What is PPC and Why Real Estate Investors Use This to do More Deals in 2024

Everybody, welcome to Real Estate Disruptories. Today we're recording something very special, a very special series. This is the PPC Masterclass of Bateman Collective. We're gonna spend the next few episodes breaking down how to effectively run a digital marketing campaign so that if you're, whether you wanna do PPC on your own, or you wanna be able to properly vet a PPC provider, you know exactly what to look for when you're deciding whether you wanna work with them or not. Today we got Brandon Bateman with Bateman Collective, and we've talked about today, why PPC? Yeah, I'm super excited to be here Steve. Thank you for having me again on the podcast. I mean, I can always geek out on marketing. It's like, you know, I've been very, very passionate about sales, very vocal about sales. But sales doesn't happen if the phone's not ringing. Yeah, right. And so-- And it happens very differently with different types of leads, too. Definitely. So before we get into YPPC, let's talk for those that haven't seen any of our episodes that we recorded together, tell us about your journey into real estate. Yeah, I'm a weird, I'm a weird guy in this industry. It feels like everybody in this industry, they started because they got into real estate. And then one day they realized, I have this problem, and I learned to solve this problem this way, and then I'm gonna solve that problem for other people, too. And I'm like backwards because I came from a marketing side, which I think gives me a little bit of a unique perspective. I started this company. It was about seven years ago when I was a sophomore in college. So I was super young. I'm still am kind of young, but I was even younger than I am now. And I knew so little about anything. And I decided that I wanted to get into digital marketing and started doing some freelance work and stuff like that. So I started working with a few clients. And at that time, I would do pretty much anything. We did a lot of Kickstarter campaign advertising or e-commerce products. I had B2B SaaS products. Pretty much everything you could imagine. You could do that. Paperclip marketing for them. Well, here's the interesting thing. At the beginning, I did a lot of Facebook marketing. That was actually the first thing I ever did. Then when I say beginning, this is probably four months after the beginning. I got this call from the guy named Mark Stubler. I know you've had Mark Stubler on the podcast. Before, a lot of people don't know him. You might know him. I say Cody Hawfine's business partner. Everyone knows Cody. Yes. Mark is the one behind the scenes making Cody look good. That's right. I like Mark a lot. So I get this call from this guy named Mark. And this time, I don't know anything about him or anything. And he just says, I am looking for somebody who can help run our KPC campaigns better than they run. Now I've worked with every industry specific company that I can find. We went through all of them. And we just can't find anybody who can make this work for us. Can you take a look at it? I said, OK. I didn't say this. I've never run a PPC campaign before. So he asked when I could come by. And he asked if I could come the next day or something. I said, I can't, but I can come next week. So I gave myself time to binge everything on YouTube that existed about PPC advertising. So this is my start with PPC. And I knew a little bit about digital advertising. I don't know how you feel about your past self. I always look at myself even six months ago, like a complete idiot that had no idea what he was doing. Yeah. I have many instances of those where I went from a complete ambassol to mildly competent. Yes. So this is one of those journeys to mildly competent. So anyways, I mean, at this time, this is back before Cody was even-- this is 2017. Cody wasn't super well-known. Wasn't doing a time-- They were for wholesaling ink. Yeah, their business was a little smaller. I don't remember exactly when you got involved with wholesaling ink, but regardless of the situation, it was earlier stage for them. I remember showing up to the office and being like, who are these people? They're not trying to sell something. Usually people I talk to are trying to sell something. And also, they're in this sketchy little basement office. And I was like, what is this place? And what is this industry? And so I walk in there, the marks there, and he shows me the computer screen. And there's his Google ads accounts. Like, tell me what's wrong with this account. So I took-- I took, well, you're a minimal EBC experience. I mean, every video on YouTube that could be found, I watched it before this moment. So I was prepared. And I had thought through all the things. So I started poking through the accounts and I thought, wow, I don't like this. So I think this should be done this way instead. Like, all these things based on what I had learned. So I didn't know this until later, but turns out, like, he was talking with like three or four companies. And the price I had quoted him is $3,000 at that time per month to manage it. It was apparently like twice the price of anybody else who had pitched him on this service. And at this point, you were like 20 years old? Yeah, I'm pretty-- I'm about 20 years old. I'm twice as expensive as anybody else. And I've never done this before. I mean, it's pretty-- a lot of Hutzpah, right? To come in, commanding $3,000 a month at 20 years old. Well, I didn't know what to charge, to be honest. Like, I just-- with my other clients, my strategy was I just charge a little bit more each time until somebody says no. So here we were at 3,000. That was the running amount of what I was just charging clients, because I had no idea what to do. But here's the-- to me, this isn't like a fake it till you make it story, because I was going to find a way to make this work. And I fully believe that. So anyways, somehow, some way, Mark, we just got along really well. Because I'm not a guy to make big promises. You probably know that about me. I'm the guy that tells you I'm going to be there at 10 o'clock, and then I get there at 9.45. Just because I don't like to mislead people, right? So anyways, I was still very humble about it. I don't know if I can help you. But if I did, I would do all of these things. And that's what I believe is going to make the difference. And Mark saw a lot of potential on that. So over the next few years, I start working in-- still continuing to work in a lot of different industries. I was actually chasing-- Michael was-- I want to work with the biggest clients. So I found companies spending hundreds of thousands, or in some cases, even millions of dollars a month on these marketing channels that I would work with. Which is cool, because you get to see kind of the enterprise side and how do those marketers do it? Because it turns out the people who work at the agencies that work with those companies or who work in those companies are some of the best in the world. And you can learn-- there was like this huge gap between how PPC is done for small companies and how PPC is done for larger companies. And-- What's that get? I mean, that's what we're going to talk about over the rest of this series. But it's more-- like a lot of people think it's just the people just stare at the screen more. They spend more hours, like more minutes, just investing into the campaign. And just because of all the time, it gets magically better. It's not my experience, actually, as much as it's a smarter strategy. And you can have people that are more experienced, that are frankly smarter people. And that's what makes the difference. But regardless, I did all that. And then this client that I started working with, Cody Hafein, Mark Stupers Business, became this business that I never heard of. I would do everything I'd be calling them, emailing them. I'd come by their office and drop off cookies, just trying to figure out, I've been managing your campaign. Can we talk? Is it good? Is it bad? It was just radio silence. Yeah, just radio silence for multiple years. I would touch base with one of their admins once in a while. But it was hard to get ahold of them. I guess they were kind of busy. And apparently, I didn't know how well it was going. And then after three years, I finally talked to them. This is my first time talking-- They were paying you $3,000 a month. And they don't talk to you. Correct. For three years. Wow. Yep. So three years later, Cody calls me up. I never talked to Cody. He's like, I don't know if you know this. But this channel has become our cheapest cost per deal marketing channel, our largest revenue per deal, our highest return on investment marketing channel, and our single highest revenue marketing channel. At scale. Apparently, that first year, we kept the ad spend the same and we doubled revenue. In the second year, we doubled revenue again while keeping the ad spend the same. And then the third year, we doubled the ad spend and we doubled the revenue. So we kind of prove that we could scale it a little bit. So you got the cost per-- Well, see, you got to kept the cost, but increased revenue. So cost per-- the spend was the same. So maybe the cost per contract or cost per deal went down so they could double the revenue. There was some of that and then some of growing revenue per deal, because this is like-- Very volume. --in a time period. It's like 2017, then 18, 19, 20, growing deal spreads were normal at that time period too. And they were getting better and stuff. So there's a lot of-- there's a lot that contributed to the growth over that time period. But we'd gotten to the point where we generated 1.4 million in wholesale assignment fees over that year from the online marketing alone. And that was kind of the first case study or the first entrance I had into this industry. And I started getting referrals from them, and those people started giving me referrals. And at some point, I look at my business. This is back in 2020. And the very, very beginning of 2020, right before you and I met. And I realized we're mostly in real estate. And I haven't even tried. I don't seek out those clients or anything. And at that point, we cut off the rest of the industries that we worked with and just focus on real estate, which I wish I could say it was like my brilliance that I decided to do that. It wasn't-- I was kind of basically just to happen naturally. And now I get to take credit for it. But in hindsight, that was an amazing decision. What were the industries that you moved away from? Ecommerce. I loved-- I really specifically loved like enterprise B2B marketing. We took one of our clients. We did most of their online demand gen until they got acquired by VMware. If you don't know them, they're like a-- time like a $40 billion. publicly traded company. The reason I love B2B and the prize legions, actually the same reason I love Real Estate, there's more that they haven't common than you think. Very high cost per lead, very variable lead quality, and high difficulty for marketers in connecting those things, and you can actually optimize for the things that matter, which means that most marketers in those industries suck. And there's potential if you're really really good to be much, much better than everybody else versus there's some industries where like the best of the marketers and the worst of the marketers are pretty close. They're commodities. Yes, exactly. The skill gap is extremely noticeable here. Yeah, that's that's why I love Real Estate Investment Marketing. Yeah. Because to Google, a seller, a buyer, a motivated seller, they're all almost the same person. Yeah. So targeting and finding the right people on online is really, really, really hard, just the same as it was for, I mean, we worked with companies selling like IT infrastructure automation software or like we had one that was like like military drones. Super cool. But could you imagine like a more niche PPC campaign? Like we're looking for people from the government searching about defense drones. And we could do it any worked, but like it was so hard to find that just the right targeting, just the right people, and it was really hard to connect what's happening in sales to what's happening in marketing. And that's what made it really interesting. What would be like the filters to figure out, to figure that out? Proximity to a base? Yeah, I mean, that's not that wasn't as useful as intent. It was more just really, really getting down into like what's the people are searching? Specific keywords. Yeah. What's the language that they're using if they're this kind of, if they're in this particular career? Yes. So it's that. And then it's also how are you defining success and how do you optimize for those things? Which is something we'll talk about. Which is all of the analytics and the attributions? Yes. Yes. And it goes, it goes, it goes, so that's why we're doing this six part series just about like how do you nail that? Because the rest of the world is cellular and emotivated cellular that they're the same thing, but in this industry, they're so different. Well, I mean, when I started my journey, I was, it was a lot easier, right? At that time, it was a lot less competitive. Yeah. Right. Like I'm just thinking I need to find sellers because I need to get listings, right? I'm a realtor. I need to get listings. So what are all the things that you might google as a homeowner? Right? And so it was what's my house worth? Appraisals? I was doing appraisal keywords. Wow. Send you to a, it was kind of like a, you put in your address and everything else. And then I would reach out to you and then I would give you an estimated value of your home. Like that's what I was doing. Right. So I bought 10p values, you know, chantherprices.com. I know you're a domain hoarder. I am very much the owner of our hoarder. Right. So I think Phoenix home prices, I think that we're all the different ones. Depending on if you're in Phoenix, that's what you have. You're in 10p this week to get. Rises very intentional. Yeah. And what I learned very quickly was that that had nothing to do with motivation. Finding out my house's worth is not intent. And so the ones that were finding intent was some of my house. And then with that journey, some of my house like, these are great appointments. But the cost for click is way higher. Yep. Right. And the people that I'm competing against is like, oh, let's google some of my house. What does this look like? Everyone's a cash buyer. Like, what is this deal? Right. And that's how I went down to this journey was that I was just thinking of all the different things that people would google. They want to sell their house. And then you find, oh, something house. Oh, people that say Google some of my house also Google buy my house. And so that was that's when I realized the value of intent. Until then, like, you know, they're indicators. And that was it. Yeah. Yeah. 100%. That totally makes sense. And there's a lot of those things you say are still true today. And some of them have changed a little bit like the world of like buying domains so that you can rank for things. That's like, that's like old school SEO. Right. And it's a little bit of a different world here. But it's totally, you're totally right. And in those things, like getting in the cellars head and understanding like what they want and understanding how to reverse engineer that and gather data around that. Like that's a lot of like, that's a lot of what PPC is. So yeah, that's why I'm super and there was no like attribution like we bought their house that that didn't exist. Yeah, it was just like it was just finding that these people that Google here that really wanted to get one to this particular website. I knew it's like, we need to spend more on on those keywords. What could I track? I could track conversion of registration. Yeah. That's the only thing I could track was really on the website. That's the only thing I could never track this turn into a sale. Yeah. Yeah, 100%, which as we'll talk about it can be can be pretty valuable to track more metrics than just those basics. Right. So that's the general background. And that's that's when you and I met was probably like 2020. Yeah, just about 2020. I remember it was right before COVID. And we got into yeah, it's when I went deep into real estate investment. And that's that's really when my company grew. Yeah, it was probably 2018 or 19 because we launched a podcast in 18. And we were at that tempi office because it was crowded, right? That podcast room was me, you and Cody. Was it was that in a different place than here? I remember it's the same office, but just a different room, right? If it was here, then it would have been in that room. That would have been 2020. Okay, it was 2020. I'm pretty sure. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I think I think I'm not going to my date. My date's mixed up because then it was post COVID four years into like just post COVID because we got in this space after COVID. Maybe it was. I think we met January of 2020 at a collective genius event. But for sure, yeah, it was after CG. That's right. So it was 2020. For sure, it was a crowded room. Yeah, it was a crowded room. I remember that. A little bit of a different space in this. Yeah. But that's yeah, that's the journey in real estate. And now we have about 30 team members, 190 clients. I want to say, how many team members? The 30. 30. Yeah, that's usually surprising to people. But there's there's a lot of work to get done. 30. We're talking like W2. 30 WAs probably 25 W2. We have like probably five like VA's contractors, etc. There are some part time. We have like a good intern program. Pretty significant overhead. It is significant overhead. Yeah. Yeah. But there's I mean, to do what we do for our clients is not, you know, I guess not easy to do. Yeah. But yeah, we have about 13 members. And like I said, about 190 clients, we've had clients across the United States, Canada, Australia, pretty much most markets, which gives you a lot of a lot of vision to what's going on across the real estate market overall and what strategies are working. And we gather a lot of data. And so yeah, it's been it's been a super needy experience. And like I said, I wish I wish it was like an intentional strategy of mine long ago. But we've found, yeah, we found a lot of potential to create results that people just can't create without the amount of data that we have. Gotcha. So what are we talking about over these next few episodes? So there's there's a lot into it. So I'll just I'll give like a brief brief overview of this of this whole series. So number one, we have we have a few resources. So there's a toolkit and that's going to include some resources like that I'm talking about. And other resources that people can use to to run their own PPC campaigns to learn more about PPC. I mean, something that you had mentioned was like kind of two purposes of this at the beginning. Like that's helped people to be able to run their own PPC campaigns or to be able to vet out companies. There's a third one that's actually my primary reason for for wanting to do this. And that is that the advantage that a business owner can have if they really understand how a marketing channel works. Even if they're working with another agency, right on the basic level, they can understand how that marketing channel works is huge. Because our clients that get it, they're we can have really productive strategic conversations. And they understand why things have gone wrong and there are other PPC campaigns that they've run and stuff like that. Like that's my whole goal with this is there's people listening to this right now that have run PPC before and it hasn't worked. And at some point during this series, some light bulbs going to go off in their head. They're going to say that's why it didn't work. Yeah, I have to do that. And that's that's the whole goal of this. So then they're like they could be smarter with their strategy in the future. Because what often happens is we try to take the lessons we've learned from other marketing channels and apply them to PPC and then it just doesn't work. So what we deal with as an agency all the time is people like it feels sometimes like we're like fighting our clients just to get them the results that they need because they're constantly wanting us to do stuff that we shouldn't be doing. Right. Right. So I think I think education is super important. So yeah, well, the toolkit will have links available like if you want if people want to schedule a consult with with my team, ask about their specific market, ask, you know, questions more specific to them. That's we'll put that in the in the description. It'll be bitmentcollective.com/disruptors. So they can do that. And this like my whole goal for this, and this is the same thing I shared with you when when I reached out to you to first build this was let's make the most comprehensive information available on the internet about PPC for real estate investors. So this is going to be long. Like it's an investment to go through this, but we're going to add so much value. And I'm going to try to hold nothing back just to give as much as we possibly can so that people have the resources they need to succeed with the channel. Yeah, well, you talk about, you know, our our scenario, right. We're going from complete MSOLs to like mildly competent to competent to decent, right? The hope then is like if you don't know at least you know what questions to ask Because what happens is Particularly if you got a vendor who's not transparent It's like yeah, hey, what's wrong with my campaign? Oh, we're taking a look at it And that's the extent you get right, but if you have the transparency you can actually look at it's like okay I you know this I don't know do these ads set to make sense Right, are you testing it? How much testing are we doing and so you can ask better questions as As a client and then we can figure out like what strategies make again Best as is a best practice versus like this feels good Yeah, yeah 100% and and then you can avoid that situation where like unknowingly as the client You're like steer the company you're working with to actually work worse for you Which people do all the time? We tried to like be really really firm, but even with us I thought sometimes see like you just let the client like Mover you and now you're doing a strategy that doesn't work It's like it happens all the time like this is like one of the main things I have to train my team on so so that's why I'm super excited for this So just just the tease like the the series and the episodes that we're gonna do So that everybody knows what to expect so so in this episode I want to talk about like why this marketing channel like if you're listening to this so far when we haven't even talked about that much So far because honestly, I think it's kind of universally a channel that everybody knows can work really well as PPC It's it's so exciting But let's talk about like Where does PPC fit within a marketing mix? How do you know if you're ready for it like the the number of like different benchmark metrics? How does it compare to paper lead like all that kind of stuff for the next episode? We're gonna talk about Okay, number number two. I'm gonna give a fair warning here. It's it's gonna be the most boring one But it's gonna lay the foundation of a lot of knowledge that you need to understand all the really exciting stuff It's gonna make a big difference So we're gonna talk about how Google works and bidding which doesn't sound like the sexiest of all of all marketing But it's it's actually I think you'll find it really fascinating We're gonna talk in the third episode about location and budget strategy. This is Probably the most like practically useful one so if you can make it through number two the number two will help you understand number three Really really clearly and that helps you do great strategy The number four we're gonna talk all about Optimizing for lead quality and how you do that because that's the number one thing that people do wrong in this industry is they focus on Generating leads not generating deals That's one thing we do differently and I'm gonna share all the strategies that we use to focus on the quality Number five is what data do we have that suggests how you do acquisitions for PPC leads and how that might vary from your other marketing channels So we're gonna go pretty deep into that and then number six the way this is gonna work So you can go and download the toolkit again with the resources in the in the links below On there you'll find a place where you can register for a live Q&A session And you can also submit questions for that session So number six which kind of got gonna scoop up all the questions from all the prior episodes and we're gonna do a live A live question answer session awesome. I think that's gonna be great. So We're talking about inbound versus outbound right We're saying like you know PPC this is it whether you do it now you do it later But for sure this is a part of your strategy. Mm-hmm, right. So inbound versus outbound. So talk to me about the the scalability Of those two. Yeah, let's talk about it. I'm actually gonna share for anybody joining on YouTube on YouTube. Yeah, I'm gonna share a graphic just so you can see and understand this a little bit more I'll put the CS so you can see it to see as we go through this but the A lot of people talk about inbound outbound like they're like it's a binary thing like is a channel inbound or outbound I don't think we often think about it as like a scale like you could imagine on one side of the scale You have like fully up on marketing on the other side of the scale you have fully inbound marketing And then there's everything in between right so just to show like some examples of like Of marketing channels and where I think they fit on the scale like a fully outbound marketing channel might be like door knocking That's like it's outbound as you could possibly be Maybe closer. They're like realtor outreach that we have like cold call. We have cold text So these are like your traditional like out more outbound type of channels And then we move Into like semi inbound channels and here's the difference in an outbound I'm like going to you like I'm like calling you and trying to see if I can get a hold of you as we get to As we get to these semi inbound channels what we're getting to is channels where you go to the seller But and then they sort of actively choose that they want to respond to you right But they're not looking for you like let's just say you're doing direct mail. That's a great example of a semi inbound channel. You're not Like people don't go to their postcard or they don't go to the their mailbox Just like thinking and praying like this is my this is my cash offer mailbox I'm just gonna go to the mailbox. I'm looking for a card. That's gonna be a cash offer in my house. There's no intense No, there's no intense. It's just like they go they went to their mailbox for whatever reason they go to their mailbox And then they pull that out and they're like oh you know what this actually could be good for me right now in my situation right So those are semi inbound channels like Facebook ads is one of the channels we manage that falls in that that realm direct mail and then Believe in a little bit more inbound. You're like radio and TV, but there's still semi inbound because these are people that are You know, you're still showing them the ad first and then they're choosing to respond to right But that one is more general because this is not like you're not targeted Right or you're targeting is because you watch this channel yeah at this time although ironically the the lead quality Objectively from radio and TV is very good And I think the reason it's really good is because there's a lot of friction like it's hard to it's hard to like Write down real quick the phone number that you have to call or remember the name of the company and so because it's not like Like that's why Facebook ads would have a lower lead quality than like TV advertising for example Because in Facebook ads you just like click the button fill out the form versus in TV kind of like it's more friction before you get there So that helps filter and improve the lead quality. There's a friction, but it's also the implied authority as well That's true absolutely. All right like this guy's on TV. He has to be legitimate. Why would he not be on TV? Or always face TV is not legitimate. Yeah versus Facebook is full of all kinds of junk anybody and everybody. Yeah Yeah, 100 percent so So that's kind of like moving from outbound to semi-anban then there's like truly genuinely inbound channels And that's going to be all search marketing. So so here's the difference about search marketing these people go Online specifically to search for a company they're going to do business with and the reason I'm sharing this is to help you understand Like where does this fall within the context of other marketing channels But also I'll be understand like why people get so excited about about PPC as a marketing channel Because it just falls in line with SEO is like some of the most inbound form of marketing where these people like specifically looked for you As is inbound as it gets what that usually means is that you're going to have less leads per contract Then you do from some of these other sources You're going to have like different quality of conversation You know, it's it's hard to negotiate prices when the sellers like what you just came to me versus They're coming to you. It's a completely different conversation from from a sales standpoint Yeah, position is very different and this is if we're if yellow pages will still be you know in business That would be the yellow pages would be right there. I should have put yellow pages on this graph Yellow pages belongs where and when the right hand side this graph right Because like I'm looking for that I mean it might even be the back right like that's the primo Yeah, it's the back of the yellow pages Why are the back? I never heard that Because it was all color like you saw that every like it's like a billboard on oh I see I see right like you didn't search for it's either like it's like it's right there Another thing to do for my time Apparently so the thing too is like you know, I think I look at Facebook And TV as like disruptive marketing right in that Um, I'm just doing whatever And then bam, it's in my face. Oh, that makes sense right now for me. Mm-hmm. So we're is a little bit more hopeful Yeah, right and so I think that's that's slightly different. So one is you're not interrupting at all They chose you whereas other one is like I hope they see this ad. I hope it applies to them Yeah, if somebody ever calls you from your PPC ad and says take me off your list like I don't even know what to think at that point It's like they like went there right it's like it's like me pulling out the yellow pages and finding a company calling them Yeah, they're there, you know Yeah, it wouldn't be from PPC unless you're unless you're using your own brand as a keyword then I guess in that instance Yeah, I suppose I suppose that would that would happen We will talk about branded campaigns too as part of this one of the most common misconceptions in PPCs around branded campaigns But if we look at this like outbound inbound scale, I'm just gonna put a little arrow on here So this is what I already talked about so lead conversion as we go from outbound inbound it increases Yeah, right. There's also a couple other things number one the cost generally increases of these channels as we go from outbound to inbound Um, and also as we're going from outbound to inbound there's a decrease in the time and operational expense associated with doing deals Well, you say cost goes up, but it's also like what's the one looking for it's a we're not necessarily accounting for cost of labor or cost of data Cost of tools and services right like the great thing about these guys that do strictly PPC and TV Is yeah, they have CRM's But they don't really need the best CRM and they don't this is less data. It's like yeah when you have when you have tens of thousands of leads right a CRM looks different Then when you have like hundreds yeah, and then on top of that you don't have to manage the co-collars There's a lot of work right so you know, we've done a lot where we pull data Right, and there's all these different places we recently worked uh Started working with prop wire, you know, but you got Um, that she got proud stream you got investor machine Um 80 20 like friends that run all these other ones right yeah pay for the data and you got to pay for the skip tracing and you got to pay for the phone numbers and you got to like to actually use the phone numbers to call them or text them and then you have a pay for a VA right they get launch control, get a smartphone and then you're paying the person like organizes all that stuff or that's you yeah or and then you're paying the person who manages those VA's like when it goes sour like I like I chuckle inside sometimes when people tell me that they have like a business that like runs without them and usually what that means is like there's the cases where that's genuinely true but in a lot of cases what that means is like unless somebody quits until somebody quits or until I have to fire one of my like cold calling BAs or whatever and then it's like and well you don't think about anything that is like that happens all the time all the time yeah if you're running it well right so yeah you're right you're you're totally right like that's and that's where time and operational expense is I know we used to have operational expense but I look at that there's still a cost that's cost it's just it's not a cost for the lead it's a cost to get the lead um great point rgbates right pardon the disruption uh he for him him looking at his own data and he has found that ppc nade is nationwide right it's cost per leaser lower but you know uh cost per lead for ppc versus cost per lead for all those other things we just talked about ppc is actually end up being cheaper in the long run and uh yeah if you're if you're national that's that's fully true and the other the other element here like I'll just give you an example and this I did this kind of like informal study right because you hear about these people that are like cold calling and have like great numbers right like I have an eight extra turn on cold calling and have 10 x return on cold calling true pre-covid yeah it's a little bit less true now but what I did is it's like took some of these companies that mostly focus on cold call um in some and obviously I know a lot of companies that mostly focus on ppc um and and look at the businesses and see like what is the net margin of the business well you'll be surprised to know is at the end like all like from from either group of course it vary between company to company but the net margin of the business on either was not significantly different um well what was really different was their marketing return on ad spend that they measured their marketing return on ad spend for or return on investment talking more like a market like a like an online marketer than normal marketer right um but yeah their return on investment for their cold calling stuff was like high numbers compared to their compared to the companies that did ppc but if you look at the pnl basically like how it worked out is marketing expense on the pnl was smaller if they did outbound marketing but operational expense was higher versus if they did a lot of ppc then their marketing expense was high and then their operational expense was low so a lot of people when they're focusing on like they're already doing outbound stuff and they're looking at should I do ppc they're thinking I have to hit the same return on investment targets that I have with my cold call and usually it's not true like to hit the same net margin as a company you actually don't need to hit those numbers quite the same um and then also you look at companies with certain revenue how many heads do they have in the company how many people how much to manage a complicated visit and it's a whole different story with with ppc so that's I think that's a super attractive piece of it yeah and I think the other thing too is things that we don't account for is that it takes a lot more effort to build trust with outbound with cold calling so not to say it doesn't work it just takes a lot more effort yeah what's the cost of lower sales team morale yeah right it's something um and then the other thing too is um the relationship is uh because they didn't start off on a great foot um it's also harder to maintain so um they don't cross the line to the final closing as often the fallout rate is higher uh with outbound versus inbound that's fascinating yeah uh personally I could see that one going either way because ppc also gets you some crazy people I know you have some personal experience with some crazy people from ppc yeah yeah I mean and I can contribute to fallout too that was a fallout yeah the guy went to prison that was a really unfortunate yeah yeah that's I don't know if you share the story of wild wild story um but yeah there's so I mean I could see I could see it going both ways but there's uh there's something about like somebody who's actively looking the other things cash conversion cycle right if you're cold calling someone how long is it going to be before the close if you're versus if they're like coming to you it's almost like if you're cold calling you're waiting for the time to be right and that's when you're finally going to get under contract versus with ppc you know the times right at the beginning right because they're searching right now that means they have a problem right now they're motivated they're feeling more heat right now so versus a paint indicator that you see from a motivated seller list this is like hey I need to sell yeah yeah 100% so it's it's a it's definitely different type of lead different type of conversation I'm not the guy it's going to tell you that it's like it's right for everybody I can tell you like number one reason that people don't like ppc sometimes is let's just say they just say I have no money and I'm looking for the cheapest way to find a deal the answer is not ppc no the answer is like you pick up a phone you go knock some doors like you got I like because here's the thing outbound channels you're using your time as part of the asset for the marketing and then for inbound channels you're it's like your money's working for you right so what that means is you're just sitting there twiddling your thumbs waiting for a lead to come in and then it comes in and it's like all hands on deck but it's yeah it's a completely different thing so what I find is oftentimes like especially if you're willing to grind the the cost per deal with some other marketing channels can be lower and it can be a like faster way to get to do a lot of people assume that this ppc has a faster cash conversion cycle means that it's the quickest way to get to a deal that's not necessarily true because it's also really expensive so I'd say the place that ppc usually fits for companies we'll talk in a later episode about like specifically how you choose your budget in your timeline but the spoiler there is probably takes a little more money than you think it probably takes a little more time than you think right and you don't turn on today and then have a contract tomorrow yeah or not usually like it's things like the happy I mean I just had a conversation with by one of my sales guys recently and he comes back from this conference like you know we go to a lot of these conferences it was just one of these masterminds and he's sharing some good news with the team and he says oh there's this client there that super happy they've been with us two weeks they already have three contracts they're super happy and he's expecting me to like like raw raw with him and I was like did you tell that client to shut up literally the words I said to him they kind of like took him like took him off guard a little bit he's like I'm sharing good news here I'm like yeah but that good news making other people think that they're gonna get three contracts in two weeks if they turn on ppc campaigns with us and I'm not happy about that it's like some of you'll find it's really different about me is like a lot of agencies that like highlight their best stories I specifically exclude our best success stories from our case studies yeah because I don't want people getting like the wrong idea of how this works so yeah their story's like I can show you learn to clients like like probably over a dozen clients that like they've gotten a lead within the first week it turns into a contract but is that a norm no but it's not the norm and and that's that's luck and I don't like marketing based on luck that's why you're noticed most of our case studies are like more than six months even if the client had success right away because we're like we're looking for like you know like we see that this person starts ppc and they have success in their first week with some other marketing agency then they're a case study for that marketing agency and then the next month they're working with us that's the reality of this industry is like it's it's a it's a really up and down thing and like sustained long-term success is really what we're looking for so I like to play games that I know I can win predictably like I don't like to play the lottery and I feel like that's what a lot of people are doing with a marketing channel if you're just you're just kind of hoping it's going to work right away right here for the long haul 100% now what's the difference between pay paper click and paper lead good question so and this is when I get super often have you noticed this that people consider like paper click and paper lead to be like almost interchangeable like I've heard people sometimes say like I'm doing ppc when really they're just doing paper lead marketing interesting and I don't know if it's because they both have like the two p's in the name or if they think that like it's because paperly companies like skew more towards online marketing but here's kind of how I think about it like direct mail you like your paying per postcard they spoke your paying per impression Google your paying per click and since it's called ppc paper leads it's just a different way of paying for things it's not the marketing channel though you'll notice like this whole this whole graph that I laid out that has all these different marketing channels on it I didn't I didn't put paper lead on here and the reason paper leads not on here is because paper leads not a marketing channel paper lead is a way of buying leads the marketing channel is what underlies the leads that the paper lead companies generating and different paper lead companies use different channels and many of them use many channels so the the thing with paper lead is you don't control the actual marketing right underneath it or the intent or the intent right so like this just say like I'm a paper lead company am I likely to use a home value keyword yeah right because it gets me a lead that is not refundable because it is a person who has a house to sell and they're not technically listed on the market so it's still like that that's the that's the that's the for paper lead companies that's the goals like I need we need to generate leads that are good enough that they don't get refunded basically so it's the incentives are different the incentives are for sure different yeah now that said I'm not saying I'm not like here to say a bunch of bad stuff about paper lead like it's it's a good way to get leads I just for me I think paper lead is a good way to get leads if you have a smaller budget and you're not really able to do the big ramp up for PPC it's also a really good channel supplementary yeah it's just I would be really really slow to have that be a core part of my business and I've seen a lot of people were like one day they don't change anything but the paper lead company changes the way that they're doing the marketing underneath the leads yeah and then now all my lead quality has changed yeah my cost hasn't changed Yeah, I've done nothing. That's the issue that you run into with it. I think it's good. It's like one of those things where like when it's good, keep going, doesn't work, absolutely. Does it not work sometimes? Absolutely. Yeah. Test it, play with it. If I had most of like my marketing budget and paper lead, I'd be really, really nervous. Even if it's going well, because concentration on the channel sounds like a really good strategy until suddenly it doesn't. Yeah. And then diversification seems like what you should have been doing all along. Well, so paper lead is one of those things that's always good or not always good. It's generally good when they're rolling out. Because when they're rolling out and they don't have a lot of clients and they have these excess leads, they can sell the leads and it's great because they're, you don't have a lot of volume so your cost per, you don't have a supply problem. You have a demand problem. Yeah. So you need to go find more people to buy your leads. And as you grow, then you have more demand. And at some point, don't know when your demand exceeds your supply. And the moment you have more demand for your leads than your supply, now you need to go source more leads and now your lead quality suffers. Probably, right? Yeah. Because your first leads were some fixed cost per lead, right? As a person that's aggregating the leads. But as demand increases, you need to fill out the demand or you don't, you could choose not to fill the demand and maintain quality. But then as a business owner, you're ignoring, you're turning down revenue. Yeah, or you're driving price way up. Yeah. Because that's why a lot of them have an auction system. And I want to be careful about what I say here because I'm not saying like, I'm not saying like people who run paper lead companies bad people. We have to recognize, I actually have a lot of friends who run paper lead companies. And I think they're really good people. We have to recognize that the standard economics of that business are such that there is a misalignment of incentives. Right. And that's the issue, right? Even like as well intentioned as somebody running it. Like another common thing that happens in paper lead even like outside of the control of the people running the paper lead companies is all paper lead companies by leads from other paper lead companies. Or are there affiliates that they have and stuff like that? In fact, there are some that that's most what they do. And then they get screwed over sometimes because somebody sells them a bunch of bad leads and then they're accidentally screwing over their clients. And so it's this big thing. Like it's a kind of tricky situation where even like well intentioned people can like screw up the lead quality sometimes. Yeah. It's just not the right, not exactly the right incentive. So that's where I think like for me that the place of for paper lead is early on. And or it's supplemental to other channels. That's like in my opinion kind of where it fits in the in the mix of things. And you just want to be really careful with it being most of your marketing. Gotcha. So we're going to go into this much deeper level in the next subsequent modules episodes. But for now like what are some key metrics? Like they don't watch the other episodes for whatever reason. Right? Yeah. At a high level where the key benchmarks that people should be targeting. Yeah, let's talk about a few things. And I just want to share like just some basic numbers just so we can get a start of what's pretty normal. And I'll share like some of the like most common questions that we get. One thing that you notice here is this is probably like what we're just about to go over is probably like on the internet the most comprehensive overview of BBC benchmarks that exists. It's not even going to be that much. But like the thing is the way that most people get their data is they just think in their mind like, oh, I have a few clients that I could think of that all have these numbers and I'm just going to like spit those out. Also humans have like a bias towards positivity. So I'm going to show some numbers and some of them are going to look a little prettier. Some of them are going to look a little uglier. And it's mostly from the standpoint of like this is everything. This is like the winning case study and like the worst client we've ever had. I'll just merge into one. So it's fascinating. But it's I think as transparent as I could possibly be. Number one question we get all the time is what is the cost per lead? I don't like that question. I think there's way too much focus in this industry around lead cost and way too little focus on lead quality. Well, there's kind of a focus on each but it seems like the only one you focus on is whichever one's not good at the moment. So like because there's a lot of focus on lead quality too. But let's talk let's talk about cost per lead and what's normal. I'm going to share a graph here. And just explain kind of this range and how it goes. So this is a yeah, this is a graph showing our cost per lead. This is as of as of like last year across our different clients. So this is a histogram for those that don't remember their college or high school years. We're basically kind of like visualizing sort of the bell curve of like natural distribution of the sample. So you can see here at the bottom we have like different buckets for for cost per lead like between zero and $50, $50 to $100, $100 to $150. And then at the top we can see at this time the number of clients that we had data on from a significant period of time that that can fall into each one of those buckets. So what you'll notice here is the most common cost per lead. And this is like seeing this the reason I share this instead of just saying, oh, the average cost per lead is $220. By the way, that's our average cost per lead. That means almost nothing when this is behind that data. And this tells you like, you know, how much is in each. The range and likelihood. Yeah, and for people listening through audio, I'll describe it because you can you can understand it. Basically, we're looking at a bell curve distribution here. We're the most common cost per lead is somewhere between $250 and $300. But you'll see cost per lead is high is $850 and is low is less than $50 on this graph. So the natural question that everybody asks except where they see this is why is it so different for all these different companies? And and that's a lot of what we're going to be talking about from a strategy standpoint. And there's a couple things like one, the idea is always get the cheapest cost per lead that you can. But you don't want to prioritize cost per lead over other things. Sometimes there's strategies where you want to run with a higher cost per lead and strategies where you want to run with a lower cost per lead. Like we can intentionally shift the quality of the leads towards a higher quality at a higher cost or lower quality at a lower cost. Like that's the decision that you have. Yeah, we had a rubber wincel in here. And one of our close one viral where he just had a breakdown of a return in an ads ban. Right, it's like if you know, for example, like the best zip code in your city, the best zip code. Like any any proper shows up there, you know it's like a grand slam. And you could target and you know, hoarders have the best margins. For example, if this is your business, right? Wouldn't you be willing to pay and you know that you can work 25% say, for example, right? Wouldn't you be willing to spend $2,500 to lead for a hoarder, home, in your favorite zip code? Right? If you know that you close one in four, if you know that, it has to be you have to know this for a fact. Right? That means your cost for contracts $10,000. Yeah. Wouldn't you want to spend that if you know you're going to make $80 or $90K in the back end? Yeah. Right? But no one will spend $2,500 on a lead. 100%. And it means that like a common scenario in PPC is that some of the highest value leads are actually undervalued in the marketplace. Right. So that happens for sure. And we'll talk about like auction economics. It's a super, it's a super interesting thing. But yeah, you're 100% right. Like cost per lead is not the end all be all. But that said, would your return on investment improve, you could get that same lead for $1,000 to set to $2,500? Yes. So the goal is always the lowest cost per lead. But we don't want to think that's the only thing that matters. It just it mixes with the other things. One thing you'll see about this particular graph here is that the, yeah, these basically just describe like who falls in one side. You got two clients there under $50 a lead. Is it true? Yeah. So under $50 a lead happens pretty much only when you're like super national. This is like I'm targeting 48 states with my marketing. Yeah. And this is a natural relationship that exists in PPC is the why do you go geographically the cheaper the cost per lead? That's why you'll see a lot of companies that focus really heavily on PPC. Often they are in multiple markets or even national. So there's a, and we'll talk about that. That's all part of our location strategy. It's not the only way to do it. We have some clients that are like fully national. Much more common is to be like in this semi national range where we're like, and you know, we're in a lot of markets, but we're not just looking for the cheapest possible leads, but some people do well with that strategy. For single markets anywhere from like $200 to $400 per lead is pretty normal. That's where you'll see like the bulk of our clients being in single markets and then the bulk of the cost per lead being in that range. As we start to get higher, those are usually really small markets. Tiny markets have a higher cost per lead. And after we go through this second episode, you'll understand exactly why. But as of now, let's leave it at that. And as we get to like these really high cost per leads, that's where we're like really really small markets. And then sometimes often like the more money you spend, the more of a dimension return you get. Like I just had a conversation with a client yesterday where they're like, well, my cost per lead's 400 bucks and I'm killing it. Let's push the cost per lead up to 600 bucks and do way more volume. Like that's a real thing that companies do. And some people are looking at that like $600 per lead, I would ever pay that, but it's not just like you were saying Robert Wensley. If you know, you convert a certain percentage of those leads at that quality, and you know what those deals are worth. In this case, that client still can hit a 4x return on investment at $600 per lead. Right. So we'll do that all day long. We had another conversation with the client again yesterday where they're revenue per lead and their business is $3,000 from in their market with BPC leads. So when you're thinking of that, if our revenue per lead is $3,000 in our minimum return on investment, it's three X. We could pay a thousand dollars per lead. And you could think like why would you ever do that? You do that because you could push volume really hard if you're going to do that. A lot of these companies dominate a market. They do it at a lower return investment, but a really high volume. So that's absolutely something to consider. So that's cost per lead. Before we move on. I know it's a deep topic, but any thoughts on cost per lead? No, I think the key here we're saying is cost per lead is just one thing. It's not the end of it all. 100%. Yep. I am going to pull up one other really insightful graph here. This is our Google leads per contract percentiles. So I mean the two questions that we can ask the most is how much do leads cost and how good are they? Obviously those are the things that people care about. This is my best attempt at using numbers to answer the questions. Right. How much do leads cost? And then here we have how many leads per contract by percentile? The reason this is really useful. Our average across all our clients is just over 15 leads per contract on Google ads. It varies though, because you'll hear people talking about how they have 10 leads per contract or something like that. Does that happen? Absolutely. You can see here that would put you somewhere between the 80th and 90th percentile. If you're one of our clients, 10th percentile would be like 24 leads per contract. First percentile is probably like 100 leads per contract. Like we'll see that here and there. This largely has to do with the acquisitions team. Because these numbers are actually normalized based on the types of keywords that leads are coming from and stuff like that. So this leads that should be the same quality. This is how much it varies still. So it has to do with your acquisitions team. Just to give people a little bit of a picture of like how does this typically go. Normally if we're going to average 15 leads per contract, what that means is that you'd end up with 13 leads that are like non spam. So two of them you'd be like one, two, three main street really. Like that kind of stuff or some crummy wholesaler this. Hey, I want to be a buyer. Yeah, yeah, something something like that, right? Yeah. All right. So you knock those two out. Now you got 13 leads, which this is by the way, it's common misconception for PPC. Because people are like, well, PPC is supposed to be the highest quality leads in my cold call. I never get an accident to like buyer lead. But in PPC, I just got this lead that like one, two, three main streets. I'm your real phone number. Like that sucks. I paid a lot of money for that. Like that's the thing is you'll still have less leads per contract. It takes that into account, right? So we're taking out two leads and we got 13 left of those 13. Normally we're going to be able to contact about 10 of them. So three people we're never going to get in contact with of those 10. About five are going to get to qualify for various reasons. These are these are people that we like got on the phone with. And they do have a house to sell. Yeah. And then they're, you know, they're just qualified because the retail they're just qualified because the lead isn't a different location than we're located in. Which that's actually one of the most common frustrations that we get from clients is like, I'm in Phoenix and you just got me lead in Florida. What the heck are we spending my money in Florida? And you know, it happens is people live in Phoenix but they're trying to sell a house that's in Florida or they use VPN sometimes. You know, so that kind of stuff happens and you get leads out of your location. And by the way, there are ways to minimize that. Right. So a lot of people, I'm not trying to say like you should have that there's a lot of stuff that we do to like with all that down a lot, but you'll still get some. You'll get properties that are already listed on the market. Get properties from realtors. Yep. Properties from realtors. So that kind of stuff is the reason that you generally or like wrong property type like like it's a mobile home and you don't like mobile homes or something like that. Yeah. So that's like the basics of people that have a house to sell that you talk to on the phone. Whittle that down to five that you consider actual opportunities. From those five opportunities, you should get one contract. Gotcha. So that's like the basics of PPC. So people ask these questions like I'm getting spam leaks from PPC is that normal. Yes. How many? 50% of your leads are spam like no, that's not good. Right. Or you know, I'm getting these out of very leads is that normal. Up to about 10%. How likely a spam coming from PPC. How likely is it? How does that even happen? Well, it's one of the greatest mysteries of the universe. I mean, there's there's I mean, there's a ton. So I mean, we could do a whole episode just on click fraud. So that's a big thing that happens in PPC. And there are ways to mess this up where your PPC campaigns will get almost 100% spam leads. It's a real it's a real thing. So I'm what I'm sharing here is like numbers from a campaign that's run well. Not well run campaign could be all over the place and sometimes even a well run campaign could have like a higher spam rate or something like that. But the yeah, reasons for spam are going to be. Sometimes Google partner network. Oh, that is that is a that is a nightmare. Don't even don't even go there. So yeah, that's like when I talk about like how if you run it wrong, you can get like 100% spam leads like that's if you're on the Google search partner network. Yeah, where there's a ton of click fraud. There is some click fraud on Google's actual network. And that you know, you might get a spam lead here and there, but it's hard to say exactly why spam leads exist sometimes it could be a competitor is messing with you or. Right could be bots. Maybe that get past Google system. Google's incentive is to get rid of those as much as they can, but you know, it happens still one of favorite stories was a shuntary right. He was holding a live event. In Phoenix, and he was talking about how paper click was really good. And everyone in the room took out their phones. And Google sell my house fast and just drained his PC account. Oh, that's hilarious. Right. And just one day. Is drain his PPC budget for the day. Right. That's so funny because they all they'll quit. Where stuff happens, right? That's funny. I think you do that to himself. Oh, he definitely did that to himself. And that's like one of his like, you know, S.O.P.s like on when we have events. We turn off our PPC campaigns. That's so funny. I didn't even think about it because they're all just hunting for the website so they can see it and see the landing page and everything. Yeah, that's that's a little bit wild, but that is. Yeah, there's there's real like in there's ways to to deal with this like we use. Software to like block IP addresses from people if they click more than like a certain number of times within the same day or a certain different number of times within the same week. Yeah, so yeah, there's there's ways to like deal with that stuff a little bit, but the thing that nobody tells you about for all that stuff is like you already paid for it. By the time you know it's a problem. And then you've got to like you can try to prevent from paying for more, but you've already paid for it. Yeah, so it's a tricky game. Perfect. All right, so you know, hopefully you guys got a ton of value here. This is just the intro, right? And then the next episode we're going to talk about laying the foundation. So tune in for the next episode where we're talking about how Google works and bidding effectively. And before I forget, I want to make sure that we get all the resources out so everybody can get them. The first one is if you're looking to book a call with someone on my team so they can talk to you about strategy specifically for your market for your business. Help answer whatever questions you have you can go to batemancollective.com/disruptors. We're going to put that in the description as well. And then number two, if you are looking for more resources and this is something that will continually reference throughout the series. We have something we call a PPC tool kit and there's a bunch of stuff in there and we'll kind of reference like I said some more of those things as we go along. You can go to batemancollective.com/toolkit/disruptors and that gets you access to a whole bunch of resources. I honestly saw this for the first time yesterday. I'm a little bit mind blown at all the value that my team put in this whole toolkit. It gives way a lot of our processes that we use for managing PPC. Things like an account maintenance checklist, specific geotargeing parameters. There's two separate other master series in there that go even deeper into PPC and then one for Facebook ads. So it's a pretty cool resource. And then in there, you'll after you sign up for the toolkit, you'll also see the place where you can sign up for the Q&A that we're going to be doing at the end of the series. All right, perfect. So guys, you know, hopefully in listening to today's, you know, many or first episode in our many are. And our first module inside our PPC masterclass of batemancollective, you guys got a ton of value, right? So make sure you guys tune in to our next episode where we're going to be going over how Google actually works and how to bid effectively. We will see you guys on the next one.