Many Investors Miss The Mark On ROI - Here's Why

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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