Brandon Bateman. $50MM In Wholesale Fees From PPC, Facebook, and SEO

Brandon Bateman: Your podcast. Shout out to Steve Trane. Jump on the Steve Trane. We real estate disruptors.

Steve Trang: Hey, everybody. Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Real Estate Disrupters. Today, we've got my good buddy, Brandon Bateman with Bateman Collective, and Brandon flew in from Salt Lake City to share how his clients have brought in about $50,000,000 in wholesale fees between PPC, Facebook, and SEO. Now I'm on a mission to create a 100 millionaires. The information on the show alone is enough for you to become a millionaire in the next five to seven years.

If you take consistent action, you will become one. Now what we've learned is that running a sales team is really hard work. Thankless at times. And, you know, you've got to hold your people accountable to what they said they want to do. This might make you feel a little exasperated.

You might feel alone. I can assure you that you're not. Ren and I are helping other business owners get through to their sales team to yield record performance in this ever shifting market. If that's if this sounds like something that might be interesting to you, text leaders to 33777. And the show is brought to you by our sister company, Investor Lift.

Get access to over 2,000,000 cash buyers across the country. Go to investorlift.confidentdisruptors to get 10% off. Now if you get value at this show, please share this episode right now. Tag our fan below. That way we can all grow together, and this is a live show, so please ask your questions for Brandon to answer.

You ready?

Brandon: Absolutely.

Steve: Alright. So we got a chance to catch up quite a bit. And so let's bring the audience in into what's going on. Now it's been about a year since you were last on the show. I don't know if you've noticed, but the market has shifted a little bit.

Brandon: I heard, actually.

Steve: Right? So let's talk about how this market shift has shown up on the digital marketing side.

Brandon: Yeah. It's a it's an excellent question. And it's kinda hard to say, like, what is a market shift and what's just a shift. Like, in terms of the digital marketing, I can tell you kinda what's happening recently. Sure.

It's it's really interesting. So one thing that I've been watching for a really long time, if you look at, like, motivated seller keywords, things like sell my house fast, sell my house as is, buy houses, all that kind of stuff, they've been exponentially growing in search volumes. Search volumes are, like, how many people are searching them on Google.

Steve: They've been interested in selling a house for cash or selling their house fast. That search inquiry has increased.

Brandon: Yeah. Exponentially since 2004.

Steve: Oh, since 2004. Sorry. Okay. Nonetheless, you're good. I was like, woah.

What's going on here? Alright.

Brandon: Well, actually, though, it that's that's the interesting thing because I I saw this going up and up and up. And I've been wondering for a while if the market shifts, what happens? December compared to December the prior year, search volume for our keywords and aggregate together is up 21% Okay. Compared to the prior year, which is really consistent with the growth that we've seen year over year for a while now. So Really?

Yeah. So it's it's intriguing to me because transaction volumes are down as I'm sure you well know. Mhmm. Yet more people are going to Google than than ever before. We hit complete record amounts in December for search volume.

So it's

Steve: Now does that sell my house fast or sell my house in general?

Brandon: So believe it or not, the the searches for more generic, non like, less motivated terms, which, by the way, can still be great keywords Right. Those have been a little bit more flat. Specifically, keywords that show motivation have been growing the most. And this is not the this is not just in the past year that that trend has existed.

Steve: Sure.

Brandon: It's it's, like I said, exponential all the way since 2004.

Steve: And the only reason why I'm asking this is that I'm just kinda picturing this right now because, you know, we do sales training and we have, you know, we coach hundreds of people. Right? The question is we noticed, like, right around July and since July, but it became more of a problem in q three was people listed with a realtor. Right? Mhmm.

Brandon: So when

Steve: you say, like, you know, sell my house, like, they might be frustrated in their realtor relationship because it's taking more than three days to sell a house, which is just mind boggling. And so for me, I I I would suspect that more people are googling sell my house, maybe even sell my house for cash. But you're saying even the parts where, like, where there is screaming motivation, that inquiry has increased as well.

Brandon: Yeah. And a lot of those people who sound motivated, they could be listed. Right? Mhmm. Like someone who's looking for a way to sell their house for cash or fast or something.

It might be because they wanna sell it quickly and it's not selling on the market.

Steve: So,

Brandon: come q three and and this has been a shift that's kinda happened in in markets at their own times. You're talking about Phoenix naturally Mhmm. Which is kind of the place where it shifted first. And then we, you know, we've seen the shift kind of move east over time

Steve: Sure.

Brandon: As things tend to go. But number of listed leads has gone up. But believe it or not, I I was running the numbers. And since q two so if we look at q two's numbers and we compare it to q four, our clients the the rate of qualification of leads. So, like, what percentage of their leads do they mark as, like, this is something I wanna have an appointment with.

This is, this is a seller that's an actual qualified opportunity. That rate has gone up by 77% with leads from PPC marketing specifically.

Steve: Where are you seeing that feedback?

Brandon: We have a database that we keep all that information in. Like, the the 50,000,000 number doesn't come from nowhere. It's, you know, it's it's from the 50,000,000 from the 72,000 leads that we generated last year. Mhmm. These, of course, rough numbers and and roughly 2,400 deals off of $9,000,000 worth of advertising spend.

So

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: So all of those numbers, we keep them, and and we have our clients report to us data on the quality of the leads. And that's not even just for us. We we basically all the marketing we do is optimized towards deals, not towards leads. It's something that we do unique as a company. Mhmm.

And opportunities are, of course, something on along the way there. So we put a lot of effort into tracking opportunities, and I was very surprised to see that that trend that from q two to q three, lead quality improved. From q three to q four, it improved yet again. Who knows what what comes in q one? Right.

But, yes, those listed leads started coming. But still even with them, things improved. The other factor is we've been improving lead quality through different initiatives that we have as a company to try to improve lead quality for our clients, which is something we always try to do. Right? So there's a like, a lot of people have dealt with those listed leads in a really bad way, but we found ways to reduce the number of listed leads by over 50%.

Steve: What what is a bad way? What did you guys do differently?

Brandon: A bad way is to do nothing.

Steve: And One way. Yeah.

Brandon: That's that just happens. Right? Listed leads just happen. But I'll I'll give you an example. I have someone, in this this conversation, I'm thinking of a specific one in my head, but I've had this conversation dozens of times with different people where they they come to me, and they they basically say, I have a problem.

My PPC was great. Now all I get is these listed leads, and we're getting tons of them. And, of course, it's not like Alyssa Bida is completely worthless, but it's pretty much worthless as as you know as well as I do. So I look into their account. And one of the biggest factors of targeting with PPC, like choosing the right seller, It's all about how you give feedback to Google.

I think we've talked about this before in the podcast. Like, that that data loop Mhmm. Really, really important. And because when you tell Google good job, it tries to find more stuff like that. So I have these people complaining to me.

These listed leads are worthless. I can't do anything for my business. And I look in their account, and they're essentially giving Google a high five every time they get a listed lead.

Steve: How are they giving Google a

Brandon: high five? Because they report to Google that they generated a lead. And Google understands that as value because they're telling Google, this is what I care about.

Steve: How are they telling Google that this is the lead?

Brandon: Well, it's through JavaScript that fires on the website. That's how you usually people, set up PPC. And and to be fair, that's that's, like, the the right way to do it. Right. Like, if you were to read a if if you were to read a book on Google Ads and just Yeah.

Do all those things, that's what you would

Steve: do. Right. So, like, a form completion, we send it back to Google. Hey. Someone went on our website.

They fill out the form. This is what we want more of.

Brandon: Yes.

Steve: So that's what you're talking about when we say we're high fiving Google.

Brandon: Yes. Yes. The high five is is an analogy. You don't actually high five Google. Right?

Steve: Sure.

Brandon: But you, it's basically you give it that positive feedback.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: And the way that we're doing it instead is it's it's a little bit different. It's called lead sculpting. Mhmm. And the way that it works is someone fills out a form. When they get past the first step of the form, the next question we ask them is, is your house listed on the market or is it not?

If they say yes, it's listed on market, then we basically terminate the process. We'll still send the lead to our client because maybe it has, you know, some some value or something. Sure. If they say no, it's not listed on the market, then we tell Google this was a lead.

Steve: This is when you're high fiving Google.

Brandon: Yes. We only high five Google when that right thing happens. So we've split tested this, and we've seen, like, it it decreases the number of listed leads by over 50% in Got it. Testing so far because Google then can use all of its data on its side to predict. Because Google's always looking at you're getting all these clicks.

What's the difference between the ones that turn into value and the ones that don't? And if you tell it more appropriately which ones have value to you, then it starts to see the differences between those people and the people who don't have value, and it can get better at generating them.

Steve: Years ago, right, when I was doing this on my own, there's something I could do where I could say, like, this lead is worth x amount.

Brandon: Mhmm. Do you

Steve: guys still have that feedback loop to Google?

Brandon: Yeah. It's it's, called conversion values. Right. And it does exist, and and we do use it.

Steve: So but you guys aren't using, like, you know, a list of leads worth $50 and an unlisted leads worth a thousand bucks. There's nothing like that. We're just saying, this is not a lead. This is a

Brandon: lead. Yeah. There's, so there's there's, of course, like, different layers of how this can be done. Sure. Lead sculpting is one of the more basic ones.

Mhmm. To go a little bit deeper would be to to assign conversion values Yeah. Which we do, and we're actually building that out in a more robust way. It's you you can tell tell Google to optimize towards a certain value and then report the the lead values, separately. So so, yeah, that absolutely exists.

The problem that most people run into with that is they don't have enough data for that to actually mean something to Google.

Steve: You need a lot of inquiries.

Brandon: You need a a ton of data. And what we built out was just eyeballing it. Yeah. Yeah. So what we built out in the past year is, like, a much more comprehensive feedback system to where we get a lot more data from our clients, And that is likely going to make a it it sets us up to do value bidding potentially even better in the future.

As of right now, we we accomplish that same goal just through different methods that aren't quite that. But I think the like, if we look at our long term vision of what we're doing, it is like, we're even doing some switching of clients right now into a more value based approach.

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: And the the road map has that, like, full force within a year or so. It's it's not an easy thing to do to get that, like, actually accurate and useful. Mhmm. But but we're getting there.

Steve: So this lead sculpting, I mean, I think anyone is listening right now. Like, if they learn nothing else from that, that right there is super valuable. Right? Just to give an effective feedback loop to Google. Is there anything else in lead sculpting, or is that everything there is as far as what you guys do in sculpt the lead?

Brandon: That is, that's, like, the biggest one right now. There's other things. Like, stuff that we'll do is we'll check someone's, like, geolocation. And if it's not in the market, then we won't report it as a lead. Yeah.

We'll do the same for, like, other potential things that could mean that it's spam and and, like, that kind of stuff. Mhmm. But that's the you know, that's list of leads is, like, the easiest takeaway for someone.

Steve: Sure. You're saying geo targeting. So, like, this is a situation where if they're not in the market if their if their IP address isn't in this market, we don't track as elite. But is that what you guys are doing right now? Because I think when I used to do that back in the day, like, it was, like, super inconsistent.

Right? Like, I said, I don't want anyone that's not here, and they'd Google it, and they'd still be and and we don't want anyone that's property is in another state, and we tell Google that.

Brandon: Mhmm. And

Steve: it was still, like, bring it in. So was it has that gotten better in their quality?

Brandon: Usually, like, 10% of leads kind of in straight areas is pretty normal. Mhmm. I don't know what you dealt with. There's also there's all kinds of different things that you could do to mitigate this. We had I had one conversation with someone in Collective Genius the other day.

They said, I have all these bad location leads, and I looked in the account, and their agency just targeted all the wrong markets. I'm like, that's so that's step one. Don't do that. Right. You gotta actually target the right areas.

There's there's different settings along those lines too. Mhmm. We also do, like, negative keywords and stuff. Like, we'll, we'll exclude all the other states as words Mhmm. And all the other major cities and things.

So

Steve: Well, that's what I had to do Mhmm. To to get that out. So I actually have a negative keyword list that's pages long.

Brandon: Yeah. I mean, there's, like we have, like, a list of, like, eight things that we do, but the the the cherry on top there is don't report it as a conversion to Google if it's not in your market.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: Because then you do all the stuff that you can do, and then you also just give the feedback to Google for it to do all the stuff that it can do. And that's that's kind of as far as you can go.

Steve: Sure. So data aggregation and machine learning. So let's talk about this. What are you doing in in regards to aggregating data and and leveraging machine learning?

Brandon: Yeah. Good good question. This has always been, you know, anybody listening to this can go back to, like, our first our first podcast episode two years ago and then our more recent one a year ago. It's it's always been part of our road map, to to use data in better ways. Sure.

And we've improved that pretty significantly over time. Like, kinda internally, we don't even consider ourselves to be a marketing company. We consider ourselves to be a data company, because, and I'm sorry if this goes, like, a little bit too philosophical, but just the the nature, like, if we're talking about supply demand economics, how that all works, is that nobody should make money from PPC because everybody would just bid the right amount of money. And it's, you know Optimal behavior. Exactly.

Yep.

Steve: Which doesn't exist.

Brandon: Exactly. So the only way to really succeed is to unlevel the playing field Mhmm. In some way compared to your competition. And it is my perception with the way that things are going that the best way to unlevel the playing field is you need to have more data than your competitors have.

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: The more data you have, the the more efficiently you can you can run your marketing overall. And come two years ago, when when we talked, we were, like, professional manual bidders. Like, we would we would, like I think it'd be, like, almost, like, brute forcing an ROI out of Google and Yeah. In Facebook or, you know, whatever the platform is where you just kinda, like, analyze things and all the different segments, and you double down where it's working and and all that stuff. And that was that was what was good.

But there's been this shift. Like like, machine learning has become extremely powerful, and it grows really, really fast in terms of how powerful it is. And Google's machine learning has become very powerful over the past few years. And at this point, we're doing, like, bid strategies, campaign strategies with artificial intelligence, with machine learning that are far outperforming what we can do manually. Yeah.

And it's been very powerful.

Steve: And it's not a surprise. Right? Because we're talking about there's two things here. We're talking about data and talking about machine learning.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: Like, we know in the last few years, data changed a lot. So it used to be, like, no one could find a hold of the homeowner. It's only they responded to a piece of mail. And then we got to a point where, like, okay. Here are all the motivated homeowners.

And then we got to a point where, like, here's how you co call them.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: Right? Or here's how you get their phone numbers. We got to a point where you're whoever could text them. Right? So there's this, like, this this this data component that kinda evolved and shifted the playing field.

The other thing too is machine learning, which is, like, you know, we use Audantic. We use DataFlick.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: These are products that are not interested in public records. They're interested only in data points. If this person does a, b, and c, they could be a good target for us. Right? And it could be I don't know what they're using for machine learning.

If I was to speculate, give given the conversations from Chris, Richter, I would guess three different data points. One is they smoke cigarettes. B, they played a lotto. And, c, their credit score is going in a downward trajectory. That would be my suspicion or probably three of the most powerful data points that they're using.

But it's machine learning versus waiting for a foreclosure notice, waiting for an, a landlord to file an eviction against a tenant. Right? Because those are great data points, but once that happens or a preforeclosure. Once that happens, everyone knows about them. But in this instance, there's just like, hey.

This person's trending this way. You should probably give him a call. Mhmm. And so that's what you guys are leveraging.

Brandon: Yeah. Absolutely. So it's, yeah, it's a it's a really interesting discussion. I think a lot of this is just how are investors doing marketing overall. Mhmm.

I think everybody agrees that digital marketing is growing at a bigger pace than than other marketing channels, and we see that by the fact that the market's declining and still search volumes are up 20%. Mhmm. We see that through our clients' results and all the clients we're talking to that are saying, all my other marketing is really rough, and then this digital marketing is going really well in the market today. It's, and through the fact that the lead quality is getting better and all those things. Like, the the journey that a motivated seller goes through to find the company that they do business with is shifting online.

Not like those other channels aren't relevant, but that the online channels are growing and those other ones are shrinking. Right? Those those trends

Steve: are shifting towards Mhmm. Online.

Brandon: That's that's my experience. And and with that, the data points are different. The whole way we used to market is different. So many people when they approach Facebook ads PPC, they think, how do I target the preforeclosure list? Mhmm.

That's not how it works. Because it turns out what someone types into Google is more predictive of their future behavior than almost any of those other things. And on top of that, Google has tens of thousands of data points per user on all kinds of other things.

Steve: Alright.

Brandon: So if we talk about, like, using data to have better success, for a lot of for a lot of investors, what they think of is it's called feature engineering. That's the piece of machine learning. It's like gathering that data, like, do they smoke Mhmm. Or do they not smoke? And it's all of those things.

Is it is it probate? Whatever the case. And that has value. But when you move to online, Google has way, way more data than we'll ever touch. Right?

These tens of thousands of data points.

Steve: That's like we we knew COVID started in November '19, not March 2020 based on what people were googling about their symptoms.

Brandon: Yeah. That's very interesting.

Steve: Right? It's fascinating. They're like, you know, like, when I go to the bathroom, this is what happens. And that search volume went way up in November '19.

Brandon: Yeah. That's I I hadn't heard that before. That that's super interesting. And so so I guess the way it works, like, if you if you break down machine learning, you have features. Those are all those data points that you have.

And then you have an outcome. In this case, it's called a supervised outcome. It's basically like the the goal thing that someone does. Mhmm. In this case, it's sell their home to an investor.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: And a lot of people think when they think data, they think about the features. Google already has way better features. They have all their online behavior, what kind of sites they visit, and they have, like, things attached to their online behavior, like their credit card history and the kind of purchases they make. And that might say if they smoke or not because do they purchase cigarettes? Like, there's all these all these data points.

There's a reason there's so many data points. And so many people focus on what are the data points and everything, but Google doesn't share everything.

Steve: Oh, they can.

Brandon: Oh, yeah. That that's true. They can't. And the real way to to win is to tell Google what is success and what isn't success. Mhmm.

So the investors that are doing best today with PPC, what they're doing is they're giving more data to Google to to say this was success, this wasn't success. So Google's algorithm can do all of its fancy stuff with all the data that it has, and they give it better quality data. Yeah.

Steve: So we're talking a lot about Google here, and we're gonna there's some other things I wanna, ask you. But did you see, Microsoft slash Bing has started collaborating in one way or another with ChatGPT? Did you see this?

Brandon: I I did see a headline. I never I haven't gone as as deep as that. I saw it this morning.

Steve: Yeah. So I don't know what it means exactly. Right? But for me, you know, I'm hoping because I love when there's competition. I'm hoping that, you know, being in Microsoft will be more competitive versus kinda like this, you know, you dis dismiss, like, little stepbrother.

That's the situation. Right?

Brandon: Yeah. Fair enough.

Steve: So do you think that that could change with with, with chat g b t and everything else is gonna change the the search engine digital marketing world?

Brandon: It's really hard to say. It depends on how people are going to react. I think under most circumstances, we can expect that the motivated seller side of the real estate investment industry is going to shift slower than just about anything else. I I came from the tech world before this, and I I talked to some of those people sometimes. They're like, wait.

Could people actually do direct mail? That's a that's a thing? Because so many industries have just blown way past that. Right? That's, like, the old thing.

Right?

Steve: It is the old thing.

Brandon: But that's the sellers that we work with. You know, they skew older in age. So so, basically, if there is a shift, I I trust that it would happen in a lot of places before it would happen in this specific industry and have implications on a lot of people listening. But it could. I mean, it just depends.

Are people gonna find the companies that they do business with through an AI tool like that? Right.

Steve: Or through

Brandon: a search engine?

Steve: Well, the idea is the the the theory, right, which IGBT is that if Microsoft can harness, right, this this AI, then the results are gonna get better. Right? Because the problem with Google or not Google, with Bing is that they're just not as good as a search engine. It's just the reality of what it is. Right?

People are gonna use what's what gives them the answers that they want. Yeah.

Brandon: They basically just try to do everything that Google does, but they pull it off a year later.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: And slightly worse. Yeah. That's all they've done.

Steve: Exactly. So that's their hope. So, anyway, we'll see where that goes. So going back to, you know, the shift in the market. So yourself, me, you know, we got Jason Lewis, Stephanie Butters, David Richter.

You know, we kinda have this thing where, like, we're in the business, but we're also vendors. And so I kinda started just like a little support group. Right? And we're seeing this, you know, for a bit affecting our business, but then also affects us as a service provider. So I'm curious for you, you know, with this shift in the market, has business gone down as far as number of clients?

Brandon: Yes. So if we look at q four, we had a decline in our number of clients, but we also spent more money on ads than ever before, which is interesting. We spent about $3,000,000 last quarter. So I, basically, what's happening is a lot of our like, I wouldn't say a lot. Some of our clients are dropping off, but those that are in are doubling down and generally doing pretty well.

Steve: Yeah. So which makes sense. So then what you're seeing then is there are fewer people competing. Is that accurate? Yes.

And that and that's not just your client. I was just saying general, right, on Google. Competition has gone down. So where what have you seen as far as as as a general across the country, cost per lead, cost per quality lead, like, how much has it gone down?

Brandon: Yeah. Great great question. And and it's a different answer for cost per lead versus cost per qualified lead. Alright. If you looked at our cost per lead trends over the year, it is, like, astoundingly steady.

It was something like $220 q one, $221 q two, $220.50, q three. Yeah. Q four was right in that in that realm. So it's really, really steady as an average across the country of about 220. Of course, some markets are really expensive.

Some some of our clients have really cheap cost per lead. So there's there's some variance there, but it's been very steady. But at the same time, I mentioned how through the course of this year, we've seen a 77 increase in lead quality. Mhmm. And what that means is the cost per qualified lead has been going down.

If we look at q two to q three, we had, like, a 7% increase in quality. And then q three to q four, there was a 31% increase in quality. So especially going into q four, we saw a huge improvement in the cost per qualified lead.

Steve: Okay. So the quality lead's gone up. Has the cost gone down, or we're just saying the quality has just gone up?

Brandon: The cost has been rock solid on PPST. On Facebook, it's been going up a little bit. Mhmm. Facebook has been mostly affected by the the general rates of the platform. Yeah.

And CPMs, if anybody's not familiar, it's basically, like, your cost per 1,000 impressions. Those have gone up. And in q four, they always go up because of election season, ecommerce companies, retail, all that craziness that goes on there. So in q four, they roughly doubled, especially between Black Friday and Christmas. We've already seen them get cut in half

Steve: so far

Brandon: in January. So it's hard to say what q one holds for Facebook. But for a couple years in a row, I've come here on this podcast and basically said, like, people are overlooking Facebook. That's kind of the better channel. PPC is really good.

It's it's flip flopped in in the past year, at least as I stand right now. Yeah. PPC has been excellent because that improvement in lead quality. While at the same time, Facebook's been steady in quality, but just the ad rates on the platform have pushed it more expensive. For many of our clients, it still is their best channel.

It's highly market specific, but as a whole, it's no longer the best performing channel.

Steve: So I had a theory, that we discussed before the show was that the reason why Facebook was no longer effective was because the iOS update and, like, the retargeting or whatever they use. Right? That was my conjecture, my thesis. And you basically said no.

Brandon: I said I don't think so. Right? Who who knows? Right? Who who can say?

I don't think Mark Zuckerberg himself could say. Right? There's a lot of there's a lot of underlying things. But what I can tell you for why the cost per lead is going up on Facebook, we have the same click through rate on our ads. So the same percentage of people click if they see the ad Mhmm.

And the same percentage of people become a lead if they clicked on the ad. So they convert on the landing page at the same rate.

Steve: The click through rate hasn't changed. Website conversion rate hasn't changed.

Brandon: Correct. And lead quality hasn't changed. So you layer all those things together. Everything appears exactly the same except that reaching someone actually costs more money now than it did before because the ad rates have gone up.

Steve: Got it.

Brandon: So it is my belief that and it's hard to say because we're always improving the way we do campaigns.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: So maybe iOS 14 had a negative impact on it, and then we just had kind of at the same time, we improved the way we were doing things, and it looks like a wash. But I I think that most of the reason for why Facebook is a little bit more tough now is mostly CPM related. Mhmm. And I don't wanna create the impression. Like, we still we still do recommend Facebook for for many people in many markets.

It's highly market dependent, though. So so definitely talk to my team if you want to decide, do you wanna do Facebook or not? Because some markets have just been really tough. Others have been fantastic, and we still have some clients where it's for sure their best their best channel out of the ones that we manage.

Steve: What else has has changed in digital marketing in the last twelve months?

Brandon: That is a a really good question. I think another thing that we're seeing is that the bigger players are doing better Mhmm.

Steve: And

Brandon: the smaller players are struggling more.

Steve: Sure.

Brandon: It's and I'll I'll get to why this maybe doesn't matter as much for our clients. But with the shift to machine learning, we talked about how, like, more data and better quality data, those are the things that help Google to do a better job. Mhmm. Common machine learning comparison would be if you're looking at traditional algorithms and how a lot of people do marketing now, you would you would look at a picture of a stool and you would tell the algorithm, well, if it has four legs and it has the seat and it has these connections on the legs that look like this, then it's a stool. Mhmm.

With machine learning, you just show it a a thousand pictures of stools and a thousand pictures of things that aren't stools, and then it learns what the stool is. Right? So if you only have five pictures of stools and and five pictures of things that aren't stools, and the algorithm relies 100% on your own data, which Google's algorithms do, they use their own features, but they still rely on your data for what's happened, actual behavioral data, then it's really ineffective. So as things shift more and more to towards machine learning, companies that generate a lot of leads on a monthly basis and have a lot of data points for Google, they have better results. And companies that have fewer, they have less.

And the quality of data and the volume of data are actually against each other because the way that you get better quality data is you move deeper into the funnel, like reporting opportunities instead of leads or contracts instead of opportunities. But that also makes it so you have less data. So there those things are always at odds. So, yeah, we definitely seen that. What we do to combat that is we've worked on a lot of data aggregation strategies.

And to be clear, this isn't that we just know what works and we have a lot of data or something like that. It's specifically that we group our accounts together Mhmm. In a way with Google to where in Google's eyes, it's as if they were all one campaign. Right. So now we have an investor.

They might be spending $3 a month with us. But in Google's eyes, they spent a million dollars last month.

Steve: You're saying there's a way to to report back to Google, not just lead or qualified lead, but a quality appointment or a signed contract?

Brandon: Yes. There is.

Steve: How would we go back and report to them, like, this turn into side contract? Because isn't there, like, elements of, like, opacity? Right? Like, they just don't want you to know what was the word exact word or, like, there's just details that they try to hide from us, isn't there?

Brandon: Well, there's some data that's more available than others. Yeah. But where a lot of people go wrong is they try to take their Google data outside of Google and then put it into a CRM where they have their CRM data Mhmm. And then understand what's happening in Google because of that. The problem is there's a lot of data that Google has that it'll never let come out of it.

Mhmm. A really good example, we we talked in the last episode about search terms versus keywords. Mhmm. Search terms being what someone actually typed in, keyword being what we told Google we wanted. You can't pull a search term out of Google.

Steve: You can So frustrating.

Brandon: You can only put your data into Google to see the search term, and keywords are practically useless. Mhmm. Because search terms are the only thing that matters. I know everybody thinks keywords are important, but they're not. Mhmm.

So it's it's something you could split all the things that happen. So we call the the supervised outcomes that we care about. We call those conversion actions. The there are two types of conversion actions. There's online conversion actions, and that's when someone fills out a form, we fire a piece of JavaScript saying this was a lead or something like that.

And then there's offline conversion actions. This is when the lead comes into your CRM, and you call the person, and you decide that it's a junk lead, or you decide it's a quality lead or it becomes a contract. All those things that Google can't see Mhmm. Because it doesn't see into your CRM. So the process of connecting that CRM data to Google is called offline conversions reporting, and it's how you close that loop.

And it's extremely powerful because it helps you give quality data to the

Steve: simple integration in place where I can go from left main into Google?

Brandon: Google actually, Google does have a Salesforce integration. I've never been able to get it to work. It's it's horrible. It's, like, universally hated. Alright.

So so the the way that we do it

Steve: is We're just gonna take you, Stephanie. You'll be fine.

Brandon: Yeah. And and I'd like to make some of this more automated. Yeah. What we've, what we've done for now is we put all of the leads into a Google Sheet, including all of the data, and we integrate that Google Sheet with Google Ads. And we have our clients select in that sheet next to each lead what ended up happening for us so they can basically score those leads.

And we feed that information into to Google. There's there's all the

Steve: That's huge.

Brandon: Yeah. There's all the tech stuff that makes that possible that I don't think anybody cares about. But the end result is that you can have a marketing strategy based on the things that you actually care about, not based on other things. And not like those vanity metrics. Who cares how many clicks you got?

Who cares cares how many leads you got?

Steve: You can focus ranking.

Brandon: Exactly. You can focus deeper into the funnel. So that's extremely powerful. Yeah. Although it's the the caveat is I've I've seen other people try to do this when they don't have that much data, and it is virtually useless.

Picture Google's algorithm with its tens of thousands of data points per user, and you just feed it information about five contracts. Right. How much do you think it's possibly gonna learn about what's different about those five contracts versus the rest of things? So that's where the fact that we've fed it in the past year, 2,400 contracts Mhmm. Or 2,400 deals.

There's there's more contracts than that. It's very valuable.

Steve: Well, I think it's, it's all machine learning. Use the stool example. I'm assuming you picked that up somewhere because

Brandon: I honestly don't remember. It's my brain.

Steve: I'm just thinking. Right? Like, the best probably is hot dog or not a hot dog because that was a meme for a bit. Right?

Brandon: Yeah. That that's right.

Steve: We just feed it pictures of thousands of hot dogs and then have Google tell you whether it's a hot dog or not. Now anything else that's changed as far as, you know, digital marketing in regards to how the market has shifted?

Brandon: Other than that, I'd say it's pretty stable. A lot of markets individually have changed. Mhmm. One thing that we're seeing is our clients that have more exit strategies are doing significantly better.

Steve: That makes sense.

Brandon: Only makes sense. Yeah. I think that's just maybe that's a real estate thing. Maybe that's not, like, a a digital marketing thing specifically.

Steve: Because I I saw, like, you know, there's a question I was asked, right, in a Facebook group. In brewer method. In brewer method Facebook group. Like, who do you guys use? Your name came up.

Right? Now brew method. There's Innovations. Right?

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: There's multiple ways to monetize this lead. So, you know, if you do Innovations, definitely makes sense to use Bateman because there are multiple exit strategies. Mhmm. So alright. I guess another question I have for you then, is you're not limited to just real estate.

Right? You do other industries.

Brandon: All we do is real estate right now.

Steve: Oh, okay. Because I know you were, like, doing some other stuff outside of it. There was there was another industry you were in, wasn't wasn't there?

Brandon: So there's been, like, this this very slow death of that part of the business through mostly through my own, like, trying to kill it because I hate it. So so, yeah, we've, when we decided to go all in on real estate, we kept some of our clients around that were from Sure. Before them, and they've just slowly, like, dwindled off.

Steve: So you basically weren't trying to get new ones. You just let you just service the existing ones.

Brandon: Yes. And and I talk sometimes about things outside of just real estate because I have a lot of experience outside of real estate from before I really just focused on it. And Well, I

Steve: was just only asking because I was curious to see what happens on a macro level outside of real estate, but then we can move on from there. Mhmm. So you were mentioning there's some other initiatives you're doing to improve lead quality. Did we cover all of those?

Brandon: We we did, but I wanna be clear how they interact with each other. Sure. So the the biggest thing that we can do to improve lead quality is to give better feedback to Google on what lead quality is.

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: So that's what offline conversions is. That's what lead sculpting is that we've talked about. Right. To make that valuable, we have to use a lot of data because the deeper you get into the funnel, the less data there is for Google to understand. So you have to give it a lot of aggregated data.

Okay. So it's the combination between those two things that is really working exceptionally well now. And it's not like, if you read a book about PPC and you do all the things that the book says to do, like, that's not in it. Right? Mhmm.

But it those are examples of things that the companies that are doing the best in PPC in the world overall are doing. They're focusing on how do we get better. It used to be that it's like we were at odds with Google. You could kind of brute force an ROI out of it by slicing and dicing everything and trying to make it work the way that you want it to. Now the game like, most of the initiatives that we have, it's all about giving it the best quality information we can and the most of it and letting their algorithm do the rest.

Steve: It's almost like capitulating. It's like, as a realtor, you're like, I hate Zillow. I hate Zillow. I hate Zillow. I have to use Zillow in my business.

Like, I hate Google. I hate working with like, you know, I feel like this is we're adversarial.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: Alright. Fine. Google will give you whatever you want. Just make our lives easier.

Brandon: And if you, I feel like I love Google. Mhmm. Right? You can you can get to that point with your relationship with Google, but you have to understand it. Right?

Like, we could feel this way with employees sometimes. Yeah. How many times have you had an employee and you measured them based on a metric, and they salespeople do this all the time. They somehow hack your metric in a way that, like, you never would have expected, and it produces a bad outcome. Mhmm.

They somehow do what you ask them to do, but somehow

Steve: They gain the system.

Brandon: Yeah. They gain the system. Right?

Steve: And Not my salespeople, though.

Brandon: There you go. I guess I guess you probably know a thing or two about that.

Steve: But Well, we hire people that are generally wired to not follow rules. So the more rules we put in place, the more they try to figure out the game system. And I'm no exception. I put myself in that category. The best in the world I've ever seen is Joe Taylor.

I don't know if you ever had him as a client.

Brandon: I I know Joe. We we haven't worked with him yet Yeah. Soon enough. But

Steve: But he's that guy. Like, here's the rules. Perfect. And he's gonna spend time figuring out how to work that system.

Brandon: Yeah. I I I absolutely believe it. But the point is, I mean, how many times have you had a conversation with someone who says, I'm so frustrated with this employee. They do this thing and this thing.

Steve: Mhmm. And

Brandon: then you look at how do they incentivize Mhmm. That person, and it they're incentivizing that bad behavior.

Steve: Right. It

Brandon: happens all the time. And then people do the same thing with Google. Right? I hate Google. They keep on giving me these list of leads.

Well, why are you high fiving Google every time you get a list of lead?

Steve: Right?

Brandon: That's a perfect example of that. So it really is like, Google's on our side, kind of. I mean, they're they're like the the tyrannical overlord of of the online advertising ecosystem. Like, they're not exactly on our sides, but the the point is they we can get a lot more from Google if we work with Google as a partner.

Steve: Their PPC side is on our side.

Brandon: Just like Yelp ads. That's right. Yep.

Steve: So, we were talking about hang on. There's something I wanna ask. Oh, best practices. So before, you know, when you were on the show, we had talked about, like, lead comes in. I don't care what happens.

One of your sales guys is going straight to the house. Mhmm.

Brandon: You

Steve: guys still encourage this behavior?

Brandon: We do, and and many of our clients are doing very well with it. It's it's, of course, not prop not not possible with virtual acquisitions.

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: So there's and our virtual clients still close pretty well. Mhmm. But you can do better if you can go go in person. I kind of think of it there's there's still kind of this dynamic between how wide you go with your targeting and and all of that kind of stuff. The the people that I think at the short end of the stick are those who are virtual, and they're in one market.

Because being in one market, you force your cost per lead higher.

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: Being virtual, you don't close as well. Those who do pretty well are either those that are in one market and they're in person, so then they have the ability to close extremely well, and that makes up for the cost per lead. We were talking before the show about Cody Hoffine who last year averaged $600 per PPC lead and closed one in 10 of them and had a fantastic five x return on investment. Alright? You can do that.

Granted, the cost per lead has gone way, way down this year. It's a different landscape now. But there's that side. Or those that are virtual across multiple markets because your cost per lead goes down, and maybe you don't close as well, but you have way more leads to deal with. So that's that's definitely something that that shifted.

But, yeah, doing the the drive by is is extremely effective. Last time I shared three principles that were working best for our clients, and and those three are still true. It's basically urgency, getting to the leads quickly, appointments quickly. I actually did an analysis with the client this morning, and we saw that their their leads that they didn't get to as quickly. We analyzed which ones they get to quickly versus which ones did they not.

Not only did they have a worse no contact rate, but when they had an opportunity, they closed at a small fraction of the rate on those opportunities. So even though they got ahold of some of the people, they didn't close as well. On the

Steve: on the ones that they weren't as quick to move on?

Brandon: Yes. Even though they still have the conversation with the seller and everything.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: So that that still matters.

Steve: The conversion rate, even if you are able to reach the person because we know it's harder to get ahold of a person.

Brandon: Mhmm. But

Steve: even if you do reach a person, if it's taking some time, your conversion rate goes down as well.

Brandon: It appears so. Yes. So Yeah.

Steve: That's an interesting stat because I haven't heard that stat before. It makes total logical sense, but I've never had anyone, like, say that, like, we have the data to support this.

Brandon: Yeah. It's, and and that's one that we haven't yet analyzed across our entire client base. I've analyzed it for a couple clients.

Steve: But it makes sense.

Brandon: Because we were trying to analyze, should we run ads during business hours only, or should we run them all the time if they're only getting to leads within business hours? Mhmm. So we're looking at what's the, you know, what's the success of leads that came in outside of business hours, and and we saw that really interesting statistic. So urgency is still important. Mhmm.

It still matters a ton. The the other the second one was assuming motivation, and it's kind of that concept of assuming leads motivated until you prove that it's not always try to go on the appointment. Don't don't disqualify them.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: And it it's it's actually really interesting. So we put our top 10% of closers against our bottom 50%. And we we looked at their appointment rates. So on a net lead so this is a lead that actually you you did get ahold of them, and they do want to sell their house. On a net lead, those are clients that were top performers.

They had four times as many appointments compared to our lower performers for their number of net leads. Mhmm. And they did twice as many deals. Yeah. So you could say maybe they had better leads, but the fact that they had twice as many appointments per deal tells me that they were just more willing to go on more appointments.

Sure. Not that their leads were necessarily better. So I thought that was a really interesting statistic that because those people who don't want to go to as many appointments, they're worried about wasting their time.

Steve: They're overqualified the lead.

Brandon: Yeah. And, and sometimes they're right.

Steve: But there are other times where they're not.

Brandon: Yeah. And they could be doing twice as many deals if they were just willing to waste a little bit more time here and there.

Steve: And they already spent the money.

Brandon: Yeah. You already spent the money.

Steve: So this is all that top line revenue goes straight to the bottom line.

Brandon: Yeah. Absolutely. So it's that that was something that was shocking to me because I expected that our top clients would have more appointments. I didn't expect it to be four times as many appointments.

Steve: Yeah. I mean, that's kinda like for us. You know, when in doubt, go. Right? But we have some, like, well, you know, are they qualified?

Do we ask conditions? Like, I don't care. Go.

Brandon: I mean, you know the story on the phone's sometimes different than the story in the house. Oh, sometimes.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. And What was the third thing?

Brandon: And the third thing, it's it's all about the process of the lead initially, in terms of who talks to it. Basically, our clients that sometimes so the the data that we actually originated the statistic with was, do they use a lead manager, or does the lead go directly to an acquisitions manager? And based on that, our clients that had to go to it directly to an acquisitions manager did far better. Yeah. We do have some clients that had to go to a lead manager that's a really well qualified lead manager, and they do exceptionally well.

I think the underlying principle of what we saw when we kinda dug in a little bit more qualitatively into the processes is you want a highly qualified person on the call initially with the client, not just a screening person.

Steve: I mean, this kinda goes back to Glengarry Glen Ross. Right? Like, if you want the

Brandon: I don't I don't know if

Steve: you watched that movie given

Brandon: I don't. No.

Steve: I haven't.

Brandon: I was

Steve: gonna say, given your background, maybe you haven't seen that movie. There's a little bit of vulgarity in that in in that movie. Right? But the idea is, like, these are the best leads, but you don't get to touch these leads until you've proven yourself.

Brandon: Mhmm. Right?

Steve: So if you're not qualified in proving yourself, why would I give you, you know, the gold leads? Yeah. Right? So, yeah, I mean, that makes total sense. So, I wanna go through, some audience questions.

I actually have some other questions I wanna ask you. But before I let's I wanna you know, we got some the patient audience here. So let's just do a real, real quick commercial break, and then we'll go to the audience questions. You're not hitting your revenue targets. Your acquisition guys have had the luxury of paying near retail, and your dispo guys have basically just been able to post anything, and it sells immediately.

You might be wondering, do I have order takers or closers? Maybe the training has gotten a little lackluster, and the management might have even gotten complacent. And now that we're facing these serious headwinds, you might be wondering, do I have all the skills necessary to lead my salespeople in this new shifting market? If you're asking yourselves these questions, please text leaders to 33777, talk to my team, and see if we can help you as we overcome this new market. Alright.

So leading us off, we got great name here, Brandon on Instagram.

Brandon: Love him already.

Steve: He wants to know where you're based out of.

Brandon: Salt Lake City, Utah.

Steve: Salt Lake City. And then you're doing something. We were talking about maybe going hela. What do you call it when jumping out of a helicopter?

Brandon: Oh, heli skiing.

Steve: Heli skiing.

Brandon: Yeah. Right. You're doing Well, I mean, that that doesn't apply to every time you jump out of a helicopter, but I think that's what I think that's what they're referring to.

Steve: Yeah. Yeah. So that was that was something that you're you and I were talking about. I was like, man, you know, I wish I had a little bit more free time. We We can do go do that together.

So if you guys are ever up in Salt Lake, maybe hit a brand in about going, hell is the game. Real Estate PR on YouTube. I love that they're using data to increase their odds. How would a newer wholesaler use or implement this and then say a business that's doing two to five deals monthly? Right?

And that's kinda goes back to your our debate prior to show that we have time. We're gonna go back into it. Someone's doing two to five deals a month. Like, how do they use aggregate data?

Brandon: Well, it really is about working with the right partner that that has that data. Because the problem is if if you have that kind of deal flow, you just don't have significant enough data to to really mean something to Google's algorithm. And, I mean, even if you have hundreds of deals per month, still you would do significantly better if you had thousands of deals per month Right. To report to Google. There is no end to that.

The more data, the better. Always. So I think it's just about working with the with the right partner. Our clients that spend a small amount and our clients that spend a large amount, there is no difference from what we can track in their return on investment. In general, the way it should work is there should be a difference.

But because of the data aggregation techniques that we use, those that have a small budget aren't necessarily at a disadvantage. Of course, they get less leads, but proportionate to their budget, they do well.

Steve: So if they were working with you, then they wouldn't be able to leverage all the existing data you have. Mhmm. If they elect to work with someone else or on their own, they don't get to leverage all that. Was it $9,000,000 I spent last year?

Brandon: Mhmm. Yeah. It's a

Steve: lot of money. Wish I could do that on my own. So, just curious We'll

Brandon: get you there.

Steve: Just curious. It's asking about, GPT where they can write a script. So we're gonna kinda touch on that. Dean McCall, what are the traits of a quality lead that you give as feedback to Google? So what are you telling Google this made a quality lead?

Brandon: So it it depends on we'll go as deep as we can into the funnel, but there's different ways that we optimize. And some of it, like, changes over time. So, really, the the name of the game is there's different levels that you can do this on. The the first one is lead sculpting, like I mentioned, where you just cut out certain leads based on certain characteristics. Then there's value reporting like you talked about.

There's the offline conversions reporting where you could step down to opportunities or contracts. What we're finding were like, the right balance right now is we're doing a lot of the lead sculpting. Yeah. But then we're using the rest of that data to I I don't know how deep we wanna get into this, but there's ways that you can use that other

Steve: data to as you want.

Brandon: To tune parameters with Google to to get you more of what you want. So we've kind of been, for a period of time now, just slowly stepping deeper and deeper into the funnel with the data from our clients. And then we there's ways to look at the data and based on that, do analysis and based on that, optimize, like, looking, for example, at which keyword has which amount of list of leads and skewing away from the one towards the other. That's all that's all analysis based. So we always do that, but then the question is how deep do we go in terms of what we give Google to optimize for.

Mhmm. And that's lead sculpting right now, and then all the rest of that based on analysis. We will the next step is for us to get to the opportunity stage there or more value based, and and we are headed that direction.

Steve: So let me ask this question, and this is gonna be super technical here. Right? So we're talking about, like, they they search a term. They went on the website. They go on the website.

They submit a form. And the next question is, is it listed yes or no? Alright. So that's what we're doing for lead sculpting. Could we have multiple flags to Google versus just one?

Like, is it binary, or we can say, like, is this person registered? Also, this person registered, and they're not listed. Also, this person, has raised their hand and said they're interested in meeting with us. And then, also, we have this person actually signed a contract with us and maybe even going further, this person actually closed. Right?

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: Could we have all these flags, or is it are we limited to just one binary, state?

Brandon: You you can and we do. Okay. The really complicated part about it is you have to be really cognizant of what works best with the algorithm. Mhmm. And if we're talking about the more value based approaches, Google's value based algorithms are too weighted towards early funnel low value actions.

This is a known weakness in the algorithm across industries. So if you were to report values with all those individual actions, then you the algorithm doesn't know how to work with that data quite as well as if you gave a value for one action, but then you change that value over time, which you can do. You can go back and adjust it. So that's so I guess the the answer is, like, for individual actions, yes. But if we're talking about, like, the value based approach, that is We basically need not best practice.

Steve: We basically need to go to Google and tell them how to do their job.

Brandon: Well, it's it's a nay it's the nature of of just machine learning algorithms that, that the different, different outcomes that you're looking for, if you if you were to segment those more, it would create more confusion.

Steve: Well, I think if that's the case we're talking about machine learning, then probably the other reality is that not only would you have to be doing it, but everyone has to be doing it. Then Google has not data to say this is a good practice.

Brandon: Yes. That is, yeah. You you could say that's true. Yeah.

Steve: Marcellus on YouTube. How much do the big dogs, wholesaler, spend a month on Facebook, PPC, and SEO? That's a good question. You know? Inquiring minds want to know.

Right?

Brandon: Yeah. What what is the normal amount of money to spend? So this is gonna heavily depend on your market. Some markets, you just can't spend that much. Mhmm.

And we've worked with clients where they can give us unlimited budget and, you know, here we are spending $5 a month or Yeah. Whatever the case is. And we're, like, right at the top of the page every time someone searches anything that vaguely can possibly mean that they wanna sell their house. Yeah. But you can only push it so far.

So I'd say, as for our client base, it's really normal for our clients to start out somewhere between 3,000 and $10,000 in ad spend. Mhmm. It's our big clients are spending more 20 plus, and we have some that'll push into the 6 figure range monthly.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: So that that kinda gives you an idea that the largest ad spends I've heard of in this industry are are in the mid 6 figure range.

Steve: Yeah. So let's pick a large metro area. Right? You got Phoenix, Atlanta, or some other big markets? Probably Dallas.

Brandon: Yeah. Right? Dallas, Houston.

Steve: Yeah. So in those markets, what's the most not what's the most. What is a commonly, a common amount for big players to spend on PPC and Facebook in those markets?

Brandon: Like, really big markets, 50 to 70, something like that. There will be companies spending in the 6 figures in some of those markets. Yeah. It depends on what style you want. Mhmm.

Because the companies that spend a lot of money in these markets, they're going to have a lower return on investment and a ton of volume. And that's a business model. The companies that spend less money, they'll have a higher return on investment and lower volume.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: Both are really viable business models.

Steve: Yeah. Well, particularly, right, like, I mean, for me, I'm excited, because there's we have multiple exit strategies. Mhmm. Right? This will actually help in other avenues of our business.

Right? Like, we're doing really well, on getting leads. It was they aren't listed. You know, we can do the cash wholesale, Ovation, creative, or list it.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: And then we get to capitalize this on multiple avenues. So, what about SEO? Like, is there anyone that's spending a ton on SEO, or is it like everyone's kinda spending, like, a flat amount on SEO?

Brandon: Definitely not flat. You you can overspend on SEO. Like, it's it's possible to spend too much money on SEO. And sometimes you you could, like, 10 x your budget, and you might go 3% faster. That's that's kinda how it can be with SEO.

Yeah. So our clients spend between $12.50 and $5 a month in SEO, usually. Mhmm. If you get more expensive than that, usually agencies are doing really heavily custom strategies that just aren't necessary in this industry because Yeah. We we don't need heavily custom strategies because we already know what we're doing.

Steve: The last, like, 4%, maybe.

Brandon: Yeah. It's SEO needs time, and it it it does need sufficient budget and consistency. So so, yeah, definitely people are spending less money on SEO. Although, really interesting fact, more clicks from Google search engine go to the organic results than the paid results.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: It's impossible to pull that data specific to this industry. I'd guess maybe this one skews a little bit more paid, but not that much. The point is there's a lot there's a ton of SEO leads. Mhmm. And compared to pay per click, just this isn't super data driven, but just think.

Like, how many people have you heard talk about PPC in the past year, and how many people have you heard talk about SEO?

Steve: Yeah. It's not a lot of people talking about SEO.

Brandon: It's not. But think there's probably just as many SEO leads out there as there are PPC leads. So there's people that are getting them. I know because I have my own podcast, and and we have I invited two separate clients to come talk about SEO within the past couple weeks, and both of them declined because they said, I don't want my competitors to know. It's it's a different game when it comes to when it comes to SEO.

So it's like there's a lot of leads potentially even more than PPC, but people just don't talk about it. Right. And investors generally like PPC because it's faster. And people with SEO, they spend they spend money for six months, and then they quit because they on the spreadsheet at one day, they look and they say, I spent this much money. I didn't get a deal.

Therefore, it is the best. Yeah. But there's a lot of leads there, and those that are consistent and spend sufficient budget, it's it is our highest return on investment channel.

Steve: Yeah. So Lance Williams wants to know, how did they get started working with you, and how long does it take to get everything started so they can say start getting leads?

Brandon: Yeah. Great question. So we have a link at batemancollective.com/disruptors. I'm sure you can throw that in the show notes. And that's where someone can can reach out if they wanna get started with us.

It is it's pretty simple. What you'll do is just fill out the lead form, and then you'll have a chance to schedule a call with someone on my team. Provided that call goes well and you wanna pull the trigger, it takes us about two weeks usually to get ads started depending on what the the impact of this podcast is. In times of the past, we've generated a waiting list. So it'll it'll depend on that, but usually about two weeks to get things started.

And that's when campaigns officially launch. And at at that point, it's a matter of time till till you get leads. So it's not it's not overly difficult. What you'll want to be prepared for there is to know what you want. What are your goals?

What would make this worth it for you? What wouldn't? And then we can do the best that we can to help recommend. Does this even make sense? Is it a fit for you or not?

Steve: Yeah. I would definitely recommend checking that out. I mean, we fully, have enjoyed working with Brandon. These question, on Facebook. Just curious, is there a chance of bots or hackers messing with the algorithms for good versus bad lead?

Brandon: Yes. There there is. And this so this happens on both Facebook and Google Mhmm. And Microsoft. It's it's everywhere.

And I don't know if you knew this. Click fraud is the second biggest organized crime in the world. I did not know that. It's it's huge after, like, human trafficking or drugs or something like that. Wow.

So it's huge. Click fraud.

Steve: And Click fraud as in wasting other people's money or click fraud to do something else?

Brandon: Well, that's that's the trick. You see It's like a social engineering component. It's it's typically click fraud from the standpoint of I have a website. I'm trying to sell advertising inventory on that website. I pretend that I'm actually selling that to people, and therefore, I get paid by the ad exchange.

Mhmm. So if you look in Google proper, like, actual Google search engines, there's not that much fraud. Maybe your competitors screen with you here and there, and there's some tactics to kinda deal with that. If you look on Facebook proper, same kinda deal. There's not really a lot of bots there Yeah.

And and stuff. If you look at their affiliated things, that's where you run into tons of click fraud issues. Like, Google has their search network and then the other search partners network. That's other search engines, which can include your website with a search bar on it. Mhmm.

That could be a search engine. Mhmm. That's where you can sell inventory to those. And Facebook has something called Audience Network that's kinda similar. It's, you know, display ads in a in a whole bunch of different websites and apps and all that kind of stuff.

And they're like, in Google proper, there's no incentive for Google to introduce product because it's their own platform. Right. But in a search partners standpoint, there is incentive, and there are a lot of fraud issues. And what you'll find this is actually one of the biggest things that I've I've found when when people come to me saying my PPC is horrible. Please help me.

This is a really common thing. It's that they're actually advertising those other networks too. Mhmm. And what happens is the algorithm sees that the leads are cheap there, and it sees that they're, getting leads. All the leads are junk, but they're getting leads.

And I've run into so many people. I I added an account the other day. They They they spent a $100 on PPC this year, and, like, $30 of it was on that network. And because they weren't tracking that data closed loop to know the quality of the leads and feeding that data to Google, the algorithm was doubling down on that traffic. So as soon as we did the analysis of where your good leads and your bad leads coming from, we can see the really clear distinction, and we can cut out the like, trim the fat, basically.

Right. So you can have a lot of issues with click fraud. And a lot of people talk about using click sees or different tools for, like, IP blocking and stuff, and that takes care of, like, 1% of click fraud. Mhmm. The really most important thing is to track closed loop so you understand where your fraud leads are coming from, and you can cut it out.

And or you can give the algorithm the information it needs to be able to optimize away from those.

Steve: What is the fraud exactly? It's Is it burning your money, or are they trying to steal something from you?

Brandon: It's burning your money because it's you're buying clicks Mhmm. That aren't real clicks.

Steve: Your competitor is going and clicking on your ad somewhere else. Not Not your competitor, but somebody is going out there and clicking ads for no reason.

Brandon: And a lot of the fraud isn't there is some fraud that could be your competitor trying to blow your budget or whatever the case is. That there's a different way to deal with that that we could talk about. But a lot of the fraud is, like, the click farm in India that's trying to these people are basically compensated for how many times they can click and fill out forms on the Internet to make it look like this website is producing traffic.

Steve: Got it. So the person that's monetizing it is the website.

Brandon: Yes. That's that's why it's only a problem on the partner networks because Google has no reason to like, if I was just to go on Google and click on a bunch of people's ads to blow their budget, I don't really have much incentive to do that. You could say maybe just screw with my competitors, and that's why that does exist a little bit. Mhmm. But the real thing is if I could have my own website, I get paid when people click from it, and I can fake people clicking from my website, then I can

Steve: make money. Got it. So when you first hit click for it, I was thinking, like, not last Halloween, but the Halloween before, Squid Game was pretty popular.

Brandon: Oh, yeah.

Steve: Alright. So we're trying to buy some costumes for Squid Game, and everything was sold out. Mhmm. I bought it from this one website, and it just never came. It's like well, that sucked.

Right? So, Yeah. A different fraud,

Brandon: but it's yeah. Sounds equally equally bad. Yeah. But the problem with this fraud stuff, this this definitely happens with Facebook too. You turn on audience network, your lead quality will go to junk because the algorithm starts seeing that you can get so many leads there.

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: So that's the biggest problem is is you've accidentally doubled down on your worst leads because they're cheap.

Steve: Alright. You're saying there's a way to deal with people fraudulently click on yours on Google. Mhmm. So this click sees, obviously. What else is there?

Brandon: That's that's the probably the best solution. The the idea is you identify if it's fraud, and then you block it in the future. So if someone, like, clicks your ad three times Mhmm. Then you can block their IP address moving forward. And that works.

And but the reason it doesn't work for these sophisticated click fraud operations is because they are smarter than that, and they change their IP address every time they

Steve: click. Right.

Brandon: And if you can only block IP addresses. So if someone's smart enough to change their IP address, then you're out of luck.

Steve: Exactly. Follow-up question from Lance. How much are your smaller clients paying between your services and ads a month?

Brandon: The total, the the smallest total budget that we work with for ads, including management fee and ads, is $3,000 a month. Yeah. So that's, like, our our baseline. If you can't do that, not only can you not work with us, but you probably just shouldn't do PPC quite yet. You probably need to get in a better financial position as a company.

But that's the that's the baseline for for working with us, and and it is that because I think that's kind of the baseline for doing this at all.

Steve: So that's a great transition. So we were talking about doing this on your own. So, I guess we're talking a lot about machine learning Mhmm. And data. Right?

But if you pick up a PPC book, they're not talking about machine learning and data. They're talking about, typically, direct response marketing. Right? And, you know, if you pick up a Perry Marshall book who was trained classically trained by Dan Kennedy, right, I believe. Mhmm.

Alright. We're talking about, like, you know, direct response marketing in regards to, like, if I do this, this will happen. Right? So we gotta make sure, like, the ad copy is clean. Right?

We gotta make sure that so the headline is, like, super clean, and then the ad copy is super clean. Right? And there's a lot of, like, science behind all that. Are we doing away with the science component as far as, like, the direct response part and just going based on what the machine says works? Or, like, how are we what are we doing here?

Brandon: Yeah. Good question. Because, I mean, if you go the extreme machine learning route, you could say, just throw a bunch of stuff against the wall and see what the machine says sticks. Yeah. The problem is you can waste a lot of money doing that.

And Right. The a lot of marketers have,

Steve: like, an

Brandon: R and D budget. We do. And but a lot of, a lot of people that are really heavy on the direct response side, they they kind of are of the opinion that you just, like, throw a bunch of inputs at a wall and you see what sticks. Mhmm. And then a lot of people that are really heavy on the brand side are the opinion that they came up with the best idea ever for what the headline should be.

And Of course. No matter what the data says, that's that's the right headline because of all these fluffy reasons.

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: I think you have to be kind of somewhere in between because the machine learning can only do as much as you can give it. So if you're too far on the side of just throwing things against the wall and seeing what sticks, my experience with my team is all those things you throw against the wall, they're, like, half baked. Mhmm. If you're too on the side of just finding the perfect headline, then you're not using data. So it's it's it's about using all those direct response principles that you know of to hypothesize and create something truly excellent, but you don't put all your eggs in that basket.

You create many things that are truly excellent in different ways, and then machine learning takes it from there.

Steve: So let's talk about direct response marketing. We're gonna get philosophical here. Alright. I'm down. So, you know, like, there's there's broad marketing.

Right? This is where, like, you know, 5th Avenue, I think,

Brandon: is what it is. Right?

Steve: You got marketing on whatever your whatever the city is or street is in New York City. Right? This is where, like, all the marketing companies are.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: And this is where, like, your Coca Cola, you just obviously, you advertise during Super Bowl and every other significant sporting event. Right?

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: That is, like, what you go to college for. That's what you they teach you in marketing. Right? I don't know how valuable that degree is. And you get direct response marketing, which is like the small business, which is like you actually have to have a return on your ad spend.

And if

Brandon: you cannot get a return on

Steve: your ad spend, you're gonna have some massive problems. Right? So let's talk about, you know, the the the direct response marketing. What makes effective marketing in your opinion?

Brandon: I think it depends on the stage of the company. I I see this all the time with people I know, like recruiting and things like that. There's a stage of the company when you are Coca Cola where everybody knows who you are, and what you need to do is reinforce brand and create Do you know how

Steve: the company is in this market? He's, like, the biggest TV.

Brandon: Oh oh, you said Doug Hopkins. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. So the I'd argue that's still more on the direct response side because still if you ask the average person, like, you know, Doug Hopkins, like, I don't know how

Steve: much open door.

Brandon: Yeah. Maybe. So there's there's that really far side. Mhmm. And then there's the the direct response side.

A lot of people assume that people who've worked for companies spend tons of money on ads probably know a lot. What they know is brand marketing Mhmm. Which is what you learn for those big companies. College degrees that are worthless. Well, because most people that graduate from marketing in college go to work with a Fortune 500 company or something like that.

So in a way, those degrees prepare them really well for what that company actually needs. And I'm not against brand marketing or anything. That's that's actually what there's a point where your company needs that, and the biggest companies in the world tend to need that, and they tend to hire a lot of marketers. So that's But the people listening to

Steve: the show probably is not that avatar.

Brandon: I don't know that anybody listening to the show is that avatar. Right? So you need to go direct response. It is results based. So there's I'm not saying that brand doesn't matter.

It does. I think there's a great way to draw to to play both sides. Because brand marketers would say it's not about creating the sale now. It's about, you know, creating this affinity for the brand that Mhmm. Will make them think of you later.

And there's some value to that. And then there's the the side of of, you know, it just matters of what you get now. But a lot of these things, a side effect is that you create brand awareness. Mhmm. So the way I think about it is you wanna get your brand message out there, but you need direct response results.

And I don't think those two are necessarily in conflict with each other. So you don't wanna go super far on the direct response side. Like Alright. This deal is over in twelve hours, and it'll never come again. It's 90% off.

Steve: And Yeah. Like With the countdown timer.

Brandon: Yeah. You build no brand Yeah. Doing that. But at the same time, you should have an actual call to action. And I believe you know, we're we're guessing here a little bit.

I believe that those who tie direct response outcomes to their advertising have better brand lift. And the reason being, the way it used to work where you just buy the Super Bowl ad, it didn't matter. Mhmm.

Steve: The way

Brandon: it works with these algorithms now, where they're really based on feedback, if you don't give quality feedback to the algorithm about what a success is, then your targeting gets screwed up because the algorithm doesn't know who's the right person to target and who isn't the right person to target. So I think you can create more brand awareness among the people who matter most by having those direct response outcomes that feed the algorithm about who you should even have those brand impressions with. Yeah. So I think there's a great way to kind of play both sides.

Steve: Got it. So going back so that's that's what direct response is. So for someone that's listening here, and let's just say they're wanting to try to do this for themselves. Right? Hypothetically.

I know you don't recommend it, but let's just say they wanted to. What are some things they wanna make sure they're doing as far as far as their, their copy when they're write when they're writing their own Google Ads?

Brandon: Yeah. Great. Great question. That's a that's a really fun one. So if we're talking about the copy for the Google Ads, I'll tell you how to do it wrong, how to do it good enough according to the book, and how to do it in an extremely exceptional way.

Steve: Sure.

Brandon: How do you do it wrong? I see this all the time. Top dollar will pay you more than anybody else. You know what? Same thing.

People come Features and benefits. Yeah. People come to me complaining that to me, their leads are retail. Mhmm. And then I look at their ad and it says, we'll pay you more than any other investor.

It's like you attract what you put out there.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: So if you don't want your leads to be retail, don't tell people, hey. If you're retail, please come here. Because that's basically what I'm saying. House on MLS. Yeah.

Exactly. So it's it's about PPC ads. You pay per click. You have to remember that. Mhmm.

It's not about what's gonna get someone to click. It's about what's gonna make those clicks valuable. That means that PPC ads should both qualify and convert. Mhmm. People always think it's just about converting.

What's gonna get them to click to go to the next stage? It's about getting the right person.

Steve: So the click through rate is not something we should focus on.

Brandon: Not that much. I mean, there's

Steve: there's not We should care about it.

Brandon: There's an exception to every rule. There's layers. You care about it. There's quality scores.

Steve: Care about it.

Brandon: Care about it.

Steve: But it should not be the number one priority.

Brandon: No. It's it's not. It's like if I were running ads for my own company, I might consider putting in there, like, $3,000 a month monthly minimum budget unless people would click. Mhmm. But I would only have people click who read that and said qualify.

That's fine. Right? Yeah. Wouldn't you rather pay per click for those clicks than everybody ever and then

Steve: So they're, like, qualified?

Brandon: You know,

Steve: we'll pay 50% of fair market value.

Brandon: Now that's aggressive.

Steve: But if they click on that, we're feeling pretty good about that lead.

Brandon: If they click on that, they don't know how read. I think that's the only thing that we're feeling.

Steve: Pretty good about that lead.

Brandon: Probably. Probably. Or they don't know how to read.

Steve: We only pay a $100,000 for single family houses in Phoenix.

Brandon: Yeah. Fair enough. So that that'd be, like, probably too far on that side. But the point is if you you would attract what you put out there

Steve: Sure.

Brandon: And you want people to look at your ad and choose your ad over someone else's. So that's kinda how you do it wrong is a lot of that stuff.

Steve: Wrong is wrong message. Mhmm. You're putting out there potentially because what I'm hearing, how I'm processing processing this is you're putting in what you think they want Mhmm. Versus what they truly need.

Brandon: Yeah. You wanna put the thing in the ad that the right person would click on, not the wrong person. Sure. That's basically it. And it's not like, the bait and switch isn't a great move Mhmm.

With PPC because Right. You when they it you don't pay to put the bait out there. Mhmm. You pay when they bite the bait. So you want you make your bait something that you if someone bites it, it means it's good.

Steve: That makes total sense Mhmm.

Brandon: Not how

Steve: I was running my ads back in the day.

Brandon: Yep.

Steve: But I was running my ads trying to get realtor leads that sometimes are in the cash.

Brandon: Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. And and the strategy can differ there for sure. Right.

Okay. And there's something to be said about how you can attract a lot of people with that kind of messaging. Yeah. We haven't seen great success with it. Now why do people do it all the time?

It's because it generates more leads. Right. And you'll find most agencies, they also do whatever generates most leads. Right. It's not about that, though.

It's about what's gonna generate the most deals. Mhmm. So you have to kinda think twice about those things. The other thing is if you're not doing lead feedback in a good way, then the algorithm will learn that that generates more leads, and it will double down on that and show that more and more often. Right.

And you'll get more and more of those people. So anytime you have more of the

Steve: leads you don't like.

Brandon: Exactly. Anytime you have, like, a little leak in your bucket, you could have this, like, little 1% problem. That will become 50% of what you spend your money on because Google sees, hey. That works really well, and it'll double down. So that's how you do it wrong.

How you do it right is you want to, well, you need a good quality score with Google. So you need in your headlines to include things that roughly reflect what your keywords are. Mhmm. So if someone searches for we buy houses, your ad should say we buy houses. If someone searches for a way to sell their house fast, your ad should talk about selling houses fast.

They're different things. Right? We assume we put all these sellers in, like, the same box, but there's different sellers that are motivated motivated by speed and convenience. There's others that are motivated by not having to do repairs. Mhmm.

For what they search, you wanna write an ad that's really relevant to that. And Google will like you for doing that as well. Right. And so that's that's kinda, like, good. What we do, which I think is the best way to do it, is we will write ads according to different themes.

Mhmm. So we test, like, messaging of do we put keyword focused things first and then a location focused thing and then a scarcity piece? Or do we do it based on benefits and then keyword and then, and then feat like, features of of how you work or or something like that. There's different ways to do that. So we test how those different things work.

So there's an actual testing methodology behind things, and we we test how those different ways of doing it affect results. Some things we've learned, locations work really well. There's actually a way with Google. Just imagine you're searching from what are we in? Chandler?

Is that where we're at? Right now. Tempe? Okay. Is is Tempe?

Tempe. Tempe. Okay. Got it right. Sorry.

I'm not from here. So we're in Tempe. Right? So let's just say you search on Google now, and you see all the ads. And they all say, we buy houses.

You know, we buy Phoenix homes, blah blah blah. And then one of them says, we buy homes in Tempe.

Steve: Mhmm. Hey.

Brandon: Which one are you more likely to click on? Yeah. The one that's hyper relevant to you. Right. Because you're in the greater Phoenix area technically, but that one's hyper relevant.

There's ways with business data feeds in Google to make it so your ads dynamically adjust to the precise location where someone is, and those have been very effective for us. So I think it's having a good testing structure, understanding how your testing affects lead quality, measuring that data and aggregating it, and always launching new ads that are a new test with a new hypothesis of how it's gonna work better than the previous highest performer. It's that. And and, basically, that's our process. We we put a bunch of ads out that we think will work really well.

We take the best one, cut the others, and then we have a new hypothesis. And Yeah. And just do that over and over again. And the the faster you can do that, the better you can be at writing, the more data you can gather.

Steve: Fun are

Brandon: you having doing that? How much fun? Yeah. It's it's brutal work. If you look in any of our accounts, you'll find, like, more than probably 75 unique headlines.

Mhmm. It's a lot. It just seemed like

Steve: it just seemed like you were having fun with it. Yeah.

Brandon: It's it's brutal. Well, I have fun because I don't actually do it. I just kinda talk about it. Oh. But You need to review the data.

Yeah. Someone on my team does it.

Steve: Because they they say right? Again, like, going back to direct response marketing and learning people seeing everything else, it's always like, you gotta test. You gotta test. You got AB split testing. Right?

Always split test, AB testing. They're always saying those things. Man, that's a lot of work. Right? I have to go write an ad and run and test this ad for the next two weeks.

This is no fun. Right? And I and then I gotta go back and review the performance and say, okay. This is the winner. Now we're gonna make a new AB test.

It was I recognize the value in it. I just hated doing it.

Brandon: Yeah. It's it is it is hard work. Some people like it more than others.

Steve: Right.

Brandon: So it's it's about finding those people. Mhmm. But, yeah, it it is hard. And to to have that many things, like, we we source a lot of writing from a lot of places Mhmm. Because no one person can write 75 ads that basically say the same thing.

Yeah. There's not enough creative energy in any single human to do that kind of thing. So it's about it's not about, like, a good marketer. It's about a good team of marketers.

Steve: Yeah. No. That makes a lot of sense. Lance, follow-up question from earlier. You have a web you have to have a website already built before starting with you.

Brandon: Yeah. Excellent question. So the the answer is no. Mhmm. The and it's it's also, like, the the sorry.

That every question you ask me, I give you, like, way more detail than you're looking for. Great. I apologize for that. But there it it's different for paid ads versus SEO. So for paid ads, we have had the most success going to specific landing pages.

And the reason we like to control those landing pages is we do things like the like, that offline conversions reporting connection that we talked about, that lead feedback system. We do things like that lead sculpting. We do things like when we read an ad, we also read a landing page headline. Because if someone searches for we buy houses in any condition,

Steve: and they come to

Brandon: the landing page, we don't talk about how we buy houses fast. We talk about on the landing page, how you don't have to do repairs.

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: And you can, you know, it can be any condition and all those different things. Right? So we actually in some ways, we do this through a dynamic landing page. So it's not actually a different landing page, but people see a different page depending on what they search in Google. So it can be hyper relevant.

Steve: So you have custom headlines or custom, I guess, h one, h two, font on your website based off the campaign.

Brandon: Even deeper than campaign based on the keyword, essentially.

Steve: Well, the keyword, group.

Brandon: Yeah. Ad group. Yeah. Yeah.

Steve: Versus ad group.

Brandon: I was trying to be simple. But yeah. Yeah. Ad group if anybody if anybody knows what that is.

Steve: Keyword theme. Sorry.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: Okay. So, yeah, I had no idea you you guys were in that detail. So that's that's phenomenal. Right? Because Yeah.

It goes back to breadcrumbs, right, which, again, goes back to direct response marketing.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: If we can have I mean, in a perfect world, right, like, the ad message and the color, right, and everything else and the font, then, like, they go to landing page, the font, the color. Yeah. The words are all the same. I'm in a I'm I'm in a safe place. I'm I'm I I made it to the right website.

Mhmm.

Brandon: Because there's I mean, there's good that landing pages and bad landing pages, but the extent to which the landing page matches the ad precisely Mhmm. Is really, really important. Right. I've tested even saying the same thing, but with different words. Mhmm.

If you use the same language you do in your ad, you you have better conversion. Because how many times have you clicked on something and then gotten there and be like, this isn't what I was looking for? So you leave.

Steve: And it all goes back to quality score. Right? Because you're saying earlier, like, what we're paying is directly tied to quality score. And if the ads look like what they typed in

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: Then the landing page is consistent. Now when they click on that landing page, they're less likely to hit the back button.

Brandon: Mhmm.

Steve: And then that improves the quality score and it's caught the lower cost per lead.

Brandon: Absolutely. And we, so so that's something that we include for clients. Like, you can't hire us to do PPC without that just being included. Yeah. Or we don't charge extra for it or anything like that.

And those landing pages like, technically, when our clients' high risk for PPC, they also get CRO Mhmm. Which is conversion rate optimization, the action of AB testing landing pages. It's we have really cool technology where I could, like, with the click of a button, I can change all of our clients' landing pages half the time in one aspect, and we can measure that data in aggregate of how that affects conversion rates. And we do a ton of those tests to change this design element and see, does page one or page two perform better? But believe it or not, we calculated.

The average split test on the landing page would take between nine and twelve months for our clients.

Steve: Mhmm.

Brandon: That's how long it takes to say landing page a works better than b. It takes us two days on average to do a test on aggregate across our clients Yeah. Because we have a 150 times the data. Right. It's which is completely mind boggling to me that I can press a button and get data in two days and move that forward.

Because think, like, how many iterations can you do of that improving those landing pages compared to one test every nine months? Yeah. Super slow.

Steve: It makes a makes a ton of sense. So, Dee, on Facebook, she got a couple examples. I I like these. Right? Pay off debt now, help them move expenses, something along along those lines.

Brandon: Yeah. Very interesting. Yeah. This could work this could work as headlines.

Steve: So, anything else you wanna touch on before we wrap this up? I got all my questions answered.

Brandon: I would answer the second part of that question because I talked about paid ads. Mhmm. I imagine you don't technically need a website because we'll run it through a landing page. And that would be that would be the company's brand and everything, but it would just be, like, a page that that we make sure loads fast and has all the right features and everything like that. The other piece of that is if it's SEO, you do need a website.

That's where you need the whole shebang with all the different pages that link to each other. Mhmm. Nobody ranks a one page website in Google, so that's important. And we work with a ton of, like, carrot sites, for example, that our clients have. We did launch a website building service Mhmm.

Recently. We took all of our clients that perform best from the SEO standpoint and other industry companies that perform the best from an SEO standpoint. They took all those best practices into, like, website build. So it's a completely SEO focused website design, and we can get clients started with that. Sometimes that's even cheaper than keeping their website because sometimes new construction is cheaper than a rehab if if the property is in really bad shape.

Yeah. And that's true a lot of the times with websites.

Steve: So, last question then from Ingrid. Is he incorporating AI for this testing?

Brandon: The the answer is yes. There's so so I I kind of talked about it a little bit more generally

Steve: so far,

Brandon: but most of the quote, unquote AB testing we do isn't actually AB testing. Mhmm. It's it's machine learning driven testing. And the the way that that works is it's more than just saying I show number I show a half the time. I show b half the time.

Mhmm. It's the algorithm understanding under what circumstances does a work better, under what circumstances does b look work better, and then predicting, for example, which landing page should I show at any given moment. And we do do those those things. That also just naturally happens when you're testing ads within Google Ads. So as for, like, the number of things that we actually do clean AB tests for these days, it's pretty rare.

Usually, there's some type of predictive analytics component where we're optimizing for the best performer, and that's that's very standard practice these days.

Steve: Alright. Cool. So then we will oh, okay. How does a client make sure only their leads are going to them? I think there might be some confusion here.

So she signs up for your program. How does she make sure the lead is only going to you and not to anyone else?

Brandon: Yeah. It's I'm trying to think of a way that you can really make sure. I mean, you have to kinda trust the person you work with, and they're not gonna go send your leads to other people. I don't know how you would deal

Steve: with your I think there's probably some confusion potentially that, maybe because you're working with all these clients that you're kinda like an aggregator.

Brandon: I understand. Yeah. So your ad spend produces leads which go to you. Those leads don't go to anybody else. However, the results of that campaign could help inform someone else's campaign in terms of how it can get performance, but they would never see the leads.

They would it would all just be that your data trains an algorithm that's used for you as well as for them.

Steve: Alright. So, we're gonna, make a couple quick announcements. I want you to think of a message, something you wanna leave the listeners with. Hey, guys. If you have value today, please like, subscribe, share, comment.

I mean, I think there was a ton of value here. Brandon sharing, what's working in PPC, and, obviously, 15,000,000 wholesale fees. He has an idea of what is going on in in the digital marketing world. We do have our dispositions live training coming up on the twentieth in our office. So if you guys are having any challenges whatsoever, shoot us a message.

We can you can, check out our live in person dispositions training. We're gonna share best practices right now to get your property sold. And I got next week Stratton Brown with Call Magicians, and we are launching something together, which I think can be really interesting. So you don't wanna miss that episode. What are some last thoughts you'd like to leave the listeners with?

Brandon: I think, I think probably the most valuable thing I have to offer, which is if if anybody is running just just to be transparent about how this world works. You know it as well as I do. Basically, there's a lot of people that are doing really well with PPC. Mhmm. And they never stop talking about it.

And then there's the normal people who try it. Bunch of money goes down the drain. They're trying to figure out what happened. They don't know what's different. Why are they not succeeding and someone else is succeeding?

And I wish I could just say, your problem is that you're not doing x or y here, but I can't. Right? That's all generalized feedback. So what we do is a is a free audit process. So if you have ever spent money on PPC and not been as successful as you hope to or Facebook ads or SEO, or if you're doing that now and you're spending money and you're not as successful as you want to be, I I personally will review the campaigns.

And the the way that that works is is you go to batmancollective.com/disruptors. There, you'll see a link to to get a free audit. Mhmm. We'll ask you a few questions about your business, and we'll do an extensive deep dive on that data. I know you actually did this two years ago now.

Was it worth it?

Steve: Well, it's absolutely worth it. I mean, for me, I'm trying to say this without, like, you know, tooting my own horn. Right? Like, because I ran my own PPC campaigns, and I've had a chance to, you know, learn it at a pretty deep level, I was only I've only had a handful of people. You're the second person I trusted throughout my PPC campaign.

Right? The first person I trusted, they passed everything, and they still sucked. But having you go through, it was really refreshing to have someone give actionable advice and why. And for me, like, don't tell me why we don't tell me what we need to do without explaining why it's important. Because if you can't tell me why this is important, I can't trust you.

Like, this is my baby. Right? Like, this is the leads feeding my business. Right? So if you can't intelligently answer why you're saying I need to do these things, I'm gonna really struggle.

So it was really valuable. You know? It's it's amazing that you offer this for free. It's really valuable to have someone who is an excellent marketer, understands the technology, be able to give you, like, here's what's happening. Here's what you here's what you need to change, and here's why.

I think that's incredibly if nothing else, like, a valuable education.

Brandon: Yeah. Abs absolutely. Yeah. And it's because so many people think they have a problem Mhmm. But it's not their problem.

Right. Right? They they say, I don't have enough leads, but the problem is they're not closing the leads. Or maybe there's too many spam leads, or it's, they're they're closing really well, and and something else is is wrong with the with with the marketing component.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: There's there's so many different layers to this, and it's really helpful to work with someone who has all the in-depth data of those that are doing really well. Right. Because we could just put it side by side and say, this is their account. This is yours. This is what's different between them.

So I can't think of any reason that anybody who's ever spent money on this stuff or is spending money wouldn't take me up on that. It's it's a huge huge value add. So so that's that's probably the biggest, the biggest thing that that I would share. The the only other thing, is, of course, if someone's interested in getting started, it's the same link, paymentcollective.com/disruptorsdisruptors. And we we also launched a podcast recently.

Oh, yeah. If you like this discussion, if anybody who's listening, if you like this discussion and you want more of this kind of talk and and specific case studies and examples of what we're doing, this has obviously been more consolidated, but we dig in every week into new digital marketing strategies, what's working, all that stuff.

Steve: Yeah.

Brandon: It's called collective clicks. And if Great name. Yeah. If if digital marketing is gonna be a part of your business, it's I think it's worth listening to. Yeah.

Steve: So I'm gonna say something here. And, you know, like, I don't normally present scarcity, right, on this show. We don't say, like, hurry up. Right?

Brandon: Mhmm. Well, the

Steve: last few times you've been on the show, you get incredibly back backlogged.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: So if you're watching this live and you guys are thinking about it, just go there and get the free consultation. Don't sign up for anything right now. Right? Just go in there and get the free consultation. Just get

Brandon: in line early. Right?

Steve: Yeah. Because if you don't, in the past, you're more than a month backlogged, I think, after coming on to the show.

Brandon: Yeah. Two months is is the worst they got. And, yeah, it is tough. People are saying, like, I wanna get started, and and I just had to say, like, I I also want you to get started. The soonest date I can give you is in two months.

I'm sorry. But it's I think it's important that we do that because we need to make sure that we do quality work. Mhmm. I've identified exactly what the team what my team's capacity is, and we're not going to exceed that. Right.

But, yeah, if you do wanna get started quickly, then then then beating the rush matters.

Steve: So isn't that a scarcity play? This This

Brandon: is reality. We know from the Real scarcity. It's it's an actual

Steve: It's a legitimate scarcity.

Brandon: Yeah.

Steve: So perfect. Alright. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you, Steve.

Great show. And see you guys all later.

Brandon: Shout out to Steve train. Jump on the Steve train. We real estate disrupt us.