialed in. And I think it's the same thing with a lot of people. So, what I tell people is, hey, you know, if you want to be a mom-and-pop shop, stay focused on one market, do a little bit of everything. That's cool. But don't complain when your profit margins are small. Don't complain when you're stuck at a certain level, okay?"

"But if you want to really grow your business, and you want to be really hyper-profitable, what you should do is you should laser-focus on one specific thing and become world-class at it," he advised. "You know, be world-class at one thing and develop a sustainable competitive advantage on that one thing."

"Then, you can go out and grow," he added. "And that's, like, the hardest part of my job every day is focusing on, okay, where are we going to go? Because we see so many different opportunities every day, and it's like, okay, how do we focus on what's really going to drive us forward in a significant way?"

"Uh, so that's what I tell everyone is, like, be hyper-focused, laser-focused," he urged. "You know, do one thing, become world-class at it, and then once you've got that locked in, then you can grow."

"Okay," he concluded. "So, I guess I'm kind of curious, like, I don't know, so, um, you, uh, InvestorLift's primary purpose is to increase the number of offers you get and to get the offers higher, right? Um, so that you can make more money, especially if you have the same deal. So, if someone wants to get started with that, you know, because you mentioned it's primarily driven by the data you have, and so, I mean, how, how do you collect that data?"

"Yeah, so we have a bunch of different data sources that we pull from," he answered. "So, we pull a lot of data from, uh, different skip tracing providers, from tax assessor records, from county records, from, uh, public and private sources. And we have some machine learning algorithms that take all that data and piece it all together. Because you have a bunch of fragmented data, you need to make it useful. And so, we piece it all together and create what we call a unified data set."

"And then what we do is we just pump that into a system," he explained. "And we have, you know, hundreds of thousands of buyers on our system. Um, and we're constantly updating it. And then when you want to sell a deal, all you do is you just post your deal on InvestorLift. Uh, we'll tell you exactly where it's gonna be located, how much it's gonna sell for, how long it's gonna take to sell, how many offers you're gonna get, and then you can just start marketing that property to your buyers."

"And then when you want to sell it," he said. "You can send out text messages, you can send out emails, um, we have some direct mail capabilities we're about to roll out as well. So, you can really market that property to the entire InvestorLift network and get a lot of offers really fast."

"And that's the key," he stated. "Because when you're just selling a deal to your buyers list, you're only marketing to a very small percentage of the entire buyer pool out there. And when you get a lot of offers on a property, it's gonna drive that price up really fast. And that's how you get higher assignment fees."

"That makes sense," she responded. "Um, and that's kind of been what I, what I was saying earlier about, like, you're leading this transition to virtual and kind of helping investors not be so dependent on their local market and things like that. And I think that also leads to better business models. Um, but the more and more we work with a variety of different companies, the more we realize that, like, this is actually, um, in the best interest of the business to go virtual. But it's also in the best interest of their own personal lifestyle, um, because it's really hard to have a work-life balance when you have to drive everywhere and you have to meet with people face to face."

"So, I think this virtual model is actually really, um, compelling to both those people that want to go from seven figures to eight figures, um, and, you know, kind of get to that stage," she added. "But I think also, it opens the door to all of these other people who want to get in real estate investing, but it's hard for them to do that because they just don't have the time. So, um, there's lots of people I talk to where they have a full-time job, and maybe they don't want to leave their full-time job, um, but they do want to kind of start investing."

"Um, and if they're virtual, they can do that, right?" she said. "Because it really opens the doors to them to be able to do it a little bit more in the evenings, a little bit more on the weekends, and things like that, which I think is great. So, I know we're starting to come up on time here, but I do want to get one last, um, sort of word of advice from you. And, um, you know, if you could give one piece of advice to someone who's just getting started in real estate investing, what would it be?"

"I would say focus," he answered. "You know, focus on one thing, become world-class at it. You know, it's like, I see so many people, they get distracted by all these different things. And, um, you know, I, I think the best piece of advice I could give anyone is just focus on one thing, become world-class at it, and then once you've got that locked in, then you can grow."

"That's awesome," she replied. "Well, thank you so much for your time today, Robert. Um, I'm really excited to see where InvestorLift goes from here, and I'm sure we'll be in touch."

"Thank you," he said. "Appreciate it."

"Awesome," she concluded. "Well, uh, thank you to everyone who tuned in, and we'll see you next time."

"Um, the reason why I like wholesaling as an exit strategy better than, you know, wholesaling or novations is because novations are like a really popular thing right now, right? There's like a new fad every couple of years, and the latest, greatest fad is novation. I think there are some instances where novation makes sense, like if I was in Seattle, you know, when I had leads coming in on million-dollar-plus houses that were built after the year 2000, the novation model makes sense on a lot of deals like that.

"The challenge that I've seen people run into with novation and wholesaling is that wholesaling is much more capital intensive, but with novation specifically, it just takes way more time to get the deals done. There are way more steps in the process, so your cash conversion cycle goes way out, right? You're not turning your money as fast, and also you need a lot more people to handle the same volume of deals. It's not simple turn and burn like doing a deal a day. When we're doing million-dollar months, we're doing multiple deals per day. You can't do that with novations, right? You could get to a few hundred thousand dollars a month with novations, but you can't do a million dollars a month in novations. At least, I've never seen anyone do it.

"And a lot of guys that I've seen go really heavy into novations have run into really serious cash flow issues. I get calls all the time, once a month, from guys that are really in cash jams. They're investors who have bills bouncing because they went too heavy into novations too fast, and they screw up their cash flows. You know, people never pay attention to cash conversion cycles. If you go from 30 days on your cash conversion cycle to 60 days, you make half as much money per year—half as much money. And when you go from 30 days to 120 days, you make 25% of the money you did. So when you add onto your cash conversion cycle like that, every day you're adding on decreases the percentage, decreases the amount of money you're gonna make in the business.

"So I like wholesaling because it's super, super scalable. It's simple; I can run it like McDonald's. It has great return on ad spend and great cash conversion cycles, better than any other exit strategy. And the other exit strategies, you know, if you're just getting started, like I'm talking about this just in the context of trying to build a million-dollar-a-month business. In the context of just doing a few deals, yeah, learn seller financing, learn novations, like get every tool in the shed, because when you're first getting started, you're not spoiled with a bunch of leads. But in the context of building like a real money-printing machine, I like to just stick with wholesaling.

"I understood a lot of people would use the same, what's the word, uh, like, I guess train of thought, so to speak, that you're using with focus and specialization. They use that to argue why they should be in one market versus in multiple markets versus what you're arguing here is one exit strategy, and then it seems like you almost don't care about the number of markets. Or you're a little bit flexible towards that, which is like the same, the same underlying principle driving it, but a really different application. What do you think about that?"

"Well, you know, fix and flip is a completely different business than wholesaling. You know, wholesaling is marketing and sales, right? You have a certain skill set that you need there—a marketing and sales skill set. Fix and flip is construction, construction management, operations management. Completely different business, right?

"So doing both of those at the same time, you really need to run two companies. Doing two markets at the same time, yeah, it might take you a few days or a few weeks to get to know the different buyers in that market and get to know the geographies, but we're not doing an entire—it's the same core business processes. We're running the same business processes; we can use the same salespeople with the same skills, we can use the same marketing campaigns, and we're running the same business.

"Yeah, there are going to be nuances to that market. There are going to be different areas that are high-crime areas we want to stay away from, but we can educate ourselves on those very quickly. It's not like we're reinventing the wheel; we're just running the same gameplay in a different place.

"Now, the reason why you want to do that is imagine this. So, Brandon, let's say you won the jackpot tomorrow, and you win a billion dollars. You're now America's newest billionaire, and you want to go invest that billion dollars and get a return on investment. Would you put it all in one stock? No. Would you throw it all in Tesla? No, right, because that'd be crazy. You'd be putting all your eggs in one basket. You would diversify your risk by investing in an entire portfolio of different stocks, different companies, different asset classes to diversify your risk, so you're not beholden to one stock going up and down. Elon Musk tweets something, and all of a sudden, you lost 100 million dollars, right?

"Even if you love to—I love Tesla. I only drive Teslas, and I would never put an entire portfolio all in one stock just because it would be insanity. That's kind of the same thing with putting all your eggs in one basket with one market. Okay, I'll tell you an example of this. So there've been times where I'm in a market, and I'm running Google ads, and then I have a competitor who hasn't been in Google ads that all of a sudden decides, 'Hey, I'm going to start running Google ads.' And I'm pretty dialed in with my numbers where I know how much I should pay for a keyword to get the return on ad spend that I want to target. And then, all of a sudden, they come in, and they start paying crazy amounts where, like, I'm like, 'You're just gonna spend yourself out of business, idiot.' But while they're spending themselves out of business, my sales team is not getting any leads off those campaigns.

"Now, if my numbers work and I know their numbers don't work, I know they're gonna be out of that campaign within a couple of months, and then my leads are going to come back. But in those couple of months, I'm up the creek not getting leads, right? So if you're just in one market, you have exposure to competitors coming in that market and disrupting your market position. That's number one. But then, number two, you have market exposure to the entire macroeconomic environment.

"I'll give you an example. The guys in Phoenix right now are all getting their asses kicked because that market is behaving right now like the East Coast and the rest of America was in November and December. November and December, all us East Coast guys, we got our asses kicked really hard, right? It was some of the worst months in wholesaling the last few years. Average assignment fees went sub-20k on Investor Lift in December, the lowest they've ever been. Now they've bounced back up to the 30s, but we got our asses kicked in November and December.

"The thing is, on the East Coast especially, seller expectations have gone down, so we're now able to get stuff at efficient prices where we can now make an efficient market between the buyer and seller expectations and capture a sizable profit there for making the deal happen. In Phoenix, the seller expectations haven't gone down. The sellers still want last year's prices, so all the Phoenix wholesalers, they're just in Phoenix, they're all screwed right now. They're getting their asses kicked really hard, and I see it in the numbers. And I've talked to some of the biggest guys in the country, and I've been like, 'Dude, why the hell do you have all your eggs in one basket in Phoenix? Like, you need to diversify out of just one market because all the macroeconomic forces of that market now are impacting your business. When that market is up, your business is up. Everyone's happy; everyone's buying Lambos. When that market is down, you're cutting the staff and cutting salaries and cutting bonuses. So why not diversify? Why not tack on three, four, five more markets? Is it really that hard? Think about how much time it takes to go learn the nuances of comping and stuff in a few different markets, building up your buyer relationships in a few different markets. Yeah, that's a small cost, but you can get through that in a few weeks or a few months, and then you get the benefit of not having like the micro exposure to competitors and not having the macro exposure of the actual market, whatever the whims of that market are. So it's an absolute no-brainer to be in multiple markets, and if you're not, you're leaving money on the table, and you're taking on this unnecessary risk that you could de-risk from your business very easily.'

"That's, yeah, so interesting. For what it's worth, I really believe in what you're saying here because I see the numbers across our clients, like our clients who are in multiple markets versus one market and how that affects things. There's also some aspects of, depending on the marketing channel that you're using, that could be more friendly or less friendly. And the channels that I'm personally familiar with—the digital channels—tend to excel in that kind of scenario versus some other channels might be a little bit more difficult to manage in those scenarios. So there's something to that, I think.

"But it's so interesting because a lot of people would say specialization in market, diversification in exit strategy. You're saying diversification in market, specialization in exit strategy, and it's a completely different model. I have noticed that a lot of people seem almost irrationally fearful of that. Maybe it's just because

they haven't done stuff in other markets before. You know, one person who I actually had on this podcast, Aaron Gaunt—you might know him—he's a client of ours and of Investor Lift as well, doing fantastic. He texted me the other day. I think he had like 40-something contracts last month, and they're dispositioning pretty well, mostly from PPC. So he's doing awesome.

"But he started in Southern California. When we started working with him as a client, he's in Southern California. Then he got one, because you know how this kind of happens with PPC, you get these stray leads in areas that you're not familiar with? Yeah, it happens all the time, right? So he gets some lead in San Antonio. He's like, 'Well, might as well try to make the most out of it,' and he successfully dispositions the property. And then he thought to himself, 'That wasn't actually that hard. I can do that. It's not my backyard. I don't feel comfortable with it, and I'm not familiar with it, but it's totally possible.' Now he's in at least probably 15 or 20 states, and every time he's gone a little bit wider, he's done a little bit better.

"So some people kind of get over that. Maybe they just need a little bit of a kick in the butt to see that they can actually do that. But do you have any opinion on the people who are listening to this and are just thinking, 'Ah, that sounds nice, Robert, but I can't do that'?"

"Okay, I think where this stems from is when we first started pumping million-dollar months, we kind of told people we're national wholesalers, okay? When we said we're national wholesalers, we didn't really mean we're like in every single city, county, state, but we started putting the word out. Like, people were, you know, we jumped on podcasts—some of the initial investors, guys that were hitting really big numbers doing a couple million dollars a month—and they're like, 'Hey, we're a national wholesaling company.' And then we accidentally started this whole national wholesaling trend, where everyone was like, 'Oh wow, national wholesaling!' And you had a bunch of gurus that were pushing out courses teaching people to go on Google ads and just target the entire United States of America, because your cost per lead is like five dollars, and you can get the cheapest leads in the world. So that was a trend last year where all these guys were learning that strategy from a few people in the game and testing it and getting their asses kicked."

"Um, so you know I've said it many times before: if you want to get Ferrari assignment fees, you got to buy some Ferrari leads. But you also got to know the price, you got to know the price."

"Yeah, just start on Disco, start on Disco and work your way back."

"That's fantastic. I want to ask you about one more thing. I think if there's like three main things that kind of show how much a company is doing, the first one's going to be the number of markets. Next is the number of exit strategies. We've talked kind of about both of those in terms of diversification versus specialization. What about marketing?"

"There's a lot of people who are doing TV and radio and SMS and cold call and direct mail and PPC and Facebook ads and SEO and billboards, and you know, the list goes on and on. Although I think that was a pretty comprehensive list. But there's a lot of available marketing channels, and it could be said that diversification in marketing channels is important. It could also be said that each marketing channel kind of has its own type of lead it generates and its own processes internally that are going to be most appropriate for that marketing channel. In that way, companies that specialize sometimes do really well. Like as an example, our clients that are heavy on cold call and then turn on PPC, they tend to not close as well as our clients that do PPC only because if you're just used to sifting through a pile of junk to find a good lead all day, then it's going to be weird to get just quality leads. It's much more likely that you kind of miss something good because it's a different mindset, right? Your PPC maximizes every lead, cold call finds something that's good hopefully out of the list, and it's a volume game, right?"

"So that's just an example, but what are you seeing about these companies that are doing really well? Do they have one marketing channel, three, seven?"

"I would say that any one of the best, making more than half a million dollars a month, is spending 80% plus of their budget on one channel, and that's Google ads. The reason being is it's the number one lead source in terms of quality. It's got the lowest cash conversion cycle, and the return on ad spend is really solid. It's predictable."

"But the more important thing too is on these other channels, you can't develop a sustainable competitive advantage. For example, if I go and try to get really good at Direct Mail, like how do I develop a competitive advantage on Direct Mail? We're all buying data from the same places, we all have the same lists. You can't really develop a competitive advantage unless you maybe try to get the data a little bit earlier. But everyone knows with Direct Mail, you got to hit the guys five, ten times before you actually get a lift, actually get a good response. So even if you get your first mail piece out a few weeks earlier, like does that really do that much? And then as soon as you figure that out, someone else is going to figure it out."

"You could A/B test, right? That's the thing that I used to always do, is just A/B test, A/B test, A/B test. But then you know what's going to happen? Your competitor is going to get your mail piece and they're going to copy it, so you can't really develop a competitive advantage on Direct Mail."

"Could you do it on TV? Could you do it on radio? It's the same. You can't really develop a competitive advantage. With Google, it's different. With Google, it's a lot different because as you start spending money on that account, that account gets smarter and smarter and smarter. You're feeding the algorithm, you're feeding Google's neural networks more and more data, and Google's getting better and better and better. It's going to get better and better and better at finding more people that look like those people. The more you spend, the more intelligent it gets. The more intelligent it gets, the more money you make, and the more money you make, the more you can afford to spend and throw back in."

"So like, if you're just getting into Google ads right now, you're already late to the game. You're five years late to the game, but five years from now, like you're not even going to be able to compete. So that's again why I think you're going to see this trend towards Mega wholesalers taking more market share here in the next few years. Because a beginner wholesaler that's spending five thousand dollars a month in their account is not going to be able to compete against a mega wholesaler that's spending a million dollars a month."

"That's why I like Google ads. It's because you can develop a sustainable long-term competitive advantage if you can get the numbers working and keep that campaign growing and growing and growing, and get more and more capital invested in every dollar you spend. That is strengthening your competitive advantage."

"I think that's kind of the irony of what we both do, if you think about it. The companies that have the most buyer relationships have an advantage, right? You could think of building a buyer's list kind of like one of those things where the biggest companies are always going to have an advantage compared to a smaller company because they're adding more and more and faster. So they have the ability to disposition deals at larger spreads, and in a way, investors kind of shortcut that. In the same way, we kind of are the same thing when it comes to PPC. We, like our clients collectively, are Google's biggest client in this industry, and we have data-sharing practices between those clients to where our clients that spend one thousand dollars a month in PPC don't actually statistically have a different return on investment than our clients that spend six figures every month, which is highly atypical because usually the companies that spend the most money are going to have the best results. Even those companies that spend six figures each month, we can make it as if they were spending even more, right? Because it's not like once you unlock this certain amount of spend, then suddenly the algorithm is fully learned, right? AI is just going to get smarter and smarter the more data you can feed it."

"So that's something I think is just really neat. In a way, InvestorLift and Pavement Collective have the same business model. We're just tackling different problems."

"Yeah, now I remember you showed me how you're doing the cross-account little trick there that you got going. But I was like, that is the freaking gold mine right there. As soon as I saw that, I was like, okay, anyone asks me where to go for PPC, I'm sending them your way because I know the power of that. I know the power of that and how it could jumpstart an account and give them such a competitive advantage on day one."

"Yeah, we're doing the same thing on InvestorLift with buyers, basically the exact same strategy. Let's work together to go strengthen our competitive advantages as a collective instead of trying to just develop it on our own."

"Yep, totally agreed. Well, this has been fantastic, Robert. Super grateful for the time that you've spent here and all the insights that you shared. Is there anything else that you'd want to share that you think people need to know?"

"I think if you're in the business right now, one of the biggest mistakes people make is, you know, they'll hear me talking about building million-dollar-a-month businesses, two million-dollar-a-month businesses, and they're like, well, I don't want to do that. That's not me. I'm happy with 200k a month. That's fine, but the strategies and the playbook that you should run to get to a million a month, you should run regardless of whether or not you're trying to get there. Even if you're trying to go to 200k a month, build your business as if you're trying to go for a million because you're going to do stuff right, and your 200k is going to be a lot more consistent, or your 300k or 400k or whatever it is."

"So it's like, you know, one of the things I always tell entrepreneurs is, 'Build your business to sell it.' Build it as if you're going to sell it, even if you keep it forever. Build it as if you're always going to sell it next year because you'll build it right. You'll start doing things right, you'll keep your books clean, you'll hire the right people, you'll put the right systems and processes in place."

"Or another analogy I like to use is like, you know, if you want to keep your house clean, the best way to keep your house clean is just to invite guests over every couple of days. If you invite guests over every couple of days, you're always going to have a clean house, right?"

"So yeah, that would be my advice. Even if you're not trying to go to a million, build it as if. Build it as if, because you'll do things right, and that will make your life a lot easier. You'll have a lot less risk in your business, you'll sleep better at night, and overall you're just going to be much, much happier as an entrepreneur and as a real estate business owner."

"Love that, very, very sound advice. I also want to put in a little plug for our clients. We have different segments of clients that we track from a return on investment standpoint. Our highest return segment right now is our national clients. That's why you'll hear me talking about national wholesaling on this podcast a lot. That's part of the reason that I wanted Robert here to kind of share what he's doing because 100% of those companies, as far as I'm aware, are InvestorLift customers. It's almost non-negotiable if you're going to do the national model. It was so much harder to do it without that, so I highly recommend if you're interested in that and learning more about InvestorLift, definitely check them out

."

"We do have a discount code. How much is it, Robert? 10% I think off of InvestorLift?"

"Yeah, if you go to get.g-e-t.investorlift.com and you use the coupon code 'Bateman,' then you'll get 10% off the first year."

"Alright, so get.g-e-t.investorlift.com, and then when you get to checkout, just put in the coupon code 'Bateman.' That will give you 10% off your first year on InvestorLift. So please, yeah, please do that if that's the right fit for you. Thank you again for your time, Robert. It's been fantastic having you on here, and we'll have to do another time. For everybody else listening, I will see you next time."

"Absolutely, thanks so much, Brandon. Appreciate having me on, and we'll see you next time."

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Brandon interviews Sharon Varn Holt, an expert in finding off-market deals through probate. They discuss her background in real estate investing, the effectiveness of direct mail marketing, and the unique opportunities in probate deals. Sharon highlights the importance of patience and building a strong marketing system for converting probate leads into successful deals.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

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"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be joined by Sharon Vornholt. Sharon is an expert in sourcing off-market deals through probate, and she's going to share with us today all kinds of different strategies that she has used to both find those leads and work those leads to create a scalable revenue channel.

"How are you doing today, Sharon?"

"I'm great. How are you doing, Brandon?"

"Doing fantastic, thank you. Where are you calling from?"

"I am from Louisville, Kentucky."

"Well, good for you. Awesome. Louisville, Kentucky - that's honestly something we don't hear that much. There are a lot of other places, but Louisville, Kentucky's underrepresented. For those that are listening that don't yet know you, your company, what you do, a little bit about your background, I would love to get the crash course on what you do and how you work with real estate investors, and what got you where you are today."

"Well, I started - I had another business in 1991, so I go back a long time with real estate, about 25 years. I had another business, a home inspection business, and an agent came in one day - an agent investor - and she said, 'Do you want to go to a REIA meeting?' And I said something like, 'What's a REIA meeting?' So I went to that meeting around about 1998, so like I said, it's been about 25 years. From then on, I just was immersed in the world of real estate investing."

"I started out doing a mix of fix and flip and buy and hold. So those were the two things I would do. Marketing was one thing I was always good at, and this is in the olden days, Brandon, when direct mail marketing was the biggest way to reach people, way before digital marketing. But fast forward, I went full-time in 2008. And if you were around in 2008, it was the best of worlds and the worst of worlds in real estate investing. So there were millions of deals, but not so many buyers could get a retail mortgage, and that was the first time I'd ever wholesaled a property.

I became what I like to say an accidental wholesaler because I did not want to hold those properties. I did not want to rehab the properties that I had because I didn't know how long they were going to sit on the market. So I just called an investor that I knew and said, 'You want to buy these couple of properties?' And he said, 'Heck yeah.' And I thought, 'Boy, that was easy.' But we both know being a wholesaler is not the easiest thing in the world, particularly if you're starting out.

So over the years, I just continued to do that, and I started the blog, I started a podcast, with the goal of teaching other people how to avoid some of the landmines and the roadblocks that I had come upon. So today, I'm really passionate about showing people this business, teaching them how to market and how to generate leads. And one of the many ways that you can generate leads - and I'm passionate about getting women into this business because I think they're greatly underrepresented in real estate investing."

"Yeah, I would absolutely agree with you on that. That's fantastic. I don't even know where to start in terms of picking your brain and understanding all this stuff. Obviously, the overlap that you and I have is marketing. We both love marketing. We both know that that's kind of where this business model begins, and arguably, it's like half of the business model for most real estate investors, right? Marketing and sales is pretty much the entirety of a wholesale operation, and then for different exit strategies, you bolt on other parts of the business that are necessary to make it run. So that considered, I would love to learn a little bit more about what it is that you're teaching in terms of marketing and how that interacts with what we do."

"I've always worked off-market deals, and it's probably because I just did not want to get in there and scrap around with a few thousand real estate agents and other investors on the MLS. So early on, as I said, direct mail marketing was an integral part of the other business that I had. So I got very good at reaching off-market sellers, and remember this was before digital marketing was ever a thought. So you combined that with - I still do, still believe direct mail marketing is the number one contact for niches like probates where it's a little bit different. But to layer that with digital marketing and all the things that can follow, you really get the explosion of the best of both worlds, I'll say that. So I don't think it's necessarily a one-prong approach, or I don't think it has to be one or the other. I think it's very much combined. I do think that you can get better results in doing what I do, which is reach off-market sellers, and particularly I love probates because sadly, there was an endless stream of leads. You can make your initial contact with them, and then you've got really a warm lead to follow up with digital marketing too. So I think it's kind of the best of both worlds personally."

"So tell me a little bit about - I mean, obviously there's a lot of people doing probate marketing. You've been doing this for a long time. I'd love to learn a little bit more about the process that you use for that. Like, where does the list come from? What have you tested in terms of the mail pieces you're using? Why is it that you say that direct mail is the best way to reach those people as opposed to, let's just say, cold calling or texting, which seemed to be really popular recently, or TV commercials or whatever the case is? I just love to understand a little bit more about that. And specifically, I mean, I'm assuming that most people listening to this have probably done some level of marketing to probate before."

"I don't think so. I think most people, most investors I have found, are not doing probates, and it's because of their own mindset. You see, in the probate process, somebody passes away, and then there are certain legal things that happen, like the personal representative is appointed, and then that property in the estate can be sold. But they're thinking that they're somehow going to have to deal with all this sadness and all of that, when in reality, if a house is in probate, it's got to be sold unless it's directly inherited. That property is going to be sold in order to close the estate.

So the family, the executor or the administrator - jointly called the personal representative - they have the business of settling the estate to take care of. There's - you have to get a federal tax ID number, it's a whole process. So it's not a matter of if they're going to sell the property, it's just a matter of when they're going to sell it. And most people will take care of that within the first year or two. They may not open the probate the first month or two somebody has passed away, it may take them six or eight months, but then once they open the probate, the clock starts ticking and they need to move forward with the process of selling this house.

Investors think, mistakenly, that there's going to be a huge amount of competition, and that's just not the case. Because if you think of - I don't know, where are you located, Brandon?"

"Salt Lake City, Utah."

"So, and if you are in a - depending on what your population is will depend on how many leads you have. And so you're comparatively - if you're doing deals on the MLS, however you're getting, doing that, you're going to have much less competition working any type of off-market deal. So that's number one.

Number two, you mentioned about the marketing piece and why don't you just cold call them or something like that. Because it's a very sensitive situation, and if Brandon cold calls a probate, 99% of them are going to put your name up on a wall and throw darts at it because you've just been insensitive to the fact that they've lost someone. They hate it when you cold call them as your first point of contact. Don't knock on their door, but use another form of marketing.

Now I know from doing this since 2008 that they have to go through a mental process themselves. They have to settle this estate, it's a required legal procedure if it's in probate. But they need to take a little time oftentimes to get this moving. And when you can send them a direct mail piece and then say, 'You know, here's what I do. I'll be here when you're ready,' they will get back with you.

Now, back to your point of digital marketing and the other contacts - once they have called you, even if they have said, 'I'm not quite ready to sell the property, but I'll be interested at some point,' then they've just opened up the door for other avenues of contact. Once they've called you, then you can generally speaking, you can call them, you can text them and check in, you can do other forms of digital marketing. But there is a process with this particular niche.

And with other types of off-market deals, let's say absentee owners or code violations, whatever, you can 100% cold call, you can 100% use digital marketing. This is a little bit different niche, which is what makes it so different.

Now you ask about getting the leads. In the U.S., there are over 3,300 counties, so there's no one central place for getting them like if you are a realtor, you've got the MLS. But you have to figure out where the leads can be gotten in your area. They're always going to be sourced locally. Now in my area, they're in the newspaper once a month. They're in the newspaper, they are not online in a portal where you can pull them. If you're in Dallas, if you're in Chicago, you can just go online and Google - you know, they're online. And so how you figure out if they're in your area, if they're online, is you would Google 'Salt Lake City' plus the plus sign 'probate,' your county and the plus sign 'probate,' and just see if they come up, if there's a portal where they come up.

They may be in the newspaper, which I know sounds really old school, but trust me, most people just quit right there. They're going to give up on these leads. And if you stop and think about it a minute, I don't know what your population is in Salt Lake City. So here we're like less than a million, maybe million-ish with the outlying counties. What are you, Brandon?"

"A little bit over 2 million."

"Okay, so let's say in your business, you have two million. If I'm getting - by the time we would sort through the leads and take out the ones we knew were too low, they were areas we didn't want, or the houses were simply too expensive, they were going to be sold on the MLS for sure - we would get between 60 and 100 leads a month, 120. In your area, that number would be probably about double that.

Now those are just leads this month. Guess what? Next month you're going to get the same amount, and the month after that you're going to get the same amount. So it is literally a never-ending stream of leads where you can build on this momentum month after month after month. You begin to build a list, and you've got this group of very valuable sellers because they have to sell the property. It's not a 'maybe one day I'll want to sell.' That's not the case."

"Yeah, and I think that takes - it also takes a certain level of patience. I actually had a call with a client a couple months ago where we were going through their leads and what they had in their pipeline and stuff like that, and they're like, 'Oh yeah, on this one we got into - or we got into contract, but it's a probate one so it doesn't really count,' because they were basically thinking like, 'Oh, it's not going to close for' - not true at all. And I looked at it like, okay, well, it's still worth something. You know, maybe those deals are a little bit slower on average, but do you have any metrics to represent cash conversion cycles in probate compared to other specific niches for off-market properties? I'm curious how it actually varies on average."

"Well, I think there - overall they're good leads. I can't give you any absolute conversion numbers, but I can tell you this: that these people - you say there is not going to close for a while. Well, if you look at many forms of marketing, whether it's direct mail or whatever it is, you have to have so many touches before people respond. With direct mail marketing, you'll get 81% of your deals - not your calls, but your deals - at or beyond the fifth month.

So once they've made their contact with you and you start to layer up your marketing efforts, then that number builds on there. So stop and think about this for a minute. You're building - if you've ever read the book 'The Compound Effect,' it's you do this this month, and then it builds on next month, and it builds on next month, till in a year you've got this fabulous machine built. And that's the way it is when you start the path with the - and start with direct mail marketing.

Every - after five months, everybody - somebody's going to be in the fifth month, they're going to be way more motivated. You likely will have spoken to them, you'll have other avenues like digital marketing to get in front of them. It's very hard, I have found, to convert a probate lead from like an ad. It's - I'm not going to say you can't do it, but you can do - often do it through your website if you're putting out marketing and then you have a probate page on your website. They're looking for some evidence that you actually know what you're doing.

So I think there's a point at which all of these different things come together and they - you know, they kind of marry each other. But I think you do need a little bit of patience, but once that machine gets built - everybody works on a different timeline too. There are people that open the estate next week, and in Kentucky, as with many, many states around the country, this is just a regular deal. That someone passes away, the estate is open, and boom, you can buy the property.

Because what happens next is that once that property is sold, the creditors are paid, then the heirs get what's left. Then and only then do people get what they're going to inherit. So they're very motivated to keep this process moving along. Now people mistakenly think the estate has to be closed, and that's when you buy the property. But guess what? It's all over then. So it's roughly as soon as they open the estate, you know, within a very short period of time you can buy the property."

"Yeah, that's super interesting. And very interesting statistic that you shared - 81% of the deals will close five months or longer after the mail is sent, as I understand that."

"No, they'll be gotten - that like the contract will be signed. So 81% of your deals, you'll get the contract at that fifth month or beyond."

"Oh, really? The contract, not even the deal. So that that even extends it further."

"Here, no, here it's a regular closing, and for an investor, it's next week or two weeks. It's the same as any other deal. Now if you're in the state of California, God bless you, because they have a lot of different rules, appraisals and things like that. But if you're in most states around the country, just think of it as a regular deal, a regular off-market deal. The triggering event is when the probate is opened, and that's when those people are raising their hands and they're saying, 'I'm ready to sell the property. We're ready to move this process forward.'

Now as I said, it might take them a couple of months because they've got to deal with things like belongings in the house and things like that. But there - that's the triggering event when they open the estate."

"Very interesting. And if it's not too much to ask, where did those - I'm curious where that number came from. Is that just direct mail as a whole, as referenced in the industry more generally, or is that specific to some of your own marketing that you've done?"

"It was - it was a statistic put out by the Sales and Marketing Council, and it was directly attributed to real estate as well as other things. Direct mail seems to be pretty much across all genres a pretty steady statistic. And it's curious to think in this age of digital marketing that people are not doing an either/or, they're - they're finding a way to marry the two together because it makes them so much more powerful.

As I said, these people, they've been through a hard time, but they've got this job to do. They've got this estate to settle. But the last thing they want you to do is cold call them or knock on their door. That they think is really insensitive. So don't do that."

"Yes, understood. I've heard the same about the divorce list. You don't want to cold call those people. It doesn't end super well."

"Yeah, although you can. It's just - you can, but yeah, there are better ways."

"Fair enough. And I'm curious on that - sorry for digging maybe even a little bit too deep into this. I'm really curious to hear - so when it comes to cold calling probate lists instead of direct mail, obviously it's a little bit more sensitive to do the direct mail, and you'd probably get less angry hang-ups and stuff like that. But do you have any data available as to the relative effectiveness of either one? Because what I've heard, for example, when it comes to like cold calling the divorce list, you're gonna have a lot of nasty conversations, but you'll still do deals. It's still worth it. People just aren't happy about it sometimes. How do you feel about that?"

"Here's my take on it. Real estate and in general real estate investing, it's a relationship business. And if you start off trying to build a relationship by hurting someone, doing something hurtful to them - and cold calling somebody who's just buried their relative is hurtful to them - to say, 'Hey, I want to buy that property that's become available.' What you're saying - what they're hearing is, 'I want to buy your mom's property' or 'your dad's property. They passed away and I want to get first in line and grab up their property.' They conjure up these things in their mind, but that's what they're hearing. They're not hearing, 'I'm a helpful resource,' which you can convey in better ways.

Now, people - I have students that have tried cold calling them. I've tried everything. It did not end well, and they've tried it, and they'll come back and they'll confess. It's really funny. They'll come back and they'll confess, 'I didn't listen. I cold called them. I thought I was in the area. I knocked on the door. They called me names I can't repeat.' And so - but for me, it's just not worth it. It's - I know that I know that the other approach works, and I know that the best mail piece that works - if you're going to do direct mail and then combine that with digital marketing - the best initial mail piece to use is a white computer-generated mail merge letter.

They don't want to get a postcard and look at it. It says, 'This is about the estate of your dad,' and this got his name on it. They're offended by that. So if you said - they don't necessarily - they - I mean, you got to stop and think, get into the mindset of these people, what they've been through. And that's part of the beauty of probates is that you can - if you can understand how they feel and put that - your marketing into a format that they can deal with, they're much more likely to choose you.

Because remember, marketing is how you get leads, but branding is why they choose you. So this is kind of a case of branding yourself poorly in their mind because you were not - you didn't really focus on the situation that they're in, if that makes sense to you.

So if you use a letter that says, 'Dear Brandon, I'm contacting you about the estate of' and the person's name, and here's the address, and then you say, 'This is what we do, this is how we can help you.' If one of your hang-ups is cleaning out the property - take what you want, leave the rest, and we'll take care of it for you. Because that's a very painful thing for a lot of people to do, to get rid of their dad's possessions that have no monetary value.

Once they've taken what they want, then they've got to deal with, 'I've got to throw away my dad's stuff.' It's an emotional thing for them. So if you can take that off the plate, figure that in your offer - somebody to come clean out the house - then you take that off the plate. That's often the stumbling block for them just saying, 'Here, you can have the property.'

So - but it - but again, if this is very - it's a different niche in that there are feelings involved. We're real genuine feelings involved. But it's a great lead source though."

"Yeah, I get it. But while you could generate leads with the wrong kind of branding, it'd be much harder to close those leads than if you can kind of speak to them the way that they want to be spoken to, especially because this could be like a slow relationship at first where like, it's not the right time when they first get your first mail piece, but it's going to take - it's going to take a continual exposure.

"What about situations where you've seen that this type of marketing to probate lists hasn't been successful? Like certain types of markets, certain states that have different laws, maybe just depend on the size of the market, or could it depend on competition? I'm just curious about the negatives that you've seen and any patterns you're able to track as to like, this is when this is a good idea, and this is when it's not."

"I think - I don't think it's ever a bad idea. I think because they're - the leads are sourced differently in areas. If you're in certain part - like I said, California has a lot of different rules. They will get the court involved as far as they'll get the property appraised, they'll do all of these crazy things, and maybe they'll just look at the tax assessor site and say, 'Well, it says it's worth two million dollars. We'll just call it 2 million,' when maybe it hasn't been updated in 35 years.

If you - so that's one area that I know people told me time and time again it's harder to do probates. It's definitely not impossible, but people - you have to learn what the rules are in your state. Now, ninety percent of the things will be the same, the process will be the same, but getting the leads - if you're in certain places in Florida, I had a student in Fort Lauderdale, he had to go to the courthouse. Well, that's totally not scalable unless you can get someone to do that for you, to go pull those leads. If you're in New Jersey, same thing.

So that's when I said if they're online - and they are online in a lot of places - you can pull the list completely free. You can get paid leads from some companies. I've not always been a fan because they often pull information from obituaries, which is just the deceased name, and then they'll find the address of the property. It's not really a good marketing strategy to send mail pieces to the property of someone who's deceased because no one else lives there in most cases unless it's a spouse. So it's a very poor use of resources.

And if somebody says to you, 'Oh, these leads are so fresh we don't have all the information,' that means they're working obituaries. Now there are some places that have the - you can buy the leads, they're super expensive. I mean super expensive. So if you can get them in your area, if there's a way for them to be pulled out online, then even a lot of the programs people are familiar with to get off-market leads and do different types of marketing too, you know, you - they - you can get them through list serve services. But that's not the case in many areas.

So I would say the downside is generally if you're in an area where the leads are hard to source and not scalable. Not scalable - it needs to be scalable."

"Yeah, yeah, I understand. Although I would assume - I don't - I mean, this is just a hypothesis. Maybe you have data to support this, maybe not, and maybe you do, but it's anecdotal. But I would assume those places where you have to like go to the courthouse and pull those records or something, they're harder to get, but when you get them, it's - they are significantly less competitive versus like a market that's maybe huge and it's all online and all of your competition has the same leads."

"Exactly. So there are - people I've had that I've worked with that did that, and what they would do was they would create a process. These are the - you really only need four pieces of information to work with probates, and that's the name and address of the deceased and the name and address of the personal representative. And then from there, you would hope to get, you know, email addresses and other ways that you could, you know, have a way to reach them online. But you only need those four pieces of information.

And the people that I have seen do this successfully, they have created the process like go to the courthouse, this is how you get the records for the month of May 2023. And then once they had their process down, then they would hire someone - much more affordable person - that would be their job to go once a week or once a month, whenever the leads were put out, and pull that information.

But you've got that 100% right. And another reason probates are such a great niche is most people, they just - they're looking for the Easy Button, Brandon. They're not willing to do even a little bit of work that's not push button to get these leads. And once you realize that these people really need to sell their property and there's very little competition compared to on the MLS, the difference is huge. I mean, two handfuls of competitors.

The other statistic is that 90% of your perceived competition will quit a direct mail only before the third mailing. So stick it out for the - you know, they come in and they don't make a million dollars in the first two months. They don't understand how this works. They don't understand how to combine digital marketing with, you know, how to contact them once they've made that initial call to them. That opens the door for other forms of communication, and you can also say to them, 'Is it okay if I do X, Y, and Z kind of keep in touch with you?' And most people, they live in a digital world and they're okay with that."

"Yeah, I understand. That is really neat and kind of exactly like I expected. On the topic of scalability, I don't know if you know Jason Lewis by any chance. He's a real estate investor here in Utah. He's a friend of mine, and he has a company called Investor Machine that is kind of like a done-for-you direct mail service. And so they're - they're of course targeting all kinds of lists with all kinds of postcards or letters or whatever the case is. And I know for a fact that in many of the markets that they're in, they actually like - they as the agency will hire people to go to the courthouse and pull records like this for their company. So it's like - I don't know, I almost - I get what you're saying by not scalable, but at the same time, like most things are somehow scalable as long as they can happen. It's just - it's like difficult to scale, which I'm sure is what you'd mean to say."

"Yeah, it's just harder to pull off. And stop and think about if you're in a big area like Chicago. A couple of years ago when the population was 8 million - is bigger than that now - they had 800 leads a month. Stop and think about that, how many leads that is in one month. So you would take your little area that you work in and you would just work those leads. And remember, your competition, when it comes to this type of marketing, they're not really your competition. Most of them are gonna - they're not going to get started to begin with, and secondly, they're going to give up when they're not a millionaire in two or three months.

So you're building this pipeline of leads and - now I've worked off-market deals for a long time, and this is really the only niche that I haven't found that postcards are effective with. You know, most other off-market deals, I think hands down postcards are as effective as letters. You know, you can mix it up, you can do whatever. But yeah, so I think you're 100% right. If you're willing to put the work into it, you can scale this. You can set up a process, have someone else do it, and then you focus on doing what you do best, which is probably talking to people, closing deals, whatever your - whatever your superpower is."

"Yeah, that's fantastic. Well, thank you for the different perspective, Sharon. It's awesome to hear a little bit about another niche form of marketing because we talk so much just about the specific channels that I'm most familiar with on this podcast. For anybody that's listening and this resonated well with - that might want to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to get in contact?"

"Probably the best way is to go over to the blog. There's a link off of there to the podcast, and I talk a lot about probates and marketing. Those are some of the things I talk about. But the Louisville Gals Real Estate Blog, and then there's a link off to the podcast, which is 'Let's Talk Real Estate Investing.'"

"Okay, fantastic. As I understand, a very successful podcast. You're what, 400 something?"

"Four hundred and..."

"Congratulations on that."

"Well, that's fantastic. Sharon, thank you for sharing your time with me today."

"And for everybody else listening, I'll see you next time."

That concludes the entire transcript with all grammatical corrections, proper capitalization, punctuation, and dialogue formatting applied.

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Join Brandon and guest Garret Cragun, Bateman Collective's Director of Paid Media, as they debunk the myths around impression share on Google Ads. This is an eye-opening discussion on maximizing value, bidding like a pro, and unlocking phenomenal results for real estate investors using PPC. This is an absolute must-listen for anyone looking to supercharge their advertising game.

Bid Calculator: https://www.notion.so/bateman/Bateman-Collective-Bid-Adjustment-Calculator-60f3dea236054935bd021653f872fd39?pvs=4

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

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"All right, how are you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing great, how are you?"

"Hey, fantastic, thank you. Um, we're gonna make this one a little bit shorter. Sounds like you got some Thai food to eat with your wife."

"That's right, lunch plans, lunch date."

"Yep, that's awesome. Um, for anybody who wants to weigh into the conversation, I'm basically arguing that Penang Curry is much better than yellow curry. But I think Garrett's a little bit of a wimp when it comes to spice."

"I am very much a wimp with the spice."

"So, if you lost all your respect for him, I understand."

"That's probably already been gone if that's what caused the respect, but I understand."

"I don't know, I mean, different people care about different things. For somebody that loves marketing, they probably like you. But if they're really into curry or into spice and curry..."

"That's right, yeah, same thing."

"Yeah. Well, I'm super excited for today's episode. We've been talking about this a lot, and this is a topic that has a ton of myths and misunderstandings, not just among real estate investors but also among professionals. This is a topic where actual professional PPC marketers can't get it right after years of their career."

"Yeah, which is crazy. We have to have so much internal training around this within our company, and I don't think it's that complicated. So, hopefully, we can distill it and get through some of those myths and really understand what's going on and make something out of this."

"Definitely, yeah. And, if that's not enough mystery and hype, let's make it extra buzzwordy: black hat marketing for you. What if I could tell you that with this one trick you could cut down your lead quality or cutting down your cost per lead by 35 percent? Experts don't want you to know this one trick about Google Ads PPC."

"That's great. Stay tuned for more. You should definitely be a copywriter for ClickFunnels."

"That's right. All right, let's jump into it. Okay, so this is all surrounding impression share, and really there's kind of this fun trio of metrics surrounding impression share. But let's talk about first, like, what is impression share?"

"In very simple terms, it's basically how often your ads show up as a percentage of the total number of searches made for the keywords that you're bidding on."

"Exactly, and it is based on your criteria, right? So, it's like when you're eligible."

"Right. So, theoretically, 100 percent impression share means every time your ad could show, you show. Versus 10 percent might mean that 10 percent of the time you show. A lot of people, when they first hear about their metric, they're just like, 'Okay, perfect, how do I get it to 100?' Like, that's their idea."

"Right. And they almost think of an agency like the role of the agency is to get that number as high as possible. Pump it up because your job is, for a budget, to get me the highest impression share possible. Where's that logic flawed?"

"Well, I think where it's flawed is that not every search is of equal value, both from the person making the search and from what's being searched. If they were all equally great, then sure, max it out, get as much as possible. But that's not the case. Different searches are gonna bring you a better ROI, and different people making those searches are also going to give you a different ROI. So, you have to maximize that value on both a person and the search."

"Oh, absolutely. And you have the other layer, which is the cost, right? Everything's gonna have a different cost of what it takes. It's kind of like saying every house in the market we should be buying if we're a wholesaler. That's not the case because you intentionally avoid houses that sell for too much. And if somebody else is coming in willing to pay way more, then you don't want the house. I mean, of course, in real estate, if you could just be really good at sales and negotiation and even though there's a higher offer you could win the deal, that's great. In this world of PPC, there's no such thing as that, right? It's just kind of like it goes for whatever it goes for."

"Yeah, it's an auction."

"Yeah, it's an auction. So, I think that's super interesting. Then there's also the component of only certain things are feasible with a certain budget, right? So, higher impression share generally correlates with more leads if the quality of the... Well, assuming all the targeting parameters are the same. If you could take everything else the same and go from 20 to 40 percent impression share, you do get more leads. Usually costs more money though, right? But it never is all the same. So, that's where optimizing towards impression share just doesn't make sense unless all your other parameters are there. So, let's talk about this trio of metrics, right? We have search impression share, that's one of them. What are the other two?"

"The other two are gonna be subsets of that larger metric. They're going to be the percentage of your share that you've lost due to budget and the percentage lost due to rank."

"Let's dig in. Just before we get any further into that, I want to clarify exactly how this works. So, these three numbers, if you add them together, they equal 100. All right, so you have your entire universe of what's possible, and you're either showing up or you're not showing up because of budget or you're not showing up because of rank. Those are the only three options."

"Right, it's going to fall into one of those buckets. So basically, those two that you mentioned are lost impression share metrics. What's the difference between a lost impression share to budget and a lost impression share to rank?"

"So, rank is kind of a black box from Google, exactly how it's measured. But the simplest way to look at it is it's a combination of your bids, your ad quality, your keyword quality, and your landing page quality. But the biggest factor by far is your bids. So when we say rank, it's probably easiest to kind of just turn rank into bids because that's kind of the main purpose of this podcast. There are other ones we've done where we have talked about rank from ads and from landing pages, but for now, let's just focus on bids as the main driver of that metric."

"Well, yeah, I think that's really appropriate because the way some PPC marketers would look at this is like, 'Oh no, I have a lot of lost impression share to rank. I need to work on all those other things.' But really, those other things are where there is no limit to how good they can be, and you should always be working on them. So I don't think this is a signal that you need to work on them. I think those should always be maxed out. So assuming you're always doing everything you can there, then the only thing left to change is bids, correct? I don't think you should just start looking at writing your ads in a relevant way the second that you have a high impression share last rank, correct?"

"So basically, that's bids. Would it be fair to simplify that and say it pretty much means somebody else is bidding higher than you?"

"Yeah, so you didn't show up because somebody else was willing to pay more."

"Yep, okay. And what about budget?"

"Essentially, if we look at your ads being active over a given day, in essence, is how early in the day your ads stopped running because your budget was used up too early in the day. So if you're limited by budget, that means that your budget ran out, but there were still available impressions to be captured if your budget wasn't already used up by the clicks that were captured."

"Yeah, totally understood. I think a good comparison to this is picturing going to an auction. In this auction, they're going to sell 100 widgets throughout the day."

"I love a good widget."

"Yes, I love a good widget too. I don't know why 'widget' is just like the default word that people always use for stuff like this, but I'm just following the trend. Okay, I can't say that with a straight face. I'm gonna use the word 'widget.'"

"There's going to be 100 widgets sold during the day. Let's just say the day ends, and you have bought 25 of those widgets. That is a 25% impression share, basically assuming the widget is an impression. That's what Google sells. So let's talk about how that could have happened throughout the day. Let's just say on that day, the average widget ended up selling for forty dollars, but you were bidding a hundred dollars for those, and you just bought the first 25 that came, and then you basically just had to go home after the first 25 sold because you were out of money. Now you've got the next 75 that may be sold for less than what you were willing to pay because you're willing to pay 100 bucks for a widget, right? So the next 75 sold for 40 bucks or whatever the case is, and you didn't get those. That's lost impression share to budget because you were willing to pay the price, your bids were sufficient, but your budget was not. Even though this is worth it to me, I don't have the money to pay for it according to my budget. That's how you set your daily budget in Google."

"The other side of that would be you bought 25 widgets during the day and you bought them for 100 bucks each. Then, maybe you had 100 grand already at that auction, and you're ready to spend 100 grand, but you're only willing to pay 100 bucks for a widget. But then 75 of those widgets sold for 120, 150, 200, whatever the case is, something that you couldn't afford. So you weren't getting them not because you didn't have the money, you had plenty of money, but you just weren't willing to pay the price on an individual level. That's your last impression share to rank, correct? Do you think that's a decent enough analogy?"

"Yeah, and what's important to look at here is that both of those outcomes aren't necessarily good or bad. In your business, you could sell those, you know, again for two times your bid, and that's a win. It's important as you're going through this process to understand that your success isn't based on the metrics themselves. It's based on how those metrics help you get to the outcomes in your business that matter. You can crush it with these metrics and still be in the red as a business. Likewise, you can keep those low and think, 'Wow, I'm so frugal,' and you're losing out on all this volume that you could be capturing at a good margin. It's not black or white like high is good, low is bad. It's more like where does it have to be to kind of maximize, kind of reach that top point of that bell curve."

"Absolutely, there is totally a point. To bring that into the analogy, let's just say these widgets—I'm a wholesaler of widgets, right? Let's just say I can sell those for 200. If there is somebody who is now bidding 500 on that widget and buying it, what's the best thing for me to do? Not get competitive."

"Yeah, I want to pay 600 when I can only sell it for 200. Come on, agency, get me that widget for twice my price. Yeah, get upset at my bidder. That's the last thing I want to do, right?"

"Right, the best thing I could do is say, 'Okay, that's not the price that works for me,' and leave. In that way, losing to the rank is actually sometimes a really good thing if it's the right loss that you're doing because there's always some fool who's gonna pay too much, especially in these competitive worlds that we play in, especially where people don't understand these metrics and how they work."

"You talked about how there's not really good or bad, but there is optimal. I want to kind of clarify that a little bit because it's not like we want a certain impression share lost due to budget or rank or whatever the case is, but I would say that we do. Lost to rank is generally not a bad thing; however, lost due to budget can be a bad thing because it proves potential inefficiency."

"This is where most people get lost, so I'm gonna try to tiptoe nice and slow through this, and I'm hoping you can help make this super clear to understand. I think taking it back to this auction analogy, if we're just remembering that scenario, if we're going through and buying, you know, paying 100 bucks for every widget for the first 25, and then the rest of the day they sell for five dollars but we ran out of money, how could we more efficiently manage that whole situation?"

"It'd probably be that we're bidding less money for those widgets because we don't need to bid that much in order to win the number that we need because we're just going to run out of budget anyways, right? So we might be better off taking that same amount of money and bidding fifty dollars instead of a hundred dollars, and then maybe we could buy 40 widgets with our budget instead of 25 or, you know, whatever the numbers would work out to. It depends on what other people are bidding and stuff like that."

"There are two metrics. I don't know if this is just too deep, but I kind of think of it like there's one metric that doesn't exist in Google Ads but it absolutely should. It's one that's called potential spend, and I'll try to explain what this means. I can't tell if you're smiling at me like I'm just gonna lose everybody or like this makes sense."

"No, no, this is what like a deep cut that people need to really understand. I really think this is the level. There are different things sometimes we talk about on this podcast that a real estate investor, if you're working with an agency to manage it, you don't need to know that, right? You don't need to know all about keyword match types and different types of bid strategies and stuff. This you need to understand. This is basic foundational economics of your business as it relates to PPC. I think it's really important."

"As far as most people get for this, they see, um, I can't believe we haven't even mentioned this yet, they see this big red thing in the Google Ads account that says 'limited by budget.' This is basically just Google highlighting something in these underlying metrics, and they're telling you to do one thing. It's not necessarily what you should do, right?"

"For those that can't see, Garrett, he's raising his finger as if Google just wants you to spend more money."

"Right, blow that budget."

"Yeah, but it's not exactly the way to talk about it, so let's make sure we understand the metrics first, and then we'll dive into it. Because it's not just are you limited by budget or not; it's to what extent are you limited by budget, and that can't be shown by just a red sign that says, 'Hey, you spend more money.' But this potential spend—when we're talking about potential spend, and again, this isn't a metric that exists in Google, this is one you have to calculate yourself or just even understand theoretically."

"I wonder if we could put a link to this formula in the podcast show notes. I'm totally down to do that."

"Yeah, we can link to this formula instead, which, as far as I'm aware, I've never seen any other PPC marketer even talk about this. In the whole world of PPC, I don't know why nobody talks about this. But it's basically, picture you have an unlimited budget, right? Infinite dollars that you can spend, but your bids are fixed at whatever your bids are."

"Let's just say you're in a target CPA bid strategy, and you're bidding 300 per acquisition. What you're basically telling Google there is there are two constraints: one, I don't want to pay more than this cost per lead, and two, I can't spend more than my budget. But in this case, the budget's infinite, right? So you're basically saying, 'Give me as much volume as you can without surpassing that cost per lead.'"

"With their standard model of diminishing returns and stuff, basically, the higher—this is like basic supply and demand economics, right?—the higher the tolerance for cost per lead, the more volume you can get at that tolerance. There is, with the limited number of people that search on Google and within your parameters for your keywords and your locations, etc., there's a finite number there. With your bids at that certain point, there's a finite number. There's auctions that you're going to win, so this is the amount of money that you would spend if you had no budget."

"For example, let's just say if I bid a hundred dollars for clicks and I could get 10 of them, then I would spend a thousand dollars even if I had an infinite budget, just because a thousand is all I would get to because other people are outbidding me or whatever the case is. But I wouldn't have limitations by budget because I have an infinite budget, so that's your potential spend."

"The next thing to think about is how does your potential spend interact with your budget. If you calculate out your potential spend and your potential spend is higher than your budget, then what you have is limitation by budget. If your potential spend is lower than your budget, then what happens is you're underspending, and people get frustrated by this because they're telling Google, 'Spend ten thousand dollars a month,' and then they spend five thousand dollars a month. So it's kind of this swinging game, right?"

"As you change your bids, you change your potential spend. If your potential spend gets below the budget, now you're underbidding. Now you're underspending, right? You want to spend your 10 grand a month; now you're spending five. If your potential spend gets higher than your budget, this is like the silent killer of Google Ads because what's going to happen is it's going to say 'limited by budget.' Everybody's gonna say, 'Oh, Google's just trying to get you to spend more money,' but there are actual viable metrics behind this that are showing, 'Hey, your potential spend is higher than your budget.' That doesn't mean that you need to raise your budget. It means that your bids are incompatible with your budget, which means that you either have to lower your bids or you have to raise your budget. But if you do nothing, what you're doing is you're paying a premium without getting the volume that should be associated with paying that premium. I hope that made sense. Help me clarify it, fill in the gaps."

"It made sense to me, but if I can try to explain it like a pleb, I will try."

"So basically, your account has a fixed amount it can spend, and the goal is to—and tell me if I'm doing this explanation incorrectly—this calculator's goal is to find the sweet spot between maximizing that spend while not paying a premium to get to that point."

"Yeah, it's basically, think of it like this: there's a law of diminishing returns, right? Companies that spend more money actually have a higher cost per lead. So if that's true, and that's aside from any data advantages or whatever the case is, right? So there's a lot to potentially unpack there, a very controversial statement, but let's just say we cut all that out and we just say, 'Yeah, if you have a higher impression share, you have a higher cost per lead,' and we have data that proves exactly that, like a very clear correlation between impression share and cost per lead. So basically, you kind of have to decide."

"Yeah, I want to pay 600 when I can only sell it for 200. Come on!"

"Agency, get me that widget for twice my price. Yeah, get upset at my bidder."

"That's the last thing I want to do, right? The best thing I could do is say, 'Okay, that's not the price that works for me,' and leave."

In that way, losing to the rank is actually sometimes a really good thing if it's the right loss you're doing because there's some fool who's going to pay too much, especially in these competitive worlds that we play in, especially where people don't understand these metrics and how they work. You talked about how there's not really good or bad, but there is optimal. I want to kind of clarify that a little bit because it's not like we want a certain impression. Sure, I lost you to budget or rank or whatever the case is, but I would say that we do like loss due to rank is generally not a bad thing. However, loss due to budget can be a bad thing because it proves potential inefficiency.

This is where most people get lost, so I'm going to try to tiptoe nice and slow through this, and I'm hoping you can help make this super, super clear to understand. But I think taking it back to this auction analogy, if we're just remembering that scenario, if we're going through and buying, you know, paying 100 bucks for every widget for the first 25 and then the rest of the day they sell for five dollars, but we ran out of money, how could we more efficiently manage that whole situation? It'd probably be that we're bidding less money for those widgets because we don't need to bid that much in order to win the number that we need because we're just going to run out of budget anyways, right? So we might be better off taking that same amount of money and bidding fifty dollars instead of a hundred dollars, and then maybe we could buy 40 widgets with our budget instead of 25 or, you know, whatever the numbers would work out to. It depends on what other people are bidding and stuff like that.

There are two metrics. I don't—I mean, it's not me if this is just too deep—but I kind of think of it like there's one metric that doesn't exist in Google Ads, but it absolutely should. It's one that's called potential spend, and I'll try to explain what this means. I can't tell if you're smiling at me like I'm just going to lose everybody or like this makes sense.

"No, no, this is a deep cut that people need to really understand."

I really think this is the level. Sometimes we talk about stuff on this podcast that, like a real estate investor, if you're working with an agency to manage it, you don't need to know that, right? You don't need to know all about keyword match types and different types of bid strategies and stuff. This, you need to understand. This is like basic foundational economics of your business as it relates to PPC. I think it's really important. As far as most people get for this, they see—

"I can't believe we haven't even mentioned this yet—they see this big red thing in the Google Ads account. It says, 'Limited by budget.'"

This is basically just Google highlighting something in these underlying metrics, and they're telling you to do one thing. It's not necessarily what you should do, right?

"For those that can't see Garrett, he's raising his finger as if Google just wants you to spend more money, right?"

"Blow that budget."

"Yeah, but it's not exactly the way to talk about it, so let's make sure we understand the metrics first and then we'll dive into it."

So, because it's not just, "Are you limited by budget or not?" It's to what extent are you limited by budget? That can't be shown by just a red sign that says, "Hey, spend more money."

When we're talking about potential spend—and again, this isn't a metric that exists in Google; this is one you have to calculate yourself or just even understand theoretically, and that's okay—I wonder if we put a link to this formula in the podcast show notes.

"I'm totally down to do that."

"Yeah, we can get a link to this formula instead, which as far as I'm aware, I've never seen any other PPC marketer even talk about this in the whole world of PPC. I don't know why. I don't know why nobody talks about this."

Basically, picture you have an unlimited budget, right? Infinite dollars that you can spend, but your bids are fixed at whatever your bids are. So you're bidding—let's just say you're in a Target CPA bid strategy, and you're bidding 300 per acquisition. What you're basically telling Google there is there's two constraints: one, I don't want to pay more than this cost per lead, and two, I can't spend more than my budget. But in this case, the budget's infinite, right? So you're basically saying, "Give me as much volume as you can without surpassing that cost per lead."

With their standard model of diminishing returns and stuff, basically, this is like basic supply and demand economics, right? The higher the tolerance for cost per lead, the more volume you can get at that tolerance. There is, with the limited number of people that search on Google and within your parameters for your keywords and your locations, etc., a finite number there. With your bids at that certain point, there's a finite number. There's auctions that you're going to win, so this is the amount of money that you would spend if you had no budget.

For example, this should say if I bid a hundred dollars for clicks and I could get 10 of them, then I would spend a thousand dollars even if I had an infinite budget, just because a thousand is all I would get to because other people are outbidding me or whatever the case is. But I wouldn't have limitations by budget because I have an infinite budget. So that's your potential spend.

The next thing to think about is how does your potential spend interact with your budget? So, if you calculate out your potential spend and your potential spend is higher than your budget, then you have a limitation by budget. If your potential spend is lower than your budget, then what happens is you're underspending, and people get frustrated by this because they're telling Google, "You know, spend ten thousand dollars a month," and then they spend five thousand dollars a month. So it's kind of this swinging game, right?

So, as you change your bids, you change your potential spend. If your potential spend gets below the budget, now you're underbidding, now you're underspending, right? You want to spend your 10 grand a month, now you're spending five. If your potential spend gets higher than your budget, this is like the silent killer of Google Ads because what's going to happen is it's going to say, "Limited by budget." Everybody's going to say, "Oh, Google's just trying to get you to spend more money." But there are actual viable metrics behind this that are showing, "Hey, your potential spend is higher than your budget." That doesn't mean that you need to raise your budget; it means that your bids are incompatible with your budget, which means that you either have to lower your bids or you have to raise your budget. But if you do nothing, what you're doing is you're paying a premium without getting the volume that should be associated with paying that premium.

"I hope that made sense. Help me clarify it, fill in the gaps."

"It made sense to me, but if I can try to explain it like a pleb, I will try."

So basically, your account has a fixed amount it can spend, and the goal is to—tell me if I'm saying this incorrectly—find the sweet spot between maximizing that spend, like maximizing how much of that maximum available, while not paying a premium to get to that point.

"Yeah, it's basically, think of it like this: there's a law of diminishing returns, right? Companies that spend more money actually have a higher cost per lead. So if that's true, and that's aside from any data advantages or whatever the case is, there's a lot to potentially unpack there, a very controversial statement. But let's just say we cut all that out and we just say, yeah, if you have a higher impression share, you have a higher cost per lead, and we have data that proves exactly that, like a very clear correlation between impression share and cost per lead. So basically, you kind of have to decide."

It's just that you're exposing a problem that was already there. So keep that in mind: if you have a decrease in quality when you change bids, it could be due to you getting results out of luck, not from good targeting in the first place.

"So let's make this actionable," you say. "I'm a business owner, listening to this, and I'm trying to figure out what to do. Maybe I'm managing my own PPC, but I think more of the people listening to this are probably just trying to figure out how to win in this game. So many people are so frustrated because they hear about all the success in PPC, but they can't seem to figure it out themselves, right?"

"So if I'm a business owner trying to know enough to be dangerous, trying to figure out what this means and how I can adjust my strategy according to this, let's talk about some actionable insights."

"Yeah," I reply. "I would say that the first step is to go into this episode's show notes, go to the link for the bid calculator, and plug in your numbers. See what that tells you, and that's going to give you an idea of how far off you are right now."

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In this fantastic episode, Brandon Bateman interviews David Olds, the expert behind a virtual transaction coordination company that has closed over $14.7 million in wholesale assignment fees! David shares his insights on transaction coordination dispositions and discusses where investors often go wrong in their approach. Get ready to learn how to tackle the challenging and essential work that leads to success.

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"All right, hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by David Olds. David runs a virtual transaction coordinations company that closed over $14.7 million worth of wholesale assignment fees for their clients just in 2022 alone. He sees tons of transactions, knows a ton about dispositions, has run a successful wholesaling company and many service businesses for Real Estate Investors. Today we're going to talk all about transaction coordination, dispositions, where investors are getting it wrong, and how do you keep on doing that boring hardware that's going to get you to success. How are you doing today, David?"

"Doing amazing. Um, doing actually really great. I missed it, missed... I missed our time a little bit. I showed up a little bit early, but luckily I realized that uh, that I was early and not late. Much better to be early than late. Doing amazing, yes."

"That's fantastic. Yeah, I can see you're one of the first early podcast guests ever. That is typically not the way it works in my office. I am like, 'Okay, I got three minutes to open the meeting, I need to go in there and turn on some lights and get online.' So it does not happen very often, but no, I'm glad we made it and we're gonna have a little bit of time to chat today."

"Yeah, and this is a little tangential, but have you always been that way? Like personally, I've been... I used to be like one of the most punctual people. Like I would never be a minute late to anything. Um, and then I got busy and was running the business, and then I started cramming stuff together, and then I became like the person who they're always waiting for 10 minutes after the meeting was supposed to start."

"Well, not that person, but I am the one-minute-before-it-starts guy. Like I've always been that way my entire life. Um, you know, same like homework in high school, like college. Like you know, I wait till the last minute. Weirdly, you know, and maybe that's just an excuse that we make to convince ourselves that I'm much better under pressure. You know, I do my best work uh, you know, at the very last second."

"Um, and it's weird because I would try to do papers like three weeks ahead of time and you know, maybe I would work out the outline, but I was always better like sitting down those, you know, at 11 o'clock at night. I'm gonna have this done at seven."

"And the other plug you can use... Have you ever seen the memes or graphics memes, whatever it is? Such an old guy on social media where it's like, you know, there are two people that marry each other in life: you know, the one who's early and the one who continues to be late, the one who packs a week before the vacation or the one that packs 10 minutes... I am that guy. My wife rides her out of her mind that she will be waiting. You know, I will go home and have like a seven o'clock dinner. I'll get home at like 6:10. She is sitting in the chair, full makeup, like everything ready to go, and I'm like, 'Well, take a shower, let's put dogs out, like it'll be fine, we'll get through them.' So I've always been that way."

"Yeah, that's funny. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are... There's something in their personality. Um, and I'm super excited for today's episode just because um, I mean you and I have known each other for what, uh, a year? Well, longer than that, I feel like."

"Yeah, maybe maybe as much as two years."

"Um, and I've always looked up to what you were doing in your businesses. I think that there's a lot of uh, I guess very few people see as many transactions as you do, and because of that, not a lot of people have the same perspective that you have, right? And everybody kind of has their unique thing to add when they come on this podcast, and I'm excited for what you might add um, because I think you have a, you know, a more... I'm personally, I'm a huge fan of data, right? I think the more exposure we have to the more scenarios, the smarter we get. Um, and there's a lot of people calling shots based on really small amounts of data, like 'I saw this once, therefore that's how it is,' right? Um, so I personally, I really enjoy talking to people that have like seen it over and over and over again and have that experience to be able to know like what's an anomaly, what's normal."

"Right, and that's weird because I'm not like... I don't feel like I'm the data guy, you know. It comes to Excel or Google Sheets, like the fact that I can get mine to add up or average, like I feel like I have two functions."

"Yeah, all right. Like I feel like we went and played basketball golf, and I had two shots that we used, and I'm done for the day. I'm like, I'm out. So I'm not like really great at it, but I am... I feel like I am pretty good at looking at the numbers out of the church. Oh well, this... if this and this are true, then this is your problem. This is where that, you know, where the flaw is or where we find business. So um, so yeah, I do love looking at the data in that sense."

"Well, I think maybe a better word than data is experience. Okay, because I mean our brains function on data, right? Every input that you've ever had, that's data to your brain. It doesn't have to exist in a spreadsheet. Um, and uh, you know, our brains learn over time as long as we're not horribly irrational people. Um, so so anyways, I'm excited to uh, I'm excited to jump into everything."

"Um, I think an awesome place to start for those listening that don't know you and what you do, if you could explain a little bit about your background, the businesses that you run."

"Yeah, just a very short version. Um, I've been an investor for 20 years, and when I started in 2002, it just started as my wife buying our first house as a foreclosure in Ocala, Florida, Central Florida. And uh, you know, we went to fix it up, sold it, bought one, fixed it, sold it. But um, probably like every other person who's been on your podcast, I picked up Rich Dad Poor Dad."

"And that led me... Well, sure. I get the most cliche thing and I'm like, never guess."

"Um, it's so funny. I still haven't read it myself. I've heard great things."

"You're the guy that hasn't read it. The one guy."

"I'm the one guy that hasn't read it. Well, but I didn't start in real estate. I started in digital marketing and then worked my way into real estate, so it's different. But sorry, you can continue with your start."

"So anyways, in the book, he says, 'Listen, if you want to learn about real estate, you got to join like a real estate group or a Meetup or you know, something like that.' They talk about if you want to do oil or stones, like how to get involved in those. But ultimately, it's you know, get around other people who are doing the thing that you want to do so that you see, 'Oh well, this is a real thing. People are actually doing it.'"

"So um, so I joined the uh, Central Florida Real Estate Investors Group. It was fantastic, and this is in the mid-2000s, long before information was available like it is now. You know, back then it was you joined a REIA, a real estate investment association, or like you picked the book out of the library. Those were really your options. That was the only source for education. There you know, YouTube certainly... Facebook didn't even exist. There were no podcasts like this, you know, guys like you bringing recognition to everybody."

"So um, so yeah, I just got very involved in the REIA and learned and just tried to absorb as much as I could. And you know, that just led to us doing you know, more and more rehabbing. That was our source of investing in the beginning. We both had full-time jobs. I worked for ProBuild at 84 Lumber. I sold doors and millworks and garage doors and windows, you know, stuff like that. My wife was a purchasing manager for Ashton Woods Homes, custom home builder. So we kind of came out of a little bit of this industry, right?"

"And then you know, 2009 happened, which was pretty bad. It was really bad. People that invest now are like, 'Oh, we had a crash.' We did not have a crash. We had a linear adjustment. A crash is when 40% of your value, 50% of your value in six months... That's what happened to us in Florida. So the market was terrible. Short version is, you know, we looked around at other places to go where we could invest, and we had a chapter see. And from here..."

"Yeah, we moved here. We knew... We really knew nobody. I knew one realtor kind of well. We moved here for real estate, and the market was terrible. So we started wholesaling. Wholesaled a lot. Um, started learning, learned how to do some owner-financed. We bought over 100 rental properties over a few years. And then you know, we took that wholesaling business when it's wider and bigger into other markets. Made some terrible mistakes along the way. We failed as hard as anybody possibly could and wasted money and you know, but we learned a lot. And I like to tell people I was just kind of too dumb to quit. And uh, and then about three years ago, we started Easy REI Closing, which is our virtual transaction. So that's the very short version, yes."

"Well, that's fantastic. Um, so as of today, what you have running, it's the... it's the virtual closings company, and then is that it or do you still wholesale?"

"We don't wholesale very, very, very little. Uh, we've moved most of those people that were in our wholesale company over to our transactions company. So and what that is, we are essentially virtual back office for investors and wholesalers across the country. Uh, we do all of their paperwork from the time they get their contracts signed. We take it all the way to closing. So you know, with your seller, collecting documents, yes sir, foreclosure, bankruptcy, tenant docs, like all of that stuff. We collect all that. We do the same thing for your end buyer, and we schedule all the closings."

"And what that does, that just allows our clients to go out and do more deals, right? Our clients are your clients, so that allows them to go talk to more sellers, talk to multiple buyers. So we have that company. We have a small coaching company. We don't do a lot a lot of coaching. It's more really consulting for some larger teams. But we also have our rental company, which now we... I did manage all of that myself, which was silly, for about 10 years, and a few years ago I outsourced that to a local property manager. So they... that's really... they do the bulk of that, and we just luckily get the checks now."

"Um, so let's see... the uh, rental company, the coaching, the transactions company. We also, because we've done some stuff, we were able to buy into an oil and gas company. So so I'm interested in that and a couple of other small companies. So we're a little bit diversified."

"Yeah, I understood. More is what sounds like an LP and in some stuff, but then... then you're active is going to be like your coaching and and the TC."

"Yeah, and then we're... I just came out of a meeting like three minutes before we jumped on that we're... we're getting ready to open a title company that's gonna... maybe not be nationwide, but operate in the focal states. So kind of got that as our next future big..."

"Yeah. I... every time I think about transaction coordination, I think about this uh, this conversation I had with Austin McCurdy. I don't know if you know Austin. He works with Sharper Business Solutions."

"Oh yeah."

"So you probably know Sharper. They just have like 30 coaches. Austin is the one that works with us. Um, and he tells us like repeated story of what always happens when he goes into a wholesale company and he finds the CEO, and he's like, 'What's your job?' and they say, 'Well, I've managed the operations,' and he's like, 'Well, there... there basically are no operations in a wholesale company. You have sales and marketing, and you have transaction coordination. That's the only thing that falls under operation.' So you're telling me the only thing that you manage is transaction coordination, and you're like, 'No, I do all this other stuff.'"

"Um, and but basically what Austin was explaining is that because the nature of transaction coordination is so different from the other aspects of the company, it's just this one little thing like the red-headed stepchild of so many companies because it doesn't follow the pattern that the rest of the company follows. Um, it's, uh, it is kind of ignored or not.

"No, no, I see some weird stuff. I've had clients where like Acquisitions is doing transaction coordination or something like that, which is absolutely horrible. It's like, it's terrible, right? So somebody uses somebody like you. We generate all of these leads, right? And, you know, so we're generally we're filling our funnel, and then I mean, let's talk about that. You know, in a wholesale company, you're gonna hire Acquisitions. You're gonna hire, right? Now they're a little bit different. Acquisitions people need to have, you want them both to be money motivated, right? Without questions. But your Acquisitions people, you're going to want to lean a little bit towards like higher end. Well, right, you have to have more, you have to have a little bit of a heart, right? Whereas on the disposition side, you want those sharks, right? Because on dyspo, it's a constant fight. It just is, right? Because who are we dealing with? We're dealing with investors that if they can knock you down five grand, that's 500. So they're, they're a little bit different personalities, but you've hired them for what they are.

"And, you know, let's just kind of step back and up a little bit. Whether you're a solo, you know, wholesaler entrepreneur or you've got some kind of team built out, right? You're basically the same personality, right? You've got that sales mentality, that hustler mentality. You know, I like to ask questions when I'm presenting to a big group for wholesalers. 'Okay, you know, who got in this to make a lot of money?' Yeah, who loves that rush of contracting the deal? Ah, everybody goes crazy. 'Who got in this business to solve title problems?' Literally just crickets because that's a different personality type that enjoys that type of work.

"Um, you know, you're probably, I could tell you're like super organized. Like you're, you're not the same personality type as me. But wholesalers are like, and like our accountants need us. Why? Because who wants to stop doing what we're doing to go look up this charge from four weeks ago that was, you know, $97.13? That's boring, right? That's not the personality type of somebody who leaves their nine-to-five job to go kind of burn the boats and go start a new business, right? That personality type that makes you successful being a wholesaler and allows you to talk to strangers and make these deals is completely at a 90-degree angle from a person who loves to do paperwork and solve complex title problems, right? So that's why, you know, wholesalers have come to us and said, 'Hey, please, you can do this. I don't have to ever collect paperwork again.' Literally somebody today is like, 'Man, I don't have to ever collect another obituary for the rest of my life.' We'll do all of that stuff for you. And because of that, we see these companies just have exponential growth because now they're just focused on sales and marketing and, you know, getting their contracts.

"And I don't know if this is an observation or a question or whatever, just looking at someone else's company and thinking, 'What the heck is this guy doing?' But basically what it sounds like is you took the worst part of the business and you said you just do that for people. And to me, that sounds like a horrible, like not very fun thing to do as a business owner. So tell me, like, what's going through your mind? What makes you think like, 'Oh, you know, all that like stuff that I hate in my business, I'm just gonna only do that for everybody else?'

"It's funny. Do you know who Corey Geary is?"

"Of course, yeah."

"Yeah, so I was with him in Puerto Rico yesterday or two nights ago, and uh, we were sitting around with Robert Wensley, who had nothing but amazing things to say about you, by the way. And, um, we were talking, and he said, 'Dude, when we were in Cozumel three years ago or four years ago, and you said you wanted to do this, I can't do it. It was the stupidest effing thing I've ever heard in my life.' It's the same thing, right?

"Well, so what it is and this is how most people, you know, how you build a company is to fill in underneath you with somebody to do the thing that you don't want to do. So as we grew, a couple different things. When I started, it was me, myself, you know, myself, maybe myself and I, no, myself, my wife, and my brother. And, um, you know, she did a lot of rental stuff. He did Acquisitions, right? Dyspo, and I also did the transactions. And what I realized is, you know, science tells us there are 24 hours in a day. More, no less, right? Math and science tell us that there's only so much you can do, and I really think you max out three, if you're good, five deals a month if you're doing everything. You're doing the marketing, buying, selling, the transactions, all of that stuff. So, you know, and as entrepreneurs when we're starting, we all know there are a lot of things we should be doing in our business, right? But who has time because you're a solo person.

"So one of the things that I realized when we started scaling up is I brought somebody in that could do transactions, and I was like, 'Oh my God.' It like, it made my life so much better because now I'm not, you know, tracking down, 'Oh, this one, you know, this guy got a contract, I sent it to the title company, now I got this laundry list of stuff to go out and gather up for them.' And it's never one list, like the first list only leads to like six more lists, right? So what happened is like I wasn't having to track that every day and every week, and I was able to just focus on, you know, my part of the business position. And then like wires were just hitting my account on properties that I literally had forgotten I contracted three, four weeks ago to sell because I had somebody that was their job. That was their only job in my office. In fact, we're standing in this room, the podcast room that was our old transaction coordinator office where we had three people just in this room.

"And so we got really good, and that's one of the things that operators enjoy is problem-solving. And so what happened was we were cartel bosses for invested with, and some of the other investors, cartel bosses coming to us like, 'Hey, how do I solve this problem? What's the monumental title? How do I get around probate? What do I do?' Those things. And some of them asked, 'Hey, can you help us close deals?' So the way that we backed into the company was that, right? It was something we were really good at. We had the people that could start doing it for some other people, and it's kind of a bunch of just things came together all at one point. And again, like you said, we realized that there was a huge, huge need for this in our industry, right? Nobody gets into this business to figure out how to do affidavits of heirship. Nowhere, you know.

"And, you know, a lot of people will say, 'Well, I just want to hire my Bill Jesus.' Well, that's awesome. You should go change your own oil too, right? Just because you can do something, that doesn't make it that you should because if you don't, if you're not good at it, how are you going to train someone to come into your company?"

"Yeah, or you have to pay them a ton if you're gonna have that person that's pre-trained. That's the fantasy, right? The fantasy is, 'Oh, I'm gonna go buy or get this, you know, former title agent.' Well, I just came out of a meeting where we're talking about hiring people at $90,000 a year, right? These are not cheap people. These people with 20 years, 10 years experience are not, they're not someone you're gonna get for 10 bucks an hour. It's just not. And you probably, you know, a lot of people listening probably don't have the need for that person, but for a literal fraction of that price, you can have us. You can just leverage our team to just work."

"Right. Somebody gave a great example of, you know, Dave Richter, like we're like fractional transaction coordinators. Certified case has a fractional CFO service. I'm like, 'Well, it's an interesting way to think about it, but I guess so.' You know, you get our team's decades of experience to come in and help them close your deals. And what happens is the biggest, the thing that I didn't realize in the early days when I was trying to do it myself, even though I feel like I was good at it, was the deals that were being lost. That title companies just said, 'Oh, you can't close that one,' because I didn't know the right questions to ask. I didn't understand how title worked. It's the cost of lost opportunity. It's Austin contacts that you canceled that you probably should, you know, that probably could have gotten closed. And I do believe, you know, of all the contracts that don't close

, it probably at least 50% of them should have."

"That's probably a safe bet."

"Yeah, at least 50% of them should have. But what happens is you get one of those calls from the title company, and they tell you that, 'Hey, you can't close because of x, y, or z.' And in reality, if you've got the right people and you know the right questions to ask, you probably could have, should have closed. Um, you know, and you and I, you know, you and I and others, like our job in the front of the business is to generate revenue, right? So I don't need to have an hour conversation about title issues on something that's not going to close. So that's the part of it is the cost of lost opportunity.

"So that's a really important point. So basically the value proposition, right? A lot of people are like, 'Okay, well, what do I get for this, you know, investment?' Well, a lot of people, you're giving them more time back, right? Because that's one of the things I didn't even realize until I got into your guys' system because I got to work with some of your team on a deal and I said, 'Man, I'm so glad you guys are dealing with this crap.' Right? Because I'm literally generating more revenue, right? So we're giving time back. You're giving bandwidth back, mental bandwidth back because all of those things, you don't think about it, but at the end of the day, when you are just doing title problems, title issues all day, it just drains your batteries. So they get time back, they get revenue back, and they get some peace of mind because they know this deal is probably going to get closed because you guys are putting your stamp of approval on it and it takes so much bandwidth out of my brain that I could go focus on things I enjoy."

"What does it actually mean? Well, so for us, I don't want to go into a market where there's not going to be enough cash buyers. That's the thing that I want, right? And I think you mentioned it already earlier. Well, I guess humans, we all presuppose a lot of things, right? So let me give you this example. If I went outside and somebody handed me the keys to an ice cream truck today, I'd be like, 'I'm gonna go buy me some ice cream. I'm gonna get chocolate and vanilla ice cream because I'm a fat guy and I like chocolate and vanilla ice cream.' So, I'm gonna fill up my truck with chocolate and vanilla and I'm gonna go out and start selling ice cream. I may sell some, alright? There are going to be other people like me, right? Maybe 25% of the world is like me, but if I go out there and people start saying, 'We really want pistachio. Why don't you have pistachio?' I'd be like, 'Because I'm allergic to peanuts and I can't be around those, but you know what? I will figure it out.' Alright, I would go figure out a way. I'll put gloves on and a mask and I would sell people pistachio because the point is you have to sell what they want.

So many times, as investors, whether it be wholesalers or rehabbers, we only do the thing that we want. I'm sure you've had people on here talking about rehabbing their biggest mistakes, like over-improving properties, right? Doing cool accent walls in the living room that they think are great, right? But that's not what the public is looking for. So, I say all that to make this point: if you're going to go into a market, do you understand what people want?

The data is pretty easy, right? With tools like PropStream, you can pull the data of all of the cash sales in the last 90, 120, or 180 days, whatever. I could pull all of those. I can very easily sort by square footage, by age, by price range. You can fool with those numbers enough to get yourself, 'Hey, looks like most of the sales that are being sold for cash, or the properties that are being sold for cash because that's what we do as wholesalers, are between 1940 and 1970.' Whatever the numbers are, right? And then you look at the range on square footage, most of them are between 1100 and 1700 square feet. Cool. And now I know that most of them are selling between 140k and 190k, right? So now I've got some data and I know that there are enough of those transactions happening in the market to absorb the inventory that I'm moving. Does that make sense?"

"Oh, absolutely."

"So now I can back into my marketing. If I'm going to do PPC, maybe I run that for a state and now I can see which markets are where the transactions are actually happening. Or if I'm going to run some type of telecommunications or direct mail, I'm going to be pulling a list. Well, now I can really zero in. I can go all the way down to the sub-zip code and say I only want 1100 square foot plus houses built in this range. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah, so I can get super targeted because your marketing dollars are like soldiers. You send them out, they cost you money, but for every dollar that goes out, I want them to come back with four or five friends. I do not want to just be spending money for no reason, so we get very tactical when it comes to this. And you know, PPC, of course, I know you're smarter than me, but for me, I can only get it down to a city or a county. I know there are people that say you can get it dialed in closer, but if I want to go super direct on direct mail or SMS or something like that, well, it's like a laser from space. I can point it in there and get a little bit closer. So make sure you're going into a market and evaluate it. Make sure there are enough transactions to support what you're trying to do.

So for me, as an example, I'm in Chattanooga, Tennessee. I know this market better than anybody. Like, we know how many wholesale deals we can put out per week here. There is a limit. If I pump out more than two to three deals a week, what happens is my buyers start seeing too many deals and they can't make a decision. So that's for 200,000 people. There's an absorption rate of how many deals I can put out into the market, so we will never go into a market that's smaller than Chattanooga. That's our baseline. So any other market that we go to, when we run those numbers, we do this a few times a year. We'll simultaneously run current numbers on Chattanooga and say, 'Oh, how does this compare?' Like, this is my baseline. There were 700 cash transactions in the last six months. Over here, it's a little bit bigger and there were 1400 transactions. Good. Okay. Adjust the spread and everything else, too. So we do a little evaluation, kind of back-of-the-envelope chicken scratch, figuring out if this is a place where we should be.

The other thing we'll look at is rentals and price increase. And here's why. Everything that we do is a function of sales and marketing and supply and demand. 100%. So there are a lot of markets where it may be good for a landlord but not necessarily good for a wholesaler."

"You're like, 'Well, that's stupid. How does that even make sense?' Well, because there are certain markets, I'm not going to call out anybody's market, but if we go into that market, maybe there's a 2% rental increase, right? So, rent multiplier is 1% standard. That's kind of like the off-the-cuff. I want a 1% rent multiplier, which means if it rents for $1,000, I should buy it for $100,000. Well, there are some markets where they want it to rent for $1,500. What does that tell you? Why can you buy something that's producing $1,000 per month for $100,000 in some markets but for only $50,000 down here? Because it's a supply and demand issue. There's more supply than demand. Makes sense?"

"Oh, absolutely. Cash flow markets."

"Cash flow markets. Thank you. Do I want to wholesale in that market? Absolutely not. Why wouldn't I? Because there's more supply than demand, right? So, I can't run up my assignments. It's not a great place to do $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 assignments. Great place to be a landlord. Fantastic place. Not a good place to be a wholesaler. Memphis is a cash flow market. Not a great place to be a wholesaler, especially virtually. Now, I will say all of that to say this: if you live in that market, you're going to dominate because you understand that. Going into a virtual market is very different. We could have a whole separate conversation about the difference between virtual and local."

"Got it. I was about to say because Chattanooga is kind of a cash flow market."

"Yeah, a high appreciation market."

"Is it really? I never thought of it like that."

"We are on fire here. We're the next Nashville. Let me tell you this: when I bought properties back in 2009, 10, and 11, like a stone's throw from here, a street and a half away, they were renting at $395. Now they're, I mean, I haven't updated them other than carpet and paint, and those same units are renting for $1,200. They've tripled. No, we're a very high appreciation market."

"Oh, that's fantastic."

"I have properties I bought at $30,000 like six years ago that are now well over $100,000. We're appreciating right now. So you want to be in those markets where, and the way that you tell the difference between a cash flow market and a good market, is if rents have gone up. Because if rents have gone up, it means there's pressure on the market, right? There's more tenants than properties. When there's more tenants than properties, what's going to happen? Investors are going to come in, buy the vacant houses, flip them, turn them into rentals because rents are just going up. So you want to be in a place, for me, y'all do whatever you want, for me, I want to be in a place where I'm seeing rents have gone up over the past four years. Also, you know, the Instagram crowd hates when you say stuff like that because you're a terrible landlord, you're just raising rents. You know, listen, we're in business, right? We're in business to do this to make money."

"Yeah, I mean houses aren't charity last I checked, at least most of them aren't."

"Eat me up on Instagram for stuff like that. It should all be our anxiety. Then again, a whole other podcast but that's hilarious."

"So let me maybe say this in different words and you can tell me if I understand it right or not. For you, what's really important when you're going into a market is the spread. The way you predict the spread the best is by rental increase, price increases because that shows that it's more of an appreciation market and appreciation markets have larger spreads."

"It's a very quick way of looking at it, sure. Yeah, 100%. Because if rents have gone up, that's going to tell you a lot of things, right? That data tells you that there's something happening in that market where either people are moving there, right?

And they're not buying, they're renting, right? Or there is a lack of supply of properties. So people are holding onto what they have, driving up the price. If rents are flat or going down, which I've never seen a place where rents went down, but I guess it's possible, maybe Detroit, maybe something like that, right?

But there's a lack of demand. There are places all across the country right now where rent has flatlined. You can do a quick search and find places where rent has flatlined or where they're not really going up at all, just minor increases, like 1% a year. You know, so there's no pressure. People are just kind of staying where they're at. So you know, there's no upward movement. I don't want to be in those markets, right? So yeah, you're right. If rents are increasing, that gives me some confidence that there's some appreciation that's happened, which means there's pressure on the market, which means there are going to be investors in there trying to scoop up properties because they're seeing the value go up. As wholesalers, the only thing we do is be a little bit quicker than them, right?

So, we get in, get the property under contract, sell it to them before they've had a chance to do the work because we're better at the marketing piece. That's really all we do. So, if you're going to be quicker than them, just understand that's how it's going to happen. I mean, that's my two cents on that. Does that make sense?"

"Yeah, it does."

"Yeah, understood."

"Um, all right. So obviously, getting the right product makes it a lot easier to sell if you're selling something that people want. What about finding those people? I talk to a lot of people, and I'm trying to give you a good platform to answer these questions on, like understanding who you're speaking to. Um, let's just picture I'm this guy and I say, 'Okay, I'm expanding into multiple markets. Don't worry, I got dispositions down. Yeah, I have an investor lift. I haven't left which, so investor lift and literally, I was the owner investing two diets ago.'

"Investor lift is the greatest drill that you're ever going to go to Home Depot or Lowe's and buy, like not even close. The next competitor is not even close to the data. But you still have to take that drill out of the box, put the right bits on there, and go do something with it, right? So, for honest, you know, here's something that I learned very early on from my mentors and coaches, and it was 'play every Ace.' All right, so what does that mean? I don't want to leave anything to chance. And the one funny thing about wholesaling is we're on a clock, right? The day you get that first contract signed, whether you're 30, 60, 90 days, whatever your time period is, or 10 days to get that deal closed, you should hear that in your ear, right?"

"Right."

"Like there's a clock going. You should feel that in your soul. So, you know, here's what I see people do a lot. Let's say you've got Investor Lift, right? Um, and I've coached a lot of my best who left on the platform here and privately, but someone's like, 'Oh, I'm just putting it on Investor Lift and I'm gonna go get five pictures and I'm gonna put the address and I'm gonna email it out to the best buyers list in the world because it is the best advantages.' Okay, great, but if you're a buyer, and Brandon and I have gotten these emails, it's, you know, because they don't adjust the pictures right. It's, you know, they make the shed in the backyard the primary picture and it's like, what? I've got to save some place, it's a rusty shed and this is an extreme example, but rusty shed and it literally says, 'This is a great deal, you should buy it,' right?"

"That's not marketing, I mean, I guess it is, right? You did functional marketing, but you didn't..."

"Yeah, it's not good marketing. It's true, this is not good marketing, right? So yeah, let's unpack a couple of things in there. One, for me, right, and I will say this to wholesalers and especially anybody new to the business, or some you know, 2019, 2020, 2021 got incredibly freaking easy because the market was so hot your dog could sell a deal, right? So what happened is you got people just throwing crap like that out there. But here's what I've always, you know, from the very beginning when I started this business, um, like I would go to eat when I was going face to face to houses and I would stand there and I would literally stand in the front yard and just look at the house. I'd look around and people are like, 'What are you doing?' I'm like, 'Trying to figure out the story that I want to use to sell this house.' Right? I'm trying to figure out what about this deal, no different than what we were talking about before, right? So when I'm looking at this house, like am I gonna try to pitch this to a rehabber? Is this an investor? It's kind of a double lock, right by the elementary school. I wonder if they could tear this down and build townhouses here, right? Who am I positioning this deal to?"

"So when that marketing goes out, I want to give every buyer who I can get to open that email, right? I want to be able to tell them, I want to tell them every drop of information about the house, right? Beds, baths, square footage, um, you know, ACS, but unfinished square foot basement, size of the yard, is there a bus stop nearby? You know, what amenities are in the area, right? Are you close to shopping? Because I have to assume that my deal in Georgia, I'm sending it to a buyer who's out of state. Can he sit on his cell phone and make a buying decision based off of one act? I would challenge most people to look at their, look at their posts, their websites, their emails and say, you know, can a buyer make a buying decision? Are there enough pictures? Are there enough good pictures, right? Are your pictures foreign? Do you tell your buyers how they're going to make money, right? Like this is all stuff we did before the little run-up that we just did. People just got lazy and now they're struggling because they don't understand. But you know, if you know, do I, I'll tell them, 'Hey, if you're going to, here's the average rent in the area. Here's what this one could rent for, you know, fixed up, right? Here's, you know, this is a light, medium, full rehab. Here's what similar properties that have been rehabbed are selling for, you know, they're selling for 280. We're selling this for 130, you know, maybe you need 60,000 in it. Here's how you're going to make money or hey, this is, you could make this a, you know, short-term rental. Here's how, uh, you know, here's what those things are paying.' Does that make sense? So we want each story because people are busy, man. I have 16,000 unread emails in my Gmail account and that makes a lot of people skittish, right? But if I don't have a good hook with a good subject line that's going to get them to open that and then once I get them to open it, I've given them all the information, well, they're just going to go, 'Oh, okay, click,' and they're just gonna, it's just gonna..."

"So the first step is like, you've got to provide good information. And then, you know, then my next thought is, how do I, how do I get my deal in front of every single person who should see it? All right, um, you know, so we've got a very, it's not super complex, but there are 10 things that we do on every single deal, right? And you know, Tiffany High, right? She says all the time, like, you know, making a lot of money in this business, it's not sexy, it's just doing the same thing over and over that works and over and over again. And if you don't have that system in place or you know that, okay, we're gonna build out the website, we're gonna send an email, we're gonna RBM, ringless voicemail, we're gonna do texting, we're going to do, you know, some direct mail, you know, we're gonna cold call, we're, you know, we're gonna do all these things on every single deal, you know, you're going to struggle because kind of where I started on all this and I don't want to go on too long but, um, I've seen so many people go, 'Oh, I'm gonna send out an email today. Three days later, oh, I still haven't sold my deal, hey, what else should I do? Oh, let me go post on Facebook, that'll work, I sold a deal that way, you know, last month.' It's been a week, still hasn't gone. Um, somebody said posting on Craigslist still works, let me try that. In two days, nothing. I wonder if I should cold call some buyers. All right, so what's happened is your time just starts to get eaten up. So what we try to teach people is, you know, when we launch a property and that comes from my visa retail, like we, I want a freaking shock and awe of our market, right? I want my deal to be every place, right? I want it on the, someone posting it in the damn bathroom above the urinal, I want it every single place where I think a buyer might possibly be. I want my thing there. So I want to be on Facebook, I want to be in the investor groups, I want to be, you know, emailing, I want to be cold calling, I want to be sending a text out to our preferred buyers, I want to be dropping RBMs, I'm doing every single thing, I'm playing every ace that I know works and what that does is that now, now what happens is you just start, start moving with some consistency. Now people will often ask, 'Which one of those works?' You know, I don't know, I guess if I put a different phone number on every marketing channel, like I could really track it. That's not the thing I'm great at. My goal is I'm just, you know, once I release a property or launch it, I want the phones in my dispositions department melting. I want so many inbound calls coming in that they can't get up to go pee. All right, that's the goal. Like when that happens, I'm very happy, right? Because I've done my job marketing."

"Yeah, well, and I think, uh, I think there's two advantages to what you're talking about. I mean, one is like you said, there's that ticking clock, right? So if you waste some time on this, then you have to do this other thing, you waste some time there. The other one is, I think it's, I think it's just as bad as someone starts with the email and then in that first three days they do

everything, right? It's like email, text blast, cold call, right? And it's like, okay, well, I have, I have a 30-day closing period, right? Like, we got plenty of time to figure this out. Let's spread it out, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, all right, I got, you know, and then so then like the next week, we're going to follow up with more cold calls and follow up with another, you know, another email blast. So I think having the plan that you just keep executing on is, I mean, it not only saves you time because you're doing everything you should, but it also, it prevents you from burning yourself out in that first week, right?"

"100%, 100%, and so like, for us, you know, we have a 30-day launch period. Now, I will say in full disclosure, because this happened to us, you know, so, so we use, you know, Investor Lift, there's another platform called deal details. Um, we use both. There's some other ways out there, right? So we had a deal we did, um, that we sent out in the morning, so it went out like 11:15 AM and by the next morning, the guy who runs our marketing team says, 'Hey, we have 11 offers in hand.' Like, it hasn't even been 24 hours. I think our first buyer came in within 18 minutes of the launch. Now, I'm not going to change my strategy. So we ended up, and people say, 'Well, why don't you stop?' Right? I'm not going to change my strategy based on one outlier result, right? Like, so we did what we did. We still launched every channel. You know, one, that buyer was, we took the highest and best, but, you know, let's say a buyer came back and we ended up working a deal out, you know, and he tried to re-trade us. Well, we've now done every step that we're supposed to, we still have six, seven offers in hand, right? So when the offers come in, people get all, get all crazy, like, okay, so now I want to go back and we want to find our, our most reliable buyer, right? Maybe the top offer is some newbie guy and he's already acting weird on the phone and I'm like, 'Ah, this guy might be a pain in the ass to work with, so let's look at offer number two.' And if I'm number two, it's from someone we sell 30 deals to a year. And yeah, it's $2,500 less, but that's my guy. You know, I'm going to make more money long-term, I'm going to build my business long-term doing that."

"Yeah, yeah. That's, yeah, no, that's, that's a really good point. And I think that, uh, I think just, just sticking to that plan, right? And being consistent, right? That's the big, uh, that's the big piece of this is, is, and having that plan too. Because like you said, I think, I think a lot of people, especially new, new wholesalers, right? They, they, they think, 'Oh, you know, I'm just going to get out there, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that.' And then they, and they don't really have that plan. And so when things don't go, you know, like we were talking earlier about the hamster wheel, right? Things don't go exactly like they planned, they start jumping from thing to thing and they get, they get distracted and they get, and they lose sight of it. So, um, that's really great advice. Um, Eric, I appreciate you being here today. Um, any final thoughts, any, any last, uh, last pieces of advice for, uh, for our listeners out there?"

"Man, um, you know, and again, I said it before, right? But I can't, I can't preach it enough. You know, get back to the fundamentals, right? Do, you know, if you haven't done a deal in a while, pick up the phone, right? Talk to people, you know, go meet people in person, right? I know this is kind of, kind of a new, you know, newfangled way of thinking about it, but like go out and build relationships, go to RIA meetings, go to meetups, go out and talk to people, you know, just, just get back to the fundamentals, get back to the basics. And if you're doing that consistently, um, you know, the business will come back to you, right? It's just, it's just, it's just a matter of time. So, uh, thanks for having me on, man. I really appreciate it."

"Yeah, Eric, thank you so much. This has been great. And, uh, we'll, we'll talk again soon."

"All right. Take care."

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In this fantastic episode, Brandon Bateman interviews David Olds, the expert behind a virtual transaction coordination company that has closed over $14.7 million in wholesale assignment fees! David shares his insights on transaction coordination dispositions and discusses where investors often go wrong in their approach. Get ready to learn how to tackle the challenging and essential work that leads to success.

Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks!

We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here.

If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

"All right, hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by David Olds. David runs a virtual transaction coordinations company that closed over $14.7 million worth of wholesale assignment fees for their clients just in 2022 alone. He sees tons of transactions, knows a ton about dispositions, has run a successful wholesaling company and many service businesses for Real Estate Investors. Today we're going to talk all about transaction coordination, dispositions, where investors are getting it wrong, and how do you keep on doing that boring hardware that's going to get you to success. How are you doing today, David?"

"Doing amazing. Actually, really great. I missed our time a little bit. I showed up a little bit early, but luckily I realized that I was early and not late. Much better to be early than late. Doing amazing."

"That's fantastic. Yeah, I can see you're one of the first early podcast guests ever. That typically not the way it works in my office. I am like, 'Okay, I got three minutes to open the meeting, I need to go in there and turn on some lights and get online.' So it does not happen very often, but I'm glad we made it and we're gonna have a little bit of time to chat today."

"Yeah, and this is a little tangential, but have you always been that way? Like personally, I used to be one of the most punctual people. I would never be a minute late to anything. And then I got busy and was running the business, and then I started cramming stuff together, and then I became like the person who they're always waiting for 10 minutes after the meeting was supposed to start."

"Well, not that person, but I am the one-minute-before-it-starts guy. I've always been that way my entire life. You know, same like homework in high school, college. I wait till the last minute. Weirdly, you know, and maybe that's just an excuse that we make to convince ourselves that I'm much better under pressure. You know, I do my best work at the very last second. And it's weird because I would try to do papers like three weeks ahead of time, and you know, maybe I would work out the outline, but I was always better sitting down at 11 o'clock at night. I'm gonna have this done at seven."

"And the other plug you can use - have you ever seen the memes or graphics memes, whatever it is? Such an old guy on social media. Where it's like, you know, there are two people that marry each other in life: the one who's early and the one who continues to be later, the one who packs a week before the vacation or the one that packs 10 minutes before. I am that guy. My wife rides me out of her mind. She will be waiting, you know, I will go home and have like a seven o'clock dinner. I'll get home at like 6:10. She is sitting in the chair, full makeup, like everything ready to go, and I'm like, 'Well, take a shower, let's put dogs out, like it'll be fine, we'll get through them.' So I've always been that way."

"Yeah, that's funny. I think a lot of entrepreneurs are - there's something in their personality. And I'm super excited for today's episode just because, I mean, you and I have known each other for what, a year? Well, longer than that, I feel like."

"Yeah, maybe maybe as much as two years."

"And I've always looked up to what you were doing in your businesses. I think that there's a lot of - I guess very few people see as many transactions as you do, and because of that, not a lot of people have the same perspective that you have, right? And everybody kind of has their unique thing to add when they come on this podcast, and I'm excited for what you might add because I think you have a more - I'm personally a huge fan of data, right? I think the more exposure we have to more scenarios, the smarter we get. And there's a lot of people calling shots based on really small amounts of data, like 'I saw this once, therefore that's how it is,' right?"

"So I personally really enjoy talking to people that have seen it over and over and over again and have that experience to be able to know like what's an anomaly, what's normal, right?"

"And that's weird because I'm not like - I don't feel like I'm the data guy, you know. When it comes to Excel or Google Sheets, like the fact that I can get mine to add up or average - like I feel like I have two functions. All right, like I feel like we went and played basketball golf, and I had two shots that we used, and I'm done for the day. I'm like, I'm out. So I'm not like really great at it, but I am - I feel like I am pretty good at looking at the numbers out of the chart. Oh well, this - if this and this are true, then this is your problem. This is where that, you know, where the flaw is or where we find business. So, um, so yeah, I do love looking at the data in that sense."

"Well, I think maybe a better word than data is experience. Because I mean, our brains function on data, right? Every input that you've ever had, that's data to your brain. It doesn't have to exist in a spreadsheet. And our brains learn over time as long as we're not horribly irrational people. So anyway, I'm excited to jump into everything. I think an awesome place to start, for those listening that don't know you and what you do, if you could explain a little bit about your background, the businesses that you run."

"Yeah, just a very short version. I've been an investor for 20 years, and when I started in 2002, it just started as my wife buying our first house as a foreclosure in Ocala, Florida, Central Florida. And we wanted to fix it up, sold it, bought one, fixed it, sold it. But probably like every other person who's been on your podcast, I picked up Rich Dad Poor Dad."

"That led me - well, sure. I get the most cliché thing and I'm like, never guess."

"It's so funny. I still haven't read it myself. I've heard great things."

"You're the guy that hasn't read it. The one guy."

"I'm the one guy that hasn't read it. Well, but I didn't start in real estate. I started in digital marketing and then worked my way into real estate. So it's different, but sorry, you can continue with your start."

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In this episode of the Collective Clicks podcast, host Brandon Bateman interviews Brady Stolzing, the Head of Operations at Bateman Collective. They discuss: Brady's background and how he came to work at Bateman Collective
Determining when to invest in scaling your operations
Common operations problems businesses face
Creating effective systems and documentation
The importance of continual improvement processes like auditing and issue tracking
The visionary vs integrator roles and how their partnership enables growth
Key software tools for task management, documentation, CRMs, and more
So if you're tired of keeping your operation together with duct tape, tears, and prayer, then this episode is for you. Thanks for listening to Collective Clicks! We're always looking to improve the pod: drop us some feedback here. If you're looking to finally unlock PPC as your best marketing channel, you can start with a free strategy consultation here.

‍

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm going to be joined by Brady Stoltzing. Brady is our head of operations at Bateman Collective and has a ton of experience that has helped him to understand what operations level you need for what point you're in in your business. We're going to talk about different softwares and tools, we're going to talk about ways to implement systems and processes within your company, and we're going to talk about the kind of relationship we have, which is something we call a Visionary Integrator relationship. We'll discuss how that works and how you can both grow the company and maintain efficiency at the same time. How are you doing today, Brady?"

"Doing good, I'm just happy to be here in person," Brady replied.

"Happy to have you out here in person as well. Tell everybody where you live usually," Brandon prompted.

"I live in Oregon," Brady answered.

"So, uh, I lived in Utah up until last summer, and my wife and I have been in Oregon for the last, uh, almost a year now," Brady explained.

"And Southern Oregon, right? By the coast?" Brandon asked.

"Southern Oregon, yeah. It's beautiful," Brady confirmed.

"Super beautiful. I know you have some land right near the coast there," Brandon commented.

"A little tiny house on it, that's right. It's a lot of fun," Brady added.

"So Brady's our unusual person on the team that doesn't actually live here and, uh, you know, lives in his sandals on the southern American Coast," Brandon joked.

"Most people just see me on the screen," Brady laughed.

"Yeah, fair enough. So that's why I'm super excited to have you here today. We were, uh, just doing some quarterly planning over the last couple days," Brandon mentioned.

"That's right, we had Sharper come out and help us. It was pretty awesome," Brady agreed.

"So yeah, um, you are... see, how do I describe this? If I died tomorrow, then I don't think anything around here would skip a beat, and you're the reason that that would be true," Brandon said.

"Of course, everybody's the reason that would be true because they have to all do their jobs," Brady interjected.

"You're the thing that holds it all together, and I'm really grateful that it's just not me that holds it together. So I'm excited to talk about that relationship and everything," Brandon continued. "The uh, the interesting thing is I don't know if any of our clients know you. I don't know if any of our partners know you. You're kind of the behind-the-scenes guy. That's what has happened, um, and really the, uh, you know, the better side of the partnership that you and I have together. So, um, for everybody listening, Brady is an operations genius, understands systems, understands people, accountability, all those things that kind of make a business work, and I'm super excited to dive into all that stuff today. Any comments before we jump into it?"

"Yeah, I mean, you're giving me tons of credit," Brady responded, "and uh, not giving yourself any. Uh, I mean, you're the mastermind behind all of this and the reason why I'm, you know, able to be working here. But uh, yeah, the relationship between us has been really interesting as it's developed over, you know, the year and a half that I've been here. Starting with getting systems in place and getting some efficiency and management in place for, you know, the different type of work and starting to scale that, and then moving into management of people and that kind of stuff, and taking more and more off your plate so you can not work until 10 pm every night. So I'm happy that you're able to have more of a family life, which is uh, definitely a good thing."

"I don't know if you could do it better. Then I'd say go ahead," Brandon joked. "So let's talk a little bit about your background because I think that'll set the stage for some of the value that you're going to add today. So tell me, uh, you know, how'd you get here and what were you doing before this?"

"Yeah, sure. So um, I started out... so, went to BYU, studied advertising, was working in digital marketing at the same time for an agency here in Utah as well, and um, they were starting a sister company which was... it was like a link building company, and it was, you know, just barely starting when I got in there," Brady explained.

"Yeah, and if I could have had some context because we talked about this before, but just to, you know, add some color to um, color to this," Brandon interjected. "Uh, you know, there's there's a few marketing channels that we focus on as a company. It's gonna be SEO, PPC, Facebook ads, correct?"

"Um, SEO, one discipline," Brady confirmed.

"Arguably one of the most important disciplines within it is something called link building, right?" Brandon added.

"It's how do you... how do you get links from other websites to yours? Google wants it to happen naturally. It doesn't in this industry, right?" Brady explained.

"Industries, it does a little bit more than others, sure. Sometimes you need a little bit of help, but you got to keep it within their policy exactly," Brandon noted.

"You got to keep it on budget, et cetera. So that's that's kind of what you're talking about. Your job was creating these backlinks?" Brandon asked.

"Yeah, so and backlinks essentially, it's um, it's like a credibility score from another site. It's somebody saying, 'Hey, I endorse this website. You should go check them out. They have good content. Here's, you know, why I think they have good content,' and you have a keyword that's linked within that. And so that's where keyword research comes into play, making sure that you're targeting the right thing so that, you know, when you start to search on Google, you show up for the right things," Brady elaborated.

The conversation continued in this manner, with Brandon and Brady discussing Brady's background in SEO and link building, his experience in developing operational systems, and how he came to work with Brandon at Bateman Collective. They delved into topics such as the importance of operational efficiency, the right time to invest in operations, and the challenges of balancing growth and efficiency in a business.

Throughout the discussion, they touched on various software tools and systems they use, including Monday for task management, Notion for company wikis, Tango for creating step-by-step guides, Loom for video recordings, and HubSpot for CRM.

The conversation concluded with an in-depth look at their Visionary-Integrator relationship, based on the concept from the book "Traction." They explained how this structure allows Brandon to focus on growth and vision while Brady manages the day-to-day operations and efficiency of the company.

The podcast ended with both expressing gratitude for their partnership and the benefits it has brought to their business.

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It's easy to fall into the trap of hyper-focusing on leading metrics like Cost Per Lead. We all do it! In today's episode, we'll dive into how to take a more data-driven approach that can help you follow the money. Discover the metrics you should be tracking at each funnel stage to maximize profits (00:00).

In this episode, we discuss:

Why ROI and bottom-funnel metrics matter more than cost per lead or impressions (02:05)
The dangers of making decisions based on limited data or small sample sizes (04:50)
Defining lead quality based on the funnel stage with sufficient sample size (07:30)
How to find undervalued leads by looking at what competitors ignore (09:45)
The flaws with only looking at cost per lead or cost per deal (11:20)
Real life examples of why you need to analyze beyond cost per lead (13:40)
The key funnel metrics you must track for real estate success (16:55)
Learn why solely focusing on cost per lead can damage your profits and ROI. Discover how to track funnel metrics properly to make data-driven decisions that maximize your real estate investment returns.

#realestateinvesting #leadgeneration #marketingmetrics

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by Garrett Cregan, our—I don't even know what we call him—our professional marketer internally, one of the best paid ads geniuses I know. We're going to talk all about the metrics that you're measuring campaigns by and how this can mislead you. We'll talk about different metrics that you should focus on at different points and why the answer is not as simple as you might think as to where in the funnel you should be looking for your optimization.

How are you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing good, how are you?"

"Hey, awesome. Excited for episode number—who knows what—of the Collective Clicks podcast. I think it's number three thousand."

"Three thousand. Okay, three thousand. Big day."

"Big day for us."

"Two thousand episodes. Yep."

"So today, the plan is to talk about metrics, which we do a lot. So if you're surprised, then you probably haven't been here before. But let's talk about specific metrics that people measure their marketing by because it turns out what you measure and how you feel about it really affects what you do with your business. It affects the kind of actions that you take, and everybody kind of has their own metrics that they think are most important for a marketing campaign to measure it in different ways that they optimize and all those types of things. So I'm really excited to dig deep into all that and find out what are the real metrics that matter and how do they interact with each other.

So, what do you think when you're measuring a marketing campaign is the most important metric to keep an eye on?"

"Well, I think it depends a lot on the goal of the campaign. Like, for instance, if I'm running some TV ads, then I'm probably not going to have that be measured on our—like on just a pure cost per contract basis because that's not the full intention of the campaign. That's not the only reason why it's active."

"Um, and so I think in part it depends on the goal of the campaign, but that's more of an aside and that's me talking as an agency employee, right? Um, but I think the—to kind of speak out of both sides of my mouth—I think it's important to focus primarily on the bottom funnel metrics. And by that, I mean the revenue-tied metrics because if those aren't there, then you're optimizing for the wrong things and you're going to get the wrong outcomes. So I think at the heart of things, it's important to have the core of your measurement be based on as close to revenue as possible and as close to revenue as that campaign is going to be tied to, if that makes any sense at all."

"Yeah, I totally agree. I think since the beginning of time, marketing companies and normal companies hire marketing companies—what do you call them? My clients, and this is what we would call them. Um, I think they've always kind of had friction on these specific metrics, right? Like, I think the most stereotypical example is the company paying for the marketing is like, 'Well, I need revenue,' right? And then the marketing agency is like, 'Well, you got a lot of impressions, you got a lot of clicks, um, you got a lot of leads,' or whatever the case is, right?

And really, the main difference here is that we're just looking at different points in the funnel, right? There's a top of the funnel and then there's the bottom of the funnel. Um, and that's kind of what you mentioned, right? You want to stay in the bottom of the funnel closer to revenue. Um, and you know, I've seen a couple people in different camps, and honestly, I don't think I fall like fully in one versus the other. I'm really curious to hear your perspective because you'll find investors that are like, 'ROI is the only thing that matters,' and while I believe that is true, I think that leads us down paths that aren't good sometimes.

Extreme example: let's just say you spent ten thousand dollars on one lead. That one lead turns out it closes into a contract, and that contract turns into a deal, and you make a hundred thousand dollars on the deal. It technically worked, right? The result is there. However, is that process repeatable and is likely to continue to provide that outcome? You're probably not going to find any marketing channel where you close every lead, right? So you probably were a little bit lucky.

Sometimes I compare this to like, let's just say we're talking like investing—not like real estate investing, but just investing in general, right? You have like an investment manager where their job is to make returns on money. So I give like ten thousand dollars to two investment managers, and one of them invests it in the S&P 500, and you know, two years later, we have, you know, what, 24% return, and it's, you know, 11% IRR or whatever the case is, right? And then someone else buys lottery tickets with the ten thousand dollars, and we just win the Powerball, and you know, now we have this like insanely high return, right? Who's the better investment manager?"

"If you're purely results-focused, then it's the guy who bought the lottery tickets."

"If you're more of a process-driven person where you kind of care about the underlying aspects there and like the repeatability and the sample size and how that affects things, then it's not the person who bought the lottery tickets because, on average, that's gonna make you fail, right?"

"So anyway, I kind of view it both ways, right? Like on one hand, the bottom of funnel metrics are the most important thing. However, I like to look at the funnel too because if you're getting those bottom of funnel metrics but the rest of the metrics don't look natural, then it's very likely that you're just running into good results but due to a small sample size. And that can be really dangerous because if you're choosing to double down on your marketing channel based on having a 10x return when that's not actually repeatable, then you're gonna waste a lot of money."

"Yeah, and I think—I mean, first of all, I thought what is the average cost per winning ticket from the lottery? Because that's making me really rethink my buying decisions because, you know, you make a good point. I could just put all my earnings into the lottery and it might be a good idea. But back to the main point, I think when you are looking at the bottom of the funnel, there's a few metrics that you have to consider in real estate to see if you're working off of small sample size or a skewed sample. And I think for me—and if there's any that I'm missing here, let me know—but I think that the first one is going to be the profit, right? Of like, of the fees that we collect minus what we spent on just the ad platform. The second is going to be the cost per deal, which is not going to take into account the difference in value of those deals. And then the third is the appointment to deal ratio. And I think if any of those three seems off, then you probably need to look a little bit higher in the funnel to see if, like, as that campaign runs longer, are those going to hold steady? And so you kind of have to look at the efficiency, the net, and the volume of your funnel to kind of get a really good idea of the full story."

"Because I can have like a thousand dollar cost per deal, but my spreads are 5,000 each, and that's not a win. But if I have like, you know, the inverse and have huge deal spreads but those deals can cost a bit more, that can be a win still. And so you kind of have to look at all of those metrics when assessing the campaign. And if, like you said, if those don't look very real and predictable, then you probably need to look further up the funnel."

"Yeah, what about—so really common talked about metric, this is probably the single metric that we're asked most about when people are talking to us in our sales process, which it makes me a little bit upset that it's the most common metric asked about because I don't think—spoiler, I don't think it's the most important one—but what about cost per lead? Famous metric."

"Yeah, so with cost per lead, there's a lot that you can control, which is the bulk of what we talk about on this podcast, right? Like things that you can do in your marketing to bring down your cost per lead and bring up the quality. Things like better keywords, better ad copy, better tracking, better page performance—all of those things can impact your cost per lead. But there's a lot that you can't control about your cost per lead that's very market-driven, not marketing-driven. Things like the size of the area you're targeting, the channel that you're working in, the number of other investors in your market—there's a lot that you can't control and that you can't predict.

So if you base your marketing on just cost per lead, that doesn't take into account the lower stages of the funnel as far as how are those leads going to turn into appointments, how are those appointments going to close, and what's the deal spread of those contracts. And if you're just looking at cost per lead, then you're going to basically always choose the channels that have the lowest cost per lead and don't always have the best deal spreads, always have the best motivation, or don't have the fastest cash cycles. So I think that's probably worth considering when looking at what seems like the golden standard of metrics when it misses a lot of deeper gray area that probably needs to be considered."

"Yeah, it's a really nuanced metric too because everybody defines 'lead' differently. I've noticed I've had a few conversations with investors recently where like there are like five different metrics that were pretty much used interchangeably throughout the entire conversation, and it creates a lot of confusion because we're not talking about the same things, right? So I really firmly believe that we need to like have some type of standard of, you know, what do different things mean? Because it creates so many communication issues, and I've noticed like the same person will say 'lead' but mean a different thing each time they say it. Like, 'Oh, in this case, I'm talking about like, you know, leads that are like, you know, really good that I can have an appointment with.' You know, and in this other case, I'm talking about like, you know, like the 'real leads.' My favorite word is 'real leads'—like, what does that mean?"

"Yeah, there's so many different—like that could be defined like 10 different ways."

"A person, an actual human being?"

"Yes. Um, but some leads aren't, you know, quote-unquote 'real leads' for a whole bunch of different reasons."

"Um, yeah, and I think people generally fall into two camps, and I don't like the two camps. I think there's like a middle ground that makes sense where like, there's on one side you have the really lead cost focused, where it's all about getting a lead at the right cost, and then on the other side you have this like quality focus where it's like, 'I don't care what it costs, I just want quality leads.' What I've noticed about every one of the people that's ever said that is they really care about what it costs too."

"Someone brought it up to me recently. They said they heard on a podcast, 'If you want Ferrari deals, you got to pay for Ferrari leads.' What do you think about that?"

"I mean, I think it sounds really good on the surface, and it's a great phrase. And I think there is some truth to it where like, if you want to get above market value, you can't pay like—uh, well, and that's probably like a bad way of phrasing it for our audience—but like if you're wanting high-quality leads, you have to be willing to pay at least what other people are willing to pay for it. And so, um, I think that's true. I think that you can't over-emphasize the best leads at the expense of volume. I think that's the only thing I would say, but I think overall it is fair to expect that the best leads are the best leads for a reason, and if you know that, then it's likely that other people also know that, and it's going to be hard to, you know, change those market dynamics too much."

"Yeah, it's funny because it just depends on who's hearing it, right? If I'm telling you you need to get paid for Ferrari leads if you want Ferrari deals, right? And you're the person who's way too focused on cost per lead, it's like the most brilliant message in the world for you. If you're the person who's already focused on lead quality, then you create some type of idea of like—we've even seen some of our clients where they go so far pushing quality up, and you can get pretty far down that road if you want to, but you get to these points where like your quality is improved by 20% and you're paying three times more per lead.

And I think everybody just assumes if your lead quality gets better, then your cost per deal goes down. That's not true. Like if you were to keep the cost probably the same and make lead quality better, then you're better off. But if you have to inflate the cost really significantly to get the quality a little bit higher, it just doesn't make sense, right? So that's where people are sometimes a little bit confused when I say that like optimizing towards return on investment and optimizing towards lead quality are two different things. They will get you different outcomes, and sometimes improving your lead quality and paying more per lead is actually a good move.

But there's a diminishing return on that, and you can push that farther and farther and farther to your filtering out like all the leads except for the one that you think is the best lead ever, and you paid a ton of money for it, but then if it doesn't close, you're, you know, you're not going to do very well, right?"

"And then I think that, um, I think there also is the idea of like the incremental value of an additional deal. If you're focusing so much on just getting those Top Line leads, then you're losing out on those more like medium quality leads that could help you get that next incremental amount of Revenue. And so I think that's where looking only at cost per lead and cost per deal is flawed because that's not taking into account those other metrics of the return on investment as well as the net profit of your campaigns. If you're so over-focusing on just efficiency, you can end up like, you know, being your Own Worst Enemy by actually under-driving volume and being in the red even if you have this screaming good cost metric. If there isn't volume, you still lose."

"Yeah, it's almost like the real only good strategy is just the one that your competition's not doing, in the sense that like that's where you find these undervalued leads, right? That's a word I like to use: undervalued. You know, as a real estate investor, you don't go into a market and say, 'Well, that house is worth a million dollars, I'm not interested at all,' right? Because if it's worth a million dollars, there's a price that you could buy that house at where it's going to be a great deal for you. Um, you could say the same about a hundred thousand dollar house, right? Well, there's a price that you can buy that house at where it's a good deal for you, right?

So it's all about kind of finding that sweet spot, which often depends on what your competition is doing. Because if they're just focused on volume of leads, which I seem to find tends to happen especially with larger companies where they have like marketing held accountable to lead generation and you have Acquisitions held accountable to closing of those leads, then marketing just does what they're supposed to do, which is drive as many leads as they possibly can. And then they say, 'Well, it's acquisition's fault they're not closing those leads.' And then acquisitions says, 'Well, these things are bad. It's all marketing's fault. They're bringing in bad leads.' So you have this like friction between them versus, you know, when we have just like a solo owner-operator of a business, they tend to be really focused on the quality because they feel like they control the whole thing and they have more the salesperson perspective.

But it's, you know, it really is a mix between both of them that you have to care about, because sometimes the way to win is actually lowering the quality. Like, what if you could lower your lead quality 10% and get three times as many leads? That'd be a huge win, right? And sometimes it's about just increasing that quality really significantly, and they both make a difference at the right time. Um, how do you find that hole though, like where where your competitors are just not focused?"

"That's it. That's a very good question."

"Um, if we're speaking more to PPC, because I think that's probably where our audience cares more, it's all about finding those keywords that you are seeing a better cost per click and a better return than your average. And I think that comes down not only to your average but also to benchmarks for your market and for your area, which if you want those benchmarks, they are found with us."

"So, I think if you know what can be achieved versus what you're seeing, then it's easier to find those hidden nuggets of value. But it kind of takes some knowledge of the benchmarks to be able to identify what's a win versus what's a less bad outcome."

"Alright, one final thing that I want to discuss that I think is interesting is how do you measure lead quality?"

"I mean, I have a thought, but I'd love to hear yours."

"I see you're playing a negotiation."

"That's right. I'll give mine and then I want to hear your better one. I think quality for me is tied to—okay, I'm going to hedge, but it's for a good reason. I think it's the percentage of leads that take the action that's nearest to revenue, and you have enough volume to have a big enough sample size."

"Yes, I follow that. I'm not sure anything—"

"That's what I would say. So, let's say that each month you get two deals, right? It's very hard to use leads to a deal as your number for quality because let's say there's a third deal that comes through and it's your next lead, then all of a sudden that looks like a killer metric. But there's not enough sample size to have that be meaningful. So, that's why I would say the lowest funnel metric that you have enough—and again, enough is so subjective, I'm sorry, I'm a marketer, so it's always going to be 'it depends'—but I think that's kind of the number. Whichever stage in the funnel that's going to be least impacted by the next lead being that action is probably where I would use to gauge quality."

"Does that make sense at all?"

"Oh, it absolutely does. It's the concept of measuring as deep in the funnel as you can with a relevant sample size."

"That was much better."

"Well, it's just a different way to explain it, but I almost didn't understand how I view things until you said that, and I'm like, wait, yes, that's how I view things. Of course, we care about the deepest in the funnel metrics, but if they don't have the sample size that's relevant for us to make good decisions, then we have to just go higher up in the funnel. It's better to have a high sample size with a less relevant metric than a low sample size with a relevant metric. Of course, that's a generalization because it depends on the sample size and how relevant the metric is. There's all those things."

"I can share a little bit about how we measure lead quality and what we've done with a lot of our clients. We put leads into different buckets. If a lead comes in, it's just a phone call or a form submission, we call that a gross lead. If it's spam or they're clearly not interested, like something like that, we would say that's not a net lead. So, you might have 100 leads come in and then you might have 90 of them be net leads. That's what I would call a real lead, you know, it's not like a fake phone number or something like that. Of those, you won't contact every one of them, right? So, you have some type of contact rate, and then you reach theoretically contacted seller leads. These are people that you've been able to get to answer the phone and they have a house to sell. Not every single one of those people is going to be an opportunity because some of them want retail or they're unqualified in other ways, like maybe they're just not in your target location or it's a mobile home and you don't like mobile homes or whatever the case is. Then you get to opportunities and some opportunities turn into contracts."

"The thing that kills me about all these metrics is they're so difficult. I could tell you one of the things that we've been running up against more often recently is pay-per-lead. Pay-per-lead is an interesting concept because what they're basically arguing is that you have to pay for net leads. If it doesn't meet the qualification criteria, then they refund you, and you look, and the cost per leads are pretty low. Sometimes when we're in conversations with people, they're looking at it and saying, 'Okay, maybe I could have a 300 cost per lead with you, but the pay-per-lead's 250, and I don't have to pay a management fee, and I get it refunded if it doesn't match certain criteria.' Then we look at it and they have a worse return on investment on pay-per-lead, and it seems to happen over and over again. I don't know what these pay-per-lead companies are doing, but it's interesting because you can have something still match the same criteria like an opportunity, for example, but be of a different level of quality. Some of it comes down to how it was generated. There's always a range of quality, and we find that most of our clients doing pay-per-lead have close to double the number of leads per contract as they do with their own PPC, which is a wild idea because they're supposed to be PPC leads still. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that or why that could be. I know we've seen some element of that between Facebook and Google, like Facebook generally requiring more opportunities per contract even though the opportunities are defined the same way. It's just the way that the lead is generated kind of affects the quality. That's something to really keep in mind because if you focus on any of these metrics that aren't just the end funnel metric, there's always some way to be misled. That's something that gets us even with pay-per-lead where you're saying, 'Okay, it should be a search lead, and it matches these criteria, and it's at this cost,' it doesn't pencil out for some reason."

"I think I don't want to get too deep into pay-per-click versus pay-per-lead because that's a whole different podcast, but I think that is kind of a case study in the value of looking as deep in the funnel as you can because on the surface it looks great. If I were an investor looking at just cost per lead, I would dump everything I had, my life savings, my 401k, into pay-per-lead because, wow, that's a screaming cost per lead. But if I were looking deep in the funnel, I probably would hold out on putting my kids' college fund into it because those numbers don't hold steady down the funnel. I think that's kind of an example of why you should look at the whole picture because what looks good on the surface might not translate as effectively into revenue. Looking at just apples to apples, that's more apples to oranges if you really look at how it performs deeper down in the process."

"Yeah, probably another way that it's a case study for looking deep in the funnel is you can see why we reach each of these metrics just by what the company generating the leads is focusing on. If you're doing your own PPC, it's closing-focused from the very beginning, and that's going to naturally just push all the quality levers as high as you can. If you're looking at pay-per-lead, what's the goal? Create the maximum number of non-refundable leads for the best margin."

"Yes."

"You can't blame pay-per-lead, but I think that's a flaw with the model. Their goal is to sell these leads for as expensive as possible and not get refunds. It's the only way to be profitable, and they don't have great margins even in the best of scenarios. I'm not talking dirt about pay-per-lead companies, but it's some aspect of just how the agreement is structured that naturally leads to an optimization point higher up in the funnel. Anytime you have a higher up in the funnel optimization point, you can expect a lower quality."

"Any last words?"

"No, I think this was a great summary of how to analyze data. I hope I didn't speak in riddles."

"In this, at the marketers with your riddle speak, a bunch of jargon to confuse the masses. That's me."

"Yeah, you just confuse them into spending more money with you, right? Is that how marketing companies work?"

"Yes, exactly. We optimize for up in the funnel, right?"

"Yes, up in the funnel of confusion."

"That's right."

"Yes, it's been awesome. I hope this episode has value for everybody listening as well, and I will see you next time."

‍

Debating whether to manage your PPC in-house or loop in an agency? We're here to offer our completely unbiased opinion (😉) and help you make the decision that's right for you. Jeff Meigs joins Brandon Bateman to discuss the pros and cons of managing PPC advertising in-house versus hiring an agency.

They discuss:

Introduction and welcoming Jeff Meigs (0:00)
Pros of managing PPC in-house (2:18)
Pros of managing PPC with an agency (3:08)
PPC: Time vs. Expertise (4:48)
Agencies can provide higher overall knowledge percentage for less cost (6:06)
Agency team size provides more data to inform decisions vs individual data (7:54)
Market shifts: in-house vs agency (12:30)
Removing agency collective data leads to worse results (13:48)
Common in-house mistakes: (16:30)
The importance of patience (18:00)
Final thoughts and advice (23:24)

So, what do you think? Is PPC better in-house or with an agency? Share your take in the comments below and let the debate begin!

"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host Brandon Bateman, and today I'm joined by Jeff Megs. Jeff is a strategist on our team and has worked with over 50 of our real estate investment clients. We're going to talk with him all about in-housing versus outsourcing your PPC, what makes the most sense for you and your situation."

"All right, how you doing today Jeff?"

"Doing great, how about you?"

"Yeah, doing awesome. Thank you. This is, uh, for anybody that doesn't know Jeff, he's one of our strategists. He works with many of our clients, and he's getting married really soon, right?"

"Yes, how long till the wedding?"

"August 11th, so it's like what, like a week and a half now?"

"A week and a half away, yeah. Soon to be the proud... I'm going from zero to four all at once, so there's a bit of a learning curve. But uh, it's... I'm super excited and really happy. I couldn't be happier right now."

"Well, so I was gonna rely on the rest of the episode to convince everybody why Jeff is a crazy person, but I guess um, I guess you all know right now. You now know you have to be crazy to be able to uh, to handle all of it, right?"

"Yeah, at once, but yeah, I love it. Love it."

"Yeah, absolutely insane. I couldn't imagine it, but uh, you do it with a smile and I guess that's how we would describe your job too."

"Yeah, so yes, thank you. Really excited for our topic today. We're going to talk about in-housing versus working with an agency, basically different ways that you can get the job done when it comes to PPC specifically. There are a lot of different layers of this and everything, and I know that you and I, Jeff, have both had experiences with this for better or worse, both ways."

"There's a lot of talk about in the industry. You're going to find people that are speaking really uh, bluntly about how you like must do this one way or the other. And I don't want this episode to be like an echo chamber. You know, obviously we're an agency, and being an agency, um, I do believe that it's better for someone to work with an agency more often than not. We'll talk about some of the exceptions to that and then also places where we might be wrong. So hopefully make this as balanced of a conversation as we possibly can."

"So, kind of starting it off Jeff, tell me about some of your experience or thoughts regarding like what are some of the pros and cons of going in-house versus working with an agency?"

"Yeah, it's... I mean there's a lot of debate about it, right? But I think there are some definite pros when it comes to being in-house. The most major one is just the amount of control you have over it. Everything that you do, you've done yourself, you know exactly how it works. If something isn't working right, you can either figure it out or look at it and say, 'Oh, maybe it's this,' and kind of go to work on it yourself. So a lot more control. I'd say that's probably the biggest thing when it comes to working in-house."

"That, and like if there's any adjustments as far as like location, you get it exactly right, exactly the way that you envisioned it and not having to describe it to someone else. Because that's always the difficult part, is the translation sometimes."

"But when it comes to taking it to an agency, I feel like there's such more depth when it comes to just figuring something out and kind of understanding it yourself versus letting like professionals kind of take it and run with it and saying, 'This is what we understand based on all this experience, all this spend,' versus kind of your own personal experience. I feel like it's really the two major layers to it."

"Number one is you have like you as a business owner do it, right? And you could technically bring anything in-house. You can cold call yourself as a business owner, you can cold text yourself, you can manage your payroll if you want to, you can do your own bookkeeping, right? Like you could... I mean that's a way that you can get anything done in the business. And then there's the concept of hiring in-house, um, and this is kind of that concept where you, you know, you have somebody and they're going to spend all their time."

"I feel like people that want different things tend to fall into one of these two buckets. The person who wants to do it themselves usually a little bit smaller of a company, right? I think I was kind of that way for for a while until I realized you can't actually grow a company that way. And some people don't want to grow a company, and that's fine. Like you don't... you don't have to grow a company to 50 employees if that's not your vision."

"If that's... yeah, that's not their version of success, then great."

"Yeah, yeah. So I mean, if you want to keep it really small, then you are going to have to wear a lot of hats, right? So some people envision like, 'I could be the PPC expert and that could be, you know, how I do things.' And then... and then other people, they just feel like they just want this person that they can see down the hall that is just sitting in front of a computer all the time, and therefore must just be making massive progress on their PPC campaigns, right?"

"Yeah, and I feel like there's a lot of things... um, not to sound try and sound too biased, but when it comes to an agency, a lot of things behind the scenes that really people don't realize that we do. Um, because we meet with them once a month, you know, maybe we email throughout the month and talk about things, and they think that maybe that's all that we do when they don't realize that there's so much... so many more layers to PPC behind the scenes too."

"Like doing spend checks, doing bid adjustments, um, you know, having all the integration set up so it goes to your CRM, making sure people are filling out the lead sheet that we provide to them. So all these different layers that when you take it in-house, you now have to try and either figure out yourself or figure out your own version, whatever you feel like is going to be best for you. But there's a lot of things that we do that are extra things that maybe they might not realize when you take it in-house. You could be missing a few key important elements to make that successful."

"Yeah, there's... you're totally right that there's... there's a lot of... um, there's a lot of pieces there. I think uh, yeah, I think our clients generally simplify what we do a