The Truth Behind Duplicate Leads: It's Not What You Think

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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