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Here’s What You’re Doing Wrong in your PPC Campaign

61m 35s

Here’s What You’re Doing Wrong in your PPC Campaign

This podcast episode from Bateman Collective explores location and budget strategies in real estate PPC advertising, a topic complicated by the fact that a lead's location is intrinsically tied to deal success. The hosts present two dominant, often conflicting viewpoints: single-market focus versus national or multi-market targeting. Single-market advocates argue for deep expertise, operational efficiency, and better monetization of expensive leads, while national proponents highlight diversification benefits, resilience to market downturns (e.g., Phoenix during interest rate hikes), and lower cost per lead by capitalizing on underserved areas. The hosts stress that neither approach is inherently superior; instead, businesses must choose what to focus on and what to diversify, whether that's marketing channels, exit strategies, or markets. They illustrate national campaigns as a low-bid strategy where you accept less volume but benefit from cheap leads in markets where competitors are saturated. Conversely, single-market players must excel at closing and exiting to justify higher lead costs. A critical practical point is the need for precise targeting—like defining whether "Atlanta" means city limits or a radius—as vague specifications lead to failure, a common issue even among generalist agencies. Ultimately, strategy should be data-driven, balancing costs, monetization capabilities, and market specifics to find the optimal approach.

Transcription

12847 Words, 68322 Characters

English
Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the PPC masterclass of Bateman Collective on this episode. We're going to be talking about location and budget strategies. So, you know, in the previous two, we recorded about why PPC, why it's effective, and we talked about how Google works and effective bidding strategies. So today we're going to be talking about location and budget strategy. So I'm in the Phoenix market. So by default, if I'm going to start at PPC strategies, I'm going to start in Phoenix. Is that the strategy everyone does? It's not what everybody does. It is what a lot of people do. So let's talk about this, because this is like, this is one of the biggest things. And I actually found myself talking about this a lot, because even for PPC experts, this is a whole different game. Because like this just say you're in the e-commerce world, you're just like, okay, we'll target the United States. Anybody and everybody. Yeah, because if they live in the middle of nowhere, or they live in the part of Los Angeles, and they buy my product for $20, guess how much revenue I get? $20. If this is real estate, now the place where they live is the product. So their location has a lot to do with my success. So it's, yeah, it is like a very commonly debated topic. And the reason I'm so excited for this particular episode, is because I think a lot of people learn things, because there's a lot of kind of polarizing views out there. There's people who like push really heavily for like very wide geographic targeting. And there's people who push very heavily for narrow geographic targeting. I'm hoping to add some balance to that conversation by talking about like how they're both kind of right. And where you can kind of strike that balance and maybe, because that's, to me, that's strategy. Strategy isn't just saying X is better than Y. It's saying like for a situation, X might make sense, and maybe no different situation, why it makes more sense. I think we're a lot of people getting in trouble or not a lot, but a bunch of people get in the trouble is when they get dogmatic, and they're just unwilling to listen to the other position, right? We're not saying pick one, pick the other. It's just evaluate the pros and cons of backyard, pros and cons of nationwide, pros and cons of being doing both, and they make a decision and let the numbers talk. - 100%. Yeah, that's absolutely the best way to do it. So I think the easiest way to show this is like we can kind of share both sides of the argument a little bit. So let's just say I am somebody who kind of promotes a single market real estate model. What usually what I'm gonna be saying is that focus is what you need. These people that are across a bunch of markets, they don't know what they're doing. You gotta be like go deep in a market, and why would you ever go somewhere else if there's more deals to be had in the market that you're already in? It just doesn't make sense, and you're gonna be better and operate more efficiently as a business that way. Meanwhile, people who are proponents of going into more markets likely are gonna be saying, well, with the shifts that are happening in the market, like some markets are really good, some markets are bad. If you were just focused in Phoenix during the hike and interest rates, I don't know a single wholesaler in Phoenix that was just like, you know what, that was fine. That was easy. - Yeah, that was pretty traumatic. You just went straight into a really deep wound right here. - Yeah, versus clients ours that were more flexible geographically, they, some markets were totally fine. - Well, you're in the Midwest, is like, what are they crying about over there? - Exactly, so diversification's a big one. The other thing is with PPC, your cross-prolete goes down as you go into more markets. So some proponents of more national type strategies will even say go really, really wide, like statewide campaigns, many states, you get this really, really cheap cost per lead, and there's people out there saying like, you should never pay more than $70 for a PPC lead, for example, stuff like that. That are focused on like these really heavily national models and a really cost per lead heavy strategy. But there are benefits, like this just say, you could pay less for leads, and all else remains equal, you're making more money. - Right way, so that's a good thing. So that's kind of some of the benefits of going nationally, or like Robert Wensley, we talked about before, he'd probably say go national, so you can focus on like the markets that have the highest spreads, so you can be doing the right deals, which is technically like national, but way different from like a Nick Perry model that would be like national, but let's do statewide campaigns in a lot of states to get a really, really low cost per lead, and then we end up doing a lot of deals in rural areas. So here's, well first, any thoughts, like have you heard any arguments outside of what I've shared already? - The arguments against going nationwide is the inefficiencies, because you gotta find a new title company, you gotta have boots in the ground, random places, right, photos, lock box, and then like I completely took for granted, 'cause I just grew up here, right? Completely took for granted how awesome we have here in Phoenix, like I could clear title this afternoon. I get a motivated homeowner at nine o'clock in the morning by three I can clear title. Now, I'm not saying this is the norm, but if I make a big enough stink, right, I could have the branch office, it's like hey, I got it for closure tomorrow, I need you to clear title today, it happens. We had deals in Oklahoma City, that took three months to clear title. - Wow. - Right, 'cause they have, my understanding they're one of the worst, right? 'Cause they have abstracts, right? And so there's that, and then we had New Mexico where like, we had deals, like we were buying it below, like typically in Phoenix, they're in the good times, you lock it up at 80, you're still doing pretty good. 80%. - Even 90, in like the really good times, right? - There were times, like yeah, yeah, where it got created. - Right, but in Albuquerque, we were locking them up at seven percent minus repairs. Like this is a freaking grants land. Finding buyers that were willing to go look at properties. - Yeah, they don't wanna get off the couch. - No, we're like, hey, so like we got the property on the contract, so we're looking for the first guy, like you know, when can you go out? Like oh, I got it opening next Tuesday, it's like that's in five days, right? In Phoenix, if they asked for five hours, you could just like, oh, I'm never calling you again. - Yeah. - So, I understand. - The working multiple markets did cause stress, but we also didn't have systems and processes, right? Like, if I go into market, no, it takes three months to clear title. Now I can be run a business prepared for three months title search. - Yep, and you'll find experiences all across the board. I think it matters like who you have on your Dispo team. - Right. - 'Cause I just interviewed one of our clients that did well, like moving to a national strategy. They moved to national launch to PPC campaign and did over seven figures their first year. Doing that with, you know, a pretty great return on investment. And when I asked them, they were just basically like, you know, honestly, a deal, it doesn't matter where it is, like, Dispo is the same. Like, I don't get why people get so caught up on this. And then meanwhile, other people have like a hard time. And I think it depends which states are going into. I think it depends on how you're doing it. A lot of the people associate nationwide with rural because a lot of people who go nationwide get rural leads. - Right. - Now there's nothing about being nationwide that makes it so you get more rural leads except that most people do it wrong. So there's something to think about there and like, that's not exactly a fair association. But here's the easiest way, like, I've been able to distill this. There's, so there's two words that I really love. They're focus, diversification. These are two really positive words that mean completely opposite things, right? It's just two sides of the same coin. So the, there's also like different places where you can focus or diversify in your business, right? So number one, marketing channels. You could have one marketing channel, very focused, maybe two, or you could have like 17 marketing channels. Like that's like diversified, right? Exit strategies is number two. You could have one exit strategy or you could have all the exit strategies. And number three is markets that you're in. So what I'm finding is that people that are like heavy per moments of one versus the other, it's just that they have a different opinion on what you should focus on and what you should diversify on in the business. So some people will say like, you wanna be focused on one market. Usually those people, they have every marketing channel and they have every exit strategy. Then meanwhile, like Robert Wensley would tell you, don't be focused on the market, it being a lot of markets, but one exit strategy, one marketing channel. So who's more focused? Robert Wensley or the person in the single market? - Subjective. - It's subjective, 'cause they're focused on different things, right? He probably looks at their business. He's like, they're doing all these different exits. They have all these different marketing channels. That's a complicated business. Meanwhile, that business is looking at they're in all these different markets. How could they possibly pull that off? So what I've seen across our clients that we've worked with is if you wanna be diversified in everything, you're pretty much screwed. You're never gonna be able to figure out how to do every exit strategy and every market with every marketing channel. Unless you're gonna be like, obviously to reach a certain level of scale, there's gonna be a couple that needs to do that. I'm not aware of any company that's at that level now. - I want to say multiple exit strategies, but I mean, new restaurants are pretty good. - Yeah, but they're still very focused on their marketing, right? They're mostly JV, as far as I understand. And then they have probably a variety of exit strategies and variety of markets, right? So they're starting to get in the end where they're like, okay, two out of the three, not they're diversified. They're still focused on one. - Right. - And they could grow more by also opening up direct to seller, but like, why? - Yeah, and they also do, they have national hard money lending and national title. - Okay, yeah, that's the whole, another thing. So anyways, I guess what I'm saying is like, all diversified, probably not a great strategy. You kind of have to choose what you want to focus on and what you want to diversify on and usually those that are across like a very common business model is heavy PPC heavy like wholesale or innovation Many markets. Yeah Another common business model of PPC is just like one piece of the marketing puzzle and you've got a lot of other channels I drive a lot of volume to and you have a lot of exit strategies because you have to monetize every lead The reality of the situation is if you're more constrained geographically your leads are gonna be pretty expensive or PPC so what you have to think is how do I become the company that monetizes those leads better than anybody else How do I become the best at getting them under contract the best at getting those contracts to close and the best at making the most money per closed deal So that my revenue per lead that I get is high So there's other people they're like my PPC doesn't work because I can't pay for this meanwhile I make way more money per lead and then I'm doing awesome all day long, right? So that's like one strategy. It's like that's pay a lot of money for the leads and that's monetizing really really well Yeah, the other strategy is let's pay less money for the leads When you when you go more national you could think of it like you're So I'll give an example. Let's just say you do MLS offers. Like that's your strategy and You're gonna do five MLS offers and you have to get one deal Well a percentage of ARV you have to do those offers out to get your one deal probably Really high. Mm-hmm. It's like north of 80. Yeah If like I got to get one deal out of these five. Let's just say you could press a button and submit an offer on every single house in the United States And you just needed to get one deal What percentage of ARV could you submit those offers at 40% Yeah, maybe lower. I don't know like really really really low, right? You could submit an offer on every single listing in the United States Maybe even 30% yeah, yeah, if you think about that's kind of how Google works like you can bid on all this traffic So so when we when we're doing more for national campaign What we're doing is we're essentially like low-balling Google where we're just saying like yeah You have other people probably paying a lot of money. It's just this is my bid limit Like I got to be here and Google says I'm not gonna give you that much of volume But then you add all these markets together and you can do that because you don't have to get a lot of your bits accepted Well, yeah, the I guess the idea for the one looking at it is that okay, so maybe today Los Angeles Phoenix Houston Everyone's playing everyone's bidding and there's not that many Users searching so no one's depleted their budgets. Yeah, but in the meanwhile Jacksonville Everyone's budget's depleted except for yours and now we're coming in cheap and all you need in a national campaign is one whole One place and then you're gonna cheat plead there So it's that's the strategy there so I'm paying low and then yeah, maybe I'm like am I as capable of monetizing a lead in that market as somebody who like lives there Probably not but if my lead costs a third What they would pay for it. Well now even if I'm not the best at closing even if I'm not the best at exiting I could still come out on top right So that's that's kind of the difference in the strategies and then there's everything in between like people like to think like local national There's also like how why do you gonna go around metros? Like one thing we're commonly advising our clients on is if you're in Like Like people like to think of is like oh am I targeting Atlanta or am I not targeting Atlanta? It's not that simple like there's like what does Atlanta mean Atlanta proper like the city limits the Atlanta DMA Does actual Atlanta city Which is really small compared to like the DMA ignore everything else around Atlanta just only Atlanta Will you be surprised how often because we do audits as a company We're like people come to us and say my ppc campaign doesn't work Is by the way if anybody's listening to this like that that baby collective comm slash disruptors link that gets you to my team where we can do a consult With with you on your specific campaign actually review it and analyze it Yeah, yeah, we'll look like through the campaign you'd be surprised how often we see something like that we're like yeah Because here's what happens under radius no because the because in agency Sometimes just does what the client tells them to so the client says I want to target Atlanta and they don't ask all the questions agency goes in types in Atlanta That's the default the default isn't a radius the default is city boundaries and you target the city of Atlanta really and then nobody notices that something's wrong Very common actually if especially if you're working with agencies that aren't in like this industry I guess that makes sense. We were saying like other end like outside of real estate. It doesn't matter Your buyer your buyer your buyer It's not look it's not location specific but because our industry so location specific yeah, it's it's like This is the kind of thing like when I hire people on my team they're they're like idiots about this until I like train them because they're not used to doing this like you won't find people from other agencies that like think about this this way because this is something like real estate investment specific it's the only Industry I know of where this is like this big of a deal so that's where generalist agencies just screw this up They just have no idea and and but the thing is with the information that I'm supplying everybody with today You'll be able to even potentially give that to a generalist agency and then they could figure it out or you know like what to tell them because now you know Not to tell them target Atlanta Because then they'll target Atlanta. They'll do what you told them to do and that I guess that's fair Yeah, but you know they're not they're not pushing back right that's what's important. Okay, so Atlanta or not Atlanta Yeah, so that's why I'm saying like a lot of people were just like oh, I'm targeting Atlanta like that It's like what does that mean does it mean Atlanta city boundaries? Does it mean a bunch of counties surrounding Atlanta? Just the main county for Atlanta? Are we doing Atlanta plus 50 mile radius or plus 20 mile radius? Or are we doing some type of custom radius targeting? Like in all those different things produce a very very different result So that's where we have to be like really specific about what we want We have to learn how to do that strategy like as an example your exit strategy greatly affects what kind of locations you're going to target right as a business Like let's just say I whole sail versus I do innovations like how like How would that affect like what kind of properties I can deal with? It affected a lot theoretically like Let's just save the properties an hour and a half out of Dallas for worth wholesale maybe Innovation probably yeah, right because there's there's more retail buyers than there are cash buyers and then you give them place Yeah, so you're saying just based on the population you can figure out what's the best exit strategy Yeah, and based on the exit I'm talking about based on the exit strategy figure out the right marketing strategy Yeah, so it's like the like sort of the opposite. I mean obviously you'll get the leads wherever you get the leads But yeah, so so There are yeah, there are different ways to do so the default is So we'll start with single market just to make it simple like if you have a single market and you just know which areas are good for you Target those areas everybody's happy right. It's super simple, but that will screw you over sometimes like I'll show Well, there's a saturation you were talking about on the previous module on the um Return investment and diminishing returns So what what are you saying for a single market like that's the issue you were running too is that you're only gonna target one Area There's only so much you can spend there and you're and the and the profit maximizer Yeah, so usually what's gonna happen in a single market scenario is you're gonna have ppc as one of your many marketing channels and you'll push it to the extent that you're willing to push it and Depending on how big the market is that could be like like there's there's people in this industry who will spend a million dollars across like a few markets It happens yeah a month But it's rare and they're usually doing massive volume at an extremely high-division return, right? Um, and then there's some markets where like you know, you're at like five grand and every time you push it to seven you just can't right spend more So yeah, that totally happens. Here's an example of a time where like People go wrong really commonly with single market targeting Um, so I'm uh, you know for those listening that can't see what I'm looking at right now is Riverside County, California This is there's a lot of counties that have this problem on some level or another but like this this is like one of the most Blightingly obvious ones. That's one county. This is one county Maricopa County by the way another one kind of like this although The beauty that Maricopa has is that those places where no one wants to be there's actually no people there Versus this one so so what's gonna happen here and and this is where like the stuff that we learned in the last episode of the series Is gonna come in handy So let's just say I'm the client and I'm working with an agency and I tell him I want to target Riverside County, California All right, this is what we got and when I say Riverside County think what do I mean? Well, I really love homes and Riverside and I probably love a Up to like Beaumont Yeah, et cetera If we get way out to Midland right next to the Nevada border because this county is very very large stretches all the way to the border Chances are that lead to me is a way different value Then that's how they lead I mean, I'm just picturing this I apologize interrupting you because like you know I drive the California all the time to visit family yeah And we drive through court site and we drive through Blight. I would never have imagined that Blight Just pass across the border is Riverside County. Yeah And here's here's what I tell you more PPC budget is spent in Blight than you would ever think And most of its wasted because most of the people targeting it are targeting it on accident because it's part of a county That also has really good areas in it and people just do county targeting. Yeah, like I just want it. I just want it all So so that's that's just like the simple example there um so Just if you think of like the auction economics that we talked about in in the last episode um You know everybody's putting their bid in and you're waiting it like where do you like The thing is you're not going to be differently at different places within the county, right? So if you're just submitting the same bid to Google for people that are searching in the core of Riverside versus in Blythe, California. - You're gonna win Blythe every time. - You're gonna be the hot guy at that auction. - You're the king of Blythe. - Yeah, you're the king of Blythe. And then you have to think to yourself, do I wanna be the king of Blythe? And I probably don't, right? That's not a high quality place to be at all. So if it is, then that's a good strategy. But I guess what I'm saying people don't realize is people will target like nine good areas and then one bad area from like a population standpoint, or they'll just be like, "Oh yeah, that targeting's good "because it at least includes like the area I wanna be in." - Nah, it's not bad. - Yeah, 90% of it's what I want. Yeah, maybe 10%'s not. The risk that you run is that you get 70% of your leads from the 10% that's bad based on how PPC works. Because what Google is gonna do, what you're telling Google is I wanna get as many leads as I possibly can in this area. And a lot of people then think that Google is evil, you know, against their mission, right? They think Google's evil because Google starts to like get them all the worst leads in those areas. But you have to realize Google's doing exactly what you just told PPC doesn't work. - Yeah, exactly. When Google's doing exactly what you just told us to do. So you're just getting the leads where you don't want them because your competitors also don't want the leads there, but your competitors are smarter than you and they're not targeting them. - They're better at targeting. - Yeah, exactly. So that's a really common issue with like even county level targeting. So we have a specific rule that we use for location targeting. If you just get this right and you always get this right, people ask me though, like is this location targeting good? Well, does it follow the three rules? And it's different for every company. But like if you nail these three rules, it's kind of like, you know, from court, like the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth. The right locations, all the right locations. Nothing but the right locations. That's how you target a campaign. So there should be a few things that are true. Like you should be able to look at it, look at a map of all the areas you're targeting when you're done with your location targeting. If you could think of any areas in there where if you got a lead, you wouldn't actually find it valuable. This happens with us with our clients all the time. Like we push them on this, push them on this, push them on this. And then like the results aren't good. And we figure out it's because we're getting a bunch of leads and bad locations. And those bad locations are the exact areas they told us to target at the beginning. - Yeah. - Okay, there's our problem. Like that's not target those and that's gonna fix it, right? So you should just like go through this mental exercise. Like, okay, if I got a lead from there, is that good or is it bad? The answer is it's bad, shouldn't be targeting it. The other side of that is, remember the more locations you target, the cheaper things are gonna be. There's, it happens all the time that people include the right locations, but they don't include all the right locations. So that means like maybe I do business in LA, and San Diego, but I just run the PPC ads in LA, but not in San Diego, which means I drive my cost per lead up compared to where I could do. So that's pretty common like one of the worst things I hear sometimes is like, oh yeah, we're in these two markets as a business, but we're just gonna test PPC in this market first, make sure it works and then we'll expand it to the other market. - Right. - Which is like, it's like saying, I'm gonna just like do this text marketing campaign real quick and then if it works, then I'll do the direct mail. But if I can't get my text messaging to work, I'm never gonna do a direct mail. It just does really like that. - It is like that. Yeah, 'cause the PPC will work different in the different markets. And people always ask like, which one has a cheaper cost per lead is A or B? When the reality is A plus B is a lower cost per lead than either A or B individually. - Yeah. - That makes sense. It's like, maybe make some sense or not, but most people like they just don't, it just doesn't click, like they don't fully understand. So for those of you listening to that again. - So if you're looking at which one's cheaper, market A or market B, the reality is market A and B together is lower cost per lead than either market A or market B. - So for example, if you had a monthly budget of $10,000. - Mm-hmm. - And if I said brand niche, I do 10,000 in San Diego or 10,000 in L.A. You say, do 10,000 between San Diego and L.A. And you'll have an overall lower cost per lead meaning you will have more leads, more opportunities. - 100%. That's what I would say. Provided you can do business well in both of those. Now if every single one of your contracts is gonna fall out in one of those areas 'cause you don't know what you're doing, they don't do that. - Then don't do that, right? So that's where we have to think like revenue per lead is kind of the metric we're looking at for that. But yeah, that's why we wanna try to skew a little bit wider if we can. Like the ideal is just as wide as we can without just going too wide. But I've seen everything in the book, like I've seen people start national campaigns. Had a client got 20 contracts in their first month with not that much budget. I can't remember what it was exactly, but it was like five or 10 grand a month and they did 20 contracts. And every single one of them fell through. The reason they had 20 contracts is because they didn't know how to comp properties and other states and all of them were locked up too high. - Yeah. - And that's the kind of thing that makes you really excited at first. And then it looks really bad. By the time it comes full circle. - We went through that. - Did you go through that? - Yeah. We went through that with Leedsolo. We're like, well, I guess we'll target this whole state. And yeah, we had a bunch of properties that we underwrote really poorly. And it wasn't necessarily that our after repair value was off. - No, different markets, they just trade at different percentages of ARV. - Right, yeah. We did not communicate that effectively to our front lines. Right? - Yeah, and that's, I mean, they don't account for a whole time or for contractor crew to drive an hour each way every day, affects what you can, what you're willing to pay. - Yeah, yeah. I guarantee that killed your sales team more out. - Completely. - Yeah. - Completely. - Yeah. - Because I mean, nothing's worse for a salesperson than like, I'm killing it. I'm having my best month ever. And then the paycheck never comes because you can't get any of the deals close. - Yeah. - So that's exactly exactly what happened. - Yeah, I can only imagine. So we're talking about ways to do it. So usually the way we'll do it is that let's just say you have a local market and you know which areas are good. And this is why I'm pushing on this so hard in this episode and helping people understand because then you'll be able to communicate really clearly to us or to whatever company you work with. This is exactly what I want. And I understand the strategic decision that I'm making by choosing these locations. And I'm actually putting thought to it versus just saying Atlanta. And then the company targets Atlanta city, right? So usually like, let's just say like, there's a few counties and you know that you could do anything across those counties and you just include those. Like, okay, that's fine. That works for some people in local markets. Sometimes you gotta do custom radius targeting. And Google, you could do as small as a one mile radius. And we've done wacky stuff with them. We've done like, yeah, the weirdest location targeting where we include like some things but not other things. Like if you have to stay away from certain areas. - Yeah, exclude maps. - Exclusion maps. - Exclusion maps. - Exclusion maps. - Yeah, well exclusions are even a separate thing. Yeah, but you can do exclusions on Google too by city and stuff. You can't do zip codes. A lot of people want to target zip codes. Can't do zip codes. - It wasn't changed. - It did change, yeah. - Well, and also like the mile radius, I think, I don't know if that was Facebook or Google but for fair housing, like we had, we could no longer go as, 'cause like I used to be able to just target neighborhoods. - Yeah, so Facebook outside of the housing, you can target small radiuses. Within housing, you can target a 15 mile radius at a minimum. - Yeah, I really screwed up my running my own campaigns. - Yeah, 'cause I guess a little background for anybody interested. Apparently it's discriminatory to people in some zip codes if you choose to run and add to them about buying it by their house, but not to people in other zip codes. So according to equal opportunity housing regulations, we're just, - I think it was really more targeted towards realtors. We just got wrapped into it. - You think that's what it was? - I don't, I agree with you. It wasn't, it's the whole housing category. - Yeah, 'cause it was a federal housing authority, right, FHA and department justice between the two of them. It was a major ordeal. 'Cause like, I mean, we talk about how long I've been doing this. Right? - Yeah, I mean, I used to be able to target like how many kids you had. - Yeah, Facebook is really wowing that stuff down. - How many kids you had? - It's not that they just not there. You just can't see it. So it feels less creepy. - Whether you're married or single, how long you live in the property, what your credit score is. Like I used to be able to target your credit score, your income, right? I did all those things. And then this whole FHA thing came down. I was like, well, that completely screwed up my business. - Yeah, although there's still, like what we'll talk about it in the, we have an episode titled Lead Quality Secrets that's after this one. Well, we'll talk about like how the targeting is a lot more robust than we think it is. You have to do it different. - Well, that was the thing, right? I just said screw this. Like it was kind of the same thing. I did all my own SEO for the longest time. Like these people that are listening, that don't know the part, I don't realize how old I am, but like I did all my own SEO for the longest time. And so Google algorithms changed. It was once considered White Hat is not considered Black Hat. And I got sandbox and you couldn't be finding the first 20 pages of Google. - Yeah. - And you know, if you, people don't be finding on the page too. Imagine you can't find you to like the page 24. - So one of my sales guys always says this joke, like where's the best place to hide a dead body? - Page two or page three? - Page two or page three of Google, yeah. - Yeah. (laughs) Right? It's true. And so that's why, that's the reason why I learned PPC. Was 'cause I said forget SEO because like, what's true today is not guaranteed to be true tomorrow. - Yeah. Yeah, I totally understand what you're saying. And it's SEO's its own. We could do a whole separate masterclass just on SEO. But it's a wild world. But that's what I was saying. I was targeting by neighborhoods. Yeah. And that went away. Yeah, 100%. So you'd be surprised, like Facebook's a little more limited, but Google, though, you can get pretty narrow, like with your radiuses, places where that's more necessary, or often going to be like some cities where there's just hyper localized situations like Baltimore, Detroit, Cleveland, all great examples of cities where as you get closer to the center of the city, the leads get worse, not better, which is the opposite of Phoenix, for example, where there's a lot of high values of properties as you get closer to the city. So yeah, you have to be kind of careful with a lot of those places, but what a lot of people find, like sometimes when they're trying to target locations, people are predicting where is the motivated seller. You have to, when you're working with Google, you just want to be looking at like a Summien God-a-motivated seller. Do I want them or not? Like for example, in California, a lot of people don't want to target Orange County because there's like, there's not that much motivation in Orange County. Meanwhile, we have clients killing it in Orange County because regardless of if you think people in Orange County are generally motivated, if someone in Orange County is searching for wee by ugly houses, they're probably a motivated seller. Right. You don't need a lot. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So when we're targeting, we're not trying to think where are the motivated sellers. The only thing that should be going through our mind is if I got a lead from this area that was a motivated seller, could I monetize it well or would I not be able to? The answer is yes, I can monetize it well, put it in your targeting. If the answer is no, keep it out of your targeting. All the yeses need to be targeted. All the nose need to be not targeted. That's how you win. So there's different ways to do it, like sometimes counties, sometimes a little more radiuses and stuff. If we're doing a national campaign, there's a specific strategy we're known for that's really effective. And I'll show it for anybody on YouTube, I can show the map right now just using Atlanta as an example. So we use something that we call satellite imagery targeting. And the way that satellite imagery targeting works is you can see this map here. And in this website, if you're looking for, it's just blue-in-marvel.de/nightlights. They're in them. Completely. Yeah, some company from Denmark. I honestly, there's probably tons of them. You just look up like nightlight overlay for Google Maps. I'm sure you can find a Google Earth file or something. This is the one that we use, but nothing special about it. But the idea here is you can tell the difference between a metro area and not a metro area. Because let's just look at Atlanta, for example. Atlanta proper. What is that? It's going to be this tiny area right around Atlanta, right? Because I just go a little bit over here. Now I'm in Decatur, right? It's not Atlanta anymore, right? If I looked up the DMA, which is if you're not familiar, designated marketing area, the DMA goes all the way actually into Alabama. Believe it or not. So what's going to happen if I target the DMA? If you told your agency target the Atlanta metro, what's that going to be? You're going to get a casepring and you can in and-- Yeah, you're going to get leads in the middle of nowhere. Validin. Yeah, which are really-- like if that's your strategy, if you love rural properties, we work with clients sometimes that love rural properties. If that's you, then great. I can tell you far more often than not, we're trying to figure out a way to get rid of the rural properties, not to get more of them. Right. It's hard to find buyers for a lot of rural stuff. So if you use this strategy, then what you can do is you can see the density of the light, and that gives you some idea of where there are-- where there's like sustained population around Atlanta and where there's not. So you can kind of see like, oh, there's areas where there are kind of lights, but there's sort of far away. This is like what I would call our "novation radius" a lot of the time, right? Like maybe even as far as Athens here. But if we're looking really like tight around Atlanta, if we're trying to wholesale, we probably want to keep it to the core area where most of the buyers are going to be really interested. So that's how you target the right locations, all the right locations, nothing but the right locations. And as you learn more about the markets, you choose like, do you want to target them a little bit differently? If Atlanta is your home market, you're not usually using this because you probably know something beyond this. Right. But if you are entering into Atlanta, then this is a great way to see how do you target the area and how do you not. Because the risk with PPC, do you just have that tiny leak in your targeting? And then it becomes all of your budget going there. And that's what people don't realize. They're like, oh, I, you know, so what if I included just a little bit of world aid? There's not that many people out there anyways. And you'll find it has 5% of the population that you're trying to target. And it has like 80% of your leads. Yeah. And people just don't understand it. It's like a, I guess the way to look at it is maybe like a hole in your boat is that wherever the hole is in your boat, the water will find it. 100%. And it gets ugly pretty fast. Yeah. And this is this nightlight that you showed here. This is a campaign you had set up for us was Arizona, Florida, and Texas. Right. So we had kind of like a quasi national strategy. So can you expand upon what you prescribed for me and my team? Yeah. Why did we choose Arizona and Florida and Texas? Okay. There's a few reasons. Like you said, like kind of quasi national. And we weren't everywhere. So, so why did we, why did we choose to do that a little bit? Well, as you start to add a few markets, your cost per lead starts to go down a lot. And let me, I'll actually pull up like a specific, a specific graph. Again, for you folks on YouTube and for everybody else, I'll try to explain the takeaway. So what we did recently, people are asking like, you know, how much is the cost per lead over here versus over there, et cetera. So we actually use the data of like a list of our clients and how many markets are they in and what is their cost per lead. And we found a model of best fit to basically model what should your cost per lead be based on the number of markets that you're in. And this is what the relationship looked like. This is the line of best fit. So you can see for a single market, typical cost per lead, being about $3 into $25, ranging as high as close to 500 as low as like 170 or something like that. And then as you get to like 11 markets, now we're like 175 per lead. Right. As high as 275 as low as 100 and you go all the way to 200 markets, it gets way cheaper. But it's 200 markets. But like 200 markets. I said 200 markets. 200 markets. We have a list of 200 markets. So what it also looks like is diminishing once you get the 200 markets. It does diminish, but at the same time, the gap between like 49 markets and 200 markets as you cut your cost per lead in half. So it's like, it's just a little bit per market. But it's a lot of real. So you decide where do we want to fall on this line? Because the more markets you're in, the more complicated things get. So there's a reason I prescribed that specific strategy to you. And I'll show like an example of how we do this. So this is our nationwide client location targeting sheet. And by the way, this is a part of the toolkit. So I'll show the-- sorry, I'm fumbling around the right tabs. Where was it? Well, the third test is thanks. Could be that one. Yes, that's it. No. Here it is. All right, please editor cut that out because I showed our internal-- our internal company notion on accident and our podcast stats. So I'll show here inside like the toolkit that we gave. There's actually a specific link to the sheet in here. It's called Under General Resources, the Nightlife Targeting Sheet. And it's to show you what we did here. We have a list of all the metro areas in the United States. It's just shy of 200. And we have data here from our clients of the average expected deal spread across these different markets. We even have data from investor left about how hot those markets are for their platform, their rank, their population, and some custom notes. Like Miami, for example, looks great on paper. But people don't do well there when they're not from there, because it's kind of like a foreign country. So we have those kinds of notes. So this data is actually wildly valuable. If you guys download the toolkit, you can get this and start playing around with it. The really cool thing about this spreadsheet is this spreadsheet uploads directly into Google. Like you select the right markets you want to target and the way that you want to target them. And we have instructions on what all these things mean. It's mostly stuff targeted around Google Maps and the contiguous lights that I had shown on the map. And then we, yeah, you can upload, like we, I literally had someone like go through the entire United States with like a map and GPS coordinates and map out exactly where the lights are and where they're not. That's what made this sheet. So that's how we do a strategy with clients. So what we would do is we would look at this and we'd say, like, well, first, what are some states that we just don't want to be in? And usually there's a few states that you just don't want to touch. Like, for example, New York attorneys are the worst attorneys in the world. It's an attorney state. Probably don't want to be there. I don't want to have-- Never in Asia, I strategy. No, like if you live in New York, sure. Give it a shot. Even people in New York are like, I wish I wasn't in New York. People that are in the most difficult markets love how difficult it is because no one else joins them. That's true. That's a fantastic point. Yeah. So nationally, usually don't like New York, but if you could figure it out. Like, I know people who do really well in New York, they just, I mean, they still deal with a mutual contact of ours. I know he has a 365-day cash conversion cycle because of how long it takes to get a deal done in New York and he flips too. But anyways, he needs to buy so deep because all the taxes you pay and it's insane. So if you're national, you're probably like, OK, New York, not my place. Oklahoma, probably not my place because you got to have a license to do deals. Probably the same for Illinois. There's other attorney states that maybe you don't want to be in, maybe Hawaii's a little far. So you make those kinds of decisions, right? And then we look at what metros are left. Then we look at what kind of spread we want, right? So we might choose like larger spread. So for you, there's a reason we stayed away from Midwest, generally, and stuff like that, because we just don't want those lower spread areas. There's a specific reason I recommended Arizona and Texas and Florida to you. So Arizona, because you already know it, and you can do well there. Texas and Florida are what I call Bain for Buck markets. The reason they're Bain for Buck markets is because you learn one state, but you get like four major markets, as part of being in that one state. So like North Carolina, Florida, Texas are all really, really friendly to national wholesaling, because you'll do a lot of deals there. I think at one point, Robert told me that like 50% of investor-lift deals are in Texas or Florida. I mean, they're just massive states with like a lot of markets in them, you know? If you're coming to Salt Lake City where I'm from, then you'll get a market, but you have to learn everything about Utah just to do the one market versus if you go into Texas, you have massive, massive markets there. You have a lot of them. So that's the reason that that was recommended. You could bring your cost per lead lower by going into more markets, but it's a, if you want to kind of dip your toe into a national wholesaling strategy, then adding like one of those Bain for Buck states in addition to your home market is a good way to kind of test the waters a little bit and see like one of one of my clients that went national, he started in California and he got, you know, he talked about he never get, you don't always get leads in your exact locations, sometimes you get these stray leads. So he got a lead from, I want to say, with San Antonio, Texas and didn't mean to get it, but he's got it. So then he was like, well, I guess I guess I might as well try to monetize this. And after doing any thought, well, that was easy. It's not that different from California. So then he expanded into that market and then he was there and he was like, well, why don't we just try other markets in Texas? How much harder could it be? So he did all the Texas and then after that, he was like, well, Texas is that easy. Other places are probably easy too. And then he expanded to a bunch of other states. And each time the cost really just went down, down, down and he was still able to do deals really effectively. So it's a good strategy. All right. So it looks like anything else we got to make sure we talk about here. I think I think talking about budgeting for a new campaign. Yeah. One last thing on locations before we, before we get deep, just one other thing for national strategy that I see people messing up with sometimes. So you know how we talked about how like, let's just say you're targeting Riverside County in California, Riverside's really good. And then I remember the name of the small town that isn't good. All the more people are going to be spending money here. The same thing happens on an individual market level. Like let's just say you have Indianapolis where the average wholesale spread might be like 12 grand. And you compare that to Phoenix where it might be like 20, 25 grand. Something like that. Where do you think the wholesalers have more money to spend on PPC on a per-deal and per-lead basis? Definitely in Phoenix because they're making more money. Right? So what that means is in Indiana, there's just the natural, like this is like economics and game theory, like where there's less demand yet equal supply in Indiana, what's naturally going to happen is a lower equilibrium cost per lead. So that's like what will naturally happen. So let's just say we ran a campaign in Indiana and Phoenix. What would happen in that campaign? Where would we spend our budget? More likely than not, we'd find that most of our budget gets spent in Indiana. Right. It's like Indiana is comparing to the other example. It's like Indiana is the rural area and Phoenix is like the good area. Right? So where people go wrong sometimes and they think like, oh, national, you just can't get good deal spreads doing that is they end up targeting areas that have like a really high deal spread in areas that have a really low deal spread within the same campaign. So what Google is naturally going to do, like if we understand bid theory and how it works is you're going to be bidding the same across all those areas and you're just going to be more likely to win the bid in those rural area or those lower spread areas. You're going to spend a lot of your budget there. So there's no such thing as a blended high spread and low spread campaigns. Basically what I'm getting at, a blended high spread and low spread campaign is just a low spread campaign. You can run a high spread campaign. You can run a low spread campaign. If you try to do it at the same time, you're going to have a low spread campaign. Right. Because you're not going to spend your money in the areas that are like most most attractive. Right. This is another place where people really mess up is let's just say I want to target high spread areas and low spread areas. There's a right way to do that and a wrong way to do that. The right way is to have a separate campaign for just the high spread areas where we tell Google, this is our priority area and we want to bid higher here. We expect to pay more per lead here and we want to dedicate this budget to these locations. And then you have the low spread campaign where you're basically telling Google, we're okay, we're willing to get leads here, but they've got to be cheap. That's the only way it's going to work for us. Or you just do a high spread campaign, which is pretty common, but that's one of the most common issues I see is you target very valuable and not as valuable and then you just get all the not valuable. Right. And then you say PPC doesn't work. All I get is like leads and all these, like I'm trying to do a national campaign, but all I can get leads in is the Midwest. Yeah, it's basically the same thing with Riverside County again. Same deal, just on a different scale. Yeah. So that's, I think that's most stuff in terms of location targeting how you pull it off. And then you're going to have a different game if you're national versus if you're local, but the principles apply still it's the right areas, all the right areas, none of their own areas. Got you. No matter what you do. And then if I'm starting off with a new campaign, like wish it, my expectations be. Yeah, that's, that's the other, the other question is like, like, let's just say we choose our locations and we started campaign how long does this take to ramp up and what should you plan for and all that kind of stuff. I think budget's probably the, the biggest question that people have. And it's probably the biggest thing that turns people away from PPC because a lot, it takes a little bit more budget than other channels do. So for us, our standard advice to people is that usually you want to start a PPC campaign out somewhere, we're trained five and $20,000 a month in ad spend. We'll take as low as two. That doesn't include a management fee, but two grand for ad spend and then a management fee on top of that. And that's usually in circumstances where like, you know, you have to be really, really patient and honestly, we just don't do it that often. It's kind of like, here's a good, good comparison for budgets. Let's just pretend I have a die, a six-sided die. Every time you roll that die, you have to pay $1,000. If the die gives you a six, then you make $7,000. Would you roll the die or would you not roll the die? Roll the die as many times as I can. Why? Because expected value. Right. So expected value is greater than cost. What if you only had $1,000? Would you roll the die or not? All you have is $1,000 to your name. I'm a crazy person, so yes. But most people would say no. Yeah. Maybe a better question. Not would Steve do it, but should someone do it? What a reasonable person do it? Probably not. Probably not. There's a lot of crazy people in this industry, so you're not alone. You're not at all alone there. But that's kind of how it is with budget, right? Because sometimes what I say is like, you need to give a lot of budget, you need to give it a lot of time. What people take from that is it doesn't work unless you give it a lot of budget a lot of time. It will work with a small budget, just the same as my expected value of every die roll is greater than my cost in that scenario that I just gave you. But if I want a situation where more likely than I end up on top, it's not that situation I just gave you if you only have a thousand bucks. If you had $10,000, it's different. There's a lot more likely with $10,000 that you'll win that game. That's how PPC works. Where do you draw that line? Really hard to say where you draw that line. What I could tell you is time matters a little bit more than budget. Our standard of advice is that we tell people about six months for a new campaign. One thing that you want to think of for budget is take whatever amount you think you're spending per month, multiply it by six. If you don't have that money sitting in your bank account, ready to go for the marketing of the PPC, and I'd be a little bit nervous myself. It's kind of like if you're going to roll that die and you've only got a thousand bucks, it's like that's like, I'm not saying it won't work. Are the odds such that if a thousand people did this on average, they would make more money than they lost? Yes. Absolutely. But is it smart? Probably not. Right? I'd probably roll smaller die where you have to pay $100 per roll. So you build up enough capital to then play with the higher stakes game. So yeah, generally like $5 to $15,000 or $5 to $20,000 a month and then over six months is what you're going to want to look at. If you look at that and you're like, oh, $10,000 a month over $6,60,000, I can't commit that. That's what tells me your monthly budget is too high. Maybe you want to look at bringing the monthly budget down a little bit. You also have to be really strict with yourself about the timeline. I've noticed situations in this industry where people just like try PPC fail, try PPC fail, and then somebody comes along and convinces them to spend way more money than they did before. She's just spent 20 grand a month in PPC. That's the problem. You're only spending five before and that's why it didn't work. Now if you spend 20, it's going to work and it works. And they're like, oh, it's because PVC needs more budget. When the reality is the 20, if it was spread as five grand over four months and you actually stuck to it, it would work too. But you just, like everybody says they're going to and then they don't when it actually comes down to it. Yeah, it's the stomach for fighting it out, sticking it out. Yeah. I would take slow and steady over fast and aggressive, but I would take fast and aggressive over slow and unsteady. Right. Does that make sense? So that makes sense. You don't have to decide where you got to be. I guess know yourself, but the best case scenario is give yourself ramp up, give yourself time. Because you're going to want, like here's the tricky thing about that scenario. You know, I said in a prior episode, like 144,000 is roughly the amount of money in this industry. This isn't PVC specific in this industry that takes to like prove a marketing channel works assuming it does work. That's what it would take to prove that that's a true thing. So now you got to think like you make pivot some marketing channels. So like if you want time to like get data to see that it works or doesn't and then pivot and then do it again. You still don't have data. We're just like, like people think we're crazy for saying you need this much budget. Meanwhile, the amount that I'm saying is like far less than statistically you should even have. That's the difficulty that we run in this industry. And that's why so many people are like, PVC works or PVC works and then it doesn't work because I had a good time and then a bad time. Like, so there's just to to look to probably to to we're not letting the math work itself out. Yeah, because the reality is if you let the math work itself out, the numbers are scary. And there are a lot more than you think. So that's where it's like like we're all playing games where like none of us are usually playing a game where we have like a thousand dollars per roll and we got a hundred grand ready to go. We still are playing those games where it's like we got like four grand ready to go and it's a thousand dollars per roll and we're hoping for the best. But you can yeah, the more budget more time you have like the greater likelihood of your success for sure as long as you make sure you're spending your right and you can track that you're headed the right direction based on leading metrics. I think that's the most important thing because the the analogy of it taking that much money is just based on lagging metrics. But let's just say your thirty thousand dollars in and you have zero leads is more time going to fix your problem. Probably not. There is a mentor Nick Peterson, you know someone I've worked with quite a bit and one of the things he always says is there are two things you're undefeated time and randomness. Right. And if you're not going to give it a time then in this instance you're not letting time and randomness do its job. Yeah, that is that is a totally fair statement. And this is like one of the trickiest. This is the most difficult thing about PPC like I like I had a conversation with the client the other day where they're like our lead flows slowed down and it's a massive problem. We need to take action to fix it. And the way I came to the conversation was like we're not going to do anything about this. That was my stance and it was the hardest stance to take. And I just had to tell him like you're going to want to punch me in the face but like we're not going to do anything about this because if we're going to be reacted to this data when there's not enough sample to tell us that there's actually a problem then we're going to screw something up that wasn't screwed up and then we're going to actually be in trouble. Whereas now we're just dealing with random variation. That's okay. And we did nothing and then there's all the bounce right back. But it's like the hardest thing is like what I tell my team is like we're in an industry where everybody's like the kind of people where if you go in an elevator and you press we're on like first floor like let's press the fifth floor button like we would run in circles in the elevator just to feel like we're doing something on the way up. I mean I made this comment the other day you know if I was stuck in traffic I'd rather take longer to get there and drive than sit there on the freeway. Yeah. That's a great analogy and it's like it's human nature right. I'm not blaming anybody for this. But I'm controlling it even though my controlling is bad the ultimate outcome is worse. I'm in control that feels good. That's so funny. The other thing that we see like you know along that same topic with like random variation is there's like I see these people self managed their campaigns all the time. So if you're thinking about self management like I want you to like like write what I'm about to say on your like bathroom mirror and like say this to yourself because like PPC it just naturally goes like this up and down up and down. So when it goes like this do you think we change something when it's nice and high we shouldn't no and we usually don't. Yeah. So we're like oh everything's fine and then it goes like this it goes nice and down and then that's the moment where we say oh no something's wrong here I'm going to change something and then where do you think it goes after that. Up right right. And then we take this upswing and we attribute it to what we did when we were down. Smart we were. Yes. And then we start learning lessons that shouldn't be learned. This I mean by the way the same thing happens in business and everything anything like like a lot of this stuff I'm talking about this is just like this. Yeah we give us all the credit for all the success. Yeah yeah or or worse like I've had it happen with like with my team where like clients like every time I reach out to you because my lead flows though it gets better. Like are you guys just not managing things unless I reach out to you. It's like well no it's like actually at these last five times you reach out to us we haven't we didn't do anything. Outside of like the norm like it's like there are things that need to be done like on your view but you didn't necessarily make any changes. Yeah we're like tweaks you know because it's it's normal like usually in most accounts will make changes about once a week but they're they're more minor changes that aren't going to like massively swing things. Right. It's more like dialing just tuning a little bit. Yeah I think so maybe be worthwhile for your guys organization just create a full presentation or video perhaps on game theory and time and randomness right like yeah maybe. And then you know there's other things to like you know exposure. So many things we talk about is like again Nick I was talking about like he is huge in crypto. He's like the problem with all you crypto people is that you look at Bitcoin every morning. Right and this thing is going up and down up and down but if you just looked at it every month. It's still went up and down all the time but you don't get stressed about it. Yeah it's not good for you. Same thing is true like this applies to like all the business. This is like people that look at it stocks every morning. Yeah. Yeah there was a study done by fidelity investments where they which if you don't know I think it's just like one of those like brokers where you put like your IRA or 401k with where they basically wanted to study like which of our customers have the best success in the stock market. And they so they broke it down by like you know all the different data points you could possibly think of. Turns out the single data point that was most predictive of someone's success. How rarely they logged in. It was that they forgot their password. That was the single most predictive of success metric available which is crazy to think of. But yeah we learn these things so like if you work with an agency like when it goes down you're like email them and then it goes up and you're like well it's you know I guess every time it goes down I got to email them and then they get the agencies like oh I'll just press the like get more leads Google button and then we'll be fine right. Or when people self managing it this is where I see like most people that I know that self manage in this industry they have like all these crazy ideas about PPC that they've like learned through their own like experiments that aren't experiments at all. It's just like before and after analyses of like just it was down and then I did this and then it went up. It's the mistaken belief of causation versus corollation. Yeah yeah the other thing that happens like along these same lines is people sometimes like try to test against another agency so they run both at the same time. It's happened to us like six or seven times. More often than not we actually come out on top. Sometimes we don't. In zero circumstances have the client actually taken it to the point of statistical significance. So in all those circumstances they set up the money paid to management fees got a little data that wasn't at all statistically significant to make a conclusion and then gave up on the test and chose one of them. We just don't do it like it happens with our clients all the time like I want to test this thing. I want to test the landing page or something and then we get into it and we're like two weeks into the test and the test needs six months and they're like okay let's go with that when that one's the winner. And we're like well if we're doing it doing the test we're going to do it right. Like there's no sense in just starting a bunch of tests that we're actually finished. Yeah and there's an actual discipline of numbers called statistics that tells you how much data you need. Yeah I think you're going to have to create a really simple video that breaks it down. Yeah probably that's digestible. Yeah I'll have to think about that a little bit but I guess like the topic we're talking about is budget. So here's the mistake that people make about budget. They say you need a lot of budget to get a great return on investment. That's not true actually. So I recently did an analysis of all their clients with their monthly budget their return on investment. There was no correlation between monthly budget and return on investment across them. What there is a huge huge correlation between is monthly budget and consistency of the campaign because the more budget you have now in a month I'm gathering as much data as I would in a year with one 12th my budget. So it feels a lot more consistent. Is it more consistent? It's more consistent in the same way that if I flip a coin ten times a day it feels like it's more consistent than if I were to flip it once a day. Because day to day I'm getting a similar percentage of heads to tails. It's not very in quite as much. So I'm going to I might sound completely full of it. But like the reason why I feel confident speaking on this right is that we had to study statistics, the castics and all the other stuff to get my degree in electrical engineering right. I mean engineers of fair person to speak to this. Yeah and another thing too is like I tried really hard to become professional poker players were like expected values was the one thing you had to be good at right. Yes emotional intelligence is valuable but like really at the end of the day you're just doing expected value calculations on every single hand. and on every single bet. - It's a great point. Yeah. BPCs basically like professional poker, but way lower stakes and on average people win. - Yeah. - Well, right. - Yeah, it's good. - You're the winning guy at the poker table 'cause the guy that's not winning the poker table is a guy that's not good at expected values. - Yeah. Yeah, that's a super fair point. So I hope this gives some clarity to like anybody thinking about the budget. The only other thing that you wanna think about is just the size of your market. Some markets just really can't handle that much budget. It correlates a lot with population, but some markets have like less people searching on Google for the certain amount of population because they have more adoption of the platform and run the demographic. So that's something that you kind of have to keep in mind and if anybody talks to my team, then we can kind of help you understand what an ideal budget might be for your market. It's not a perfect science. Like it's one of those things where you just like, look at all the data, you make the most informed decision you can and then you get ready to adapt to whatever data comes in. Once you make that decision, that's the best that you can do. Yep, and if you guys are interested in getting a review and audit or strategy conversation, so baitmancollective.com/disruptors. And if you guys, again, if you guys enjoyed that night light, I mean, it just doesn't sound like it's the right term, but the night light map. Yeah. baitmancollective.com/toolkit-disruptors. So hopefully you guys got a lot of value here to understanding location and budget strategies and make sure you tune into the next one. We're going to be talking about lead quality secrets. That's a very different concept. So we will see you guys on the next one.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Geographic targeting in real estate PPC is unique because location is the product, unlike e-commerce where buyers can be anywhere.
  2. There are two opposing strategies
  3. Both approaches have merit; the key is balancing focus and diversification across marketing channels, exit strategies, and markets—being diversified in all three is often unsustainable.
  4. National campaigns work by low-bidding across many areas, capitalizing on underserved markets where competitors' budgets are depleted, leading to cheaper leads.
  5. Monetization ability matters
  6. Targeting precision is critical—specifying "Atlanta" often means city boundaries, not the broader metro area, leading to missed opportunities; exit strategy (e.g., wholesale vs. innovation) should influence location targeting.
  7. Generalist agencies often mishandle location targeting due to lack of real estate-specific knowledge, so clear specifications are essential.

Summary:

This podcast episode from Bateman Collective explores location and budget strategies in real estate PPC advertising, a topic complicated by the fact that a lead's location is intrinsically tied to deal success. The hosts present two dominant, often conflicting viewpoints: single-market focus versus national or multi-market targeting. , Phoenix during interest rate hikes), and lower cost per lead by capitalizing on underserved areas.

The hosts stress that neither approach is inherently superior; instead, businesses must choose what to focus on and what to diversify, whether that's marketing channels, exit strategies, or markets. They illustrate national campaigns as a low-bid strategy where you accept less volume but benefit from cheap leads in markets where competitors are saturated. Conversely, single-market players must excel at closing and exiting to justify higher lead costs.

A critical practical point is the need for precise targeting—like defining whether "Atlanta" means city limits or a radius—as vague specifications lead to failure, a common issue even among generalist agencies. Ultimately, strategy should be data-driven, balancing costs, monetization capabilities, and market specifics to find the optimal approach.

FAQs

The episode discusses location and budget strategies for PPC campaigns in real estate investing, including the pros and cons of local versus national targeting.

Focusing on a single market allows for deeper market knowledge, more efficient operations, and better monetization of leads, as seen with faster title clearing in areas like Phoenix.

National strategies offer diversification, lower cost per lead, and the ability to capitalize on markets with high spreads or less competition, even if you're less efficient in each area.

You can focus or diversify in marketing channels, exit strategies, and markets. Being diversified in everything is risky, so you must choose what to focus on and what to diversify, like using one marketing channel but many markets.

Targeting 'Atlanta' can mean city boundaries, a DMA, or a radius, which drastically changes results. Agencies often default to city limits, missing surrounding areas, so you must define your targeting precisely.

Your exit strategy influences location choices; for example, wholesaling may work in rural areas, while innovations might be better in populated areas with more retail buyers, so you tailor targeting to your exit plan.

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