PPC Essentials Part 5: Exploring Location Targeting

"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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