Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Marketing for Motivated Sellers

Joe Fairless: Best Ever listeners, how are you doing? Welcome to the best real estate investing advice ever show. I’m Joe Fairless, and this is the world’s longest-running daily real estate investing podcast. We only talk about the best advice ever, we don’t get into any of that fluffy stuff.
With us today, Scott Corbett. How are you doing, Scott?

Scott Corbett: Hi, I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me on.

Joe Fairless: Well, I’m glad to have you on. Today we’re gonna be talking about something very specifically, as we typically do on Skillset Sunday episodes. Today we’re gonna be talking about pay-per-click campaigns and how to create effective pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns.
Scott is the owner of Lightmark Media, which is a marketing agency that works exclusively with real estate investors. His company does motivated seller pay-per-click campaigns in about 50 different markets across the country. He’s based in Athens, Georgia.
With that being said, Scott, do you wanna give the Best Ever listeners a little bit more about your background and your current focus?

Scott Corbett: You bet, and thanks, Joe. I have to say, we didn’t start out just working with real estate investors; we’ve been doing this about a decade now… But we’ve ended up here because we found real estate investors really understand the value of a lead; you know how to make money from leads, and so that makes a great client for us, because that’s what we do. We really just do lead generation.

So it’s nice working with real estate investors because, I’ll tell you, we send out these monthly reports kind of summarizing what happened over the course of the month, and we always ask “Hey, can you tell us about any great deals you got from PPC this month?” and when we get those answers back, that’s kind of like the big “Woohoo-s!” kind of echoed down the hallways here, because that’s the payoff for us. When we hear that we’ve helped somebody do an extra two, three, four, five deals, and make a great check from them, that’s fantastic, that’s the payoff. So that’s the real synergy with the real estate industry.

On top of that, I’m also a member of a pretty high-level real estate mastermind. I love masterminding with real estate investors; they’re so sharp, they’re so entrepreneurial, they’re so driven, they’re so goal-oriented, and it sharpens me, even though I’m not a full-time real estate investor. It’s just great to be in this world, the world that you’re in, and [unintelligible [00:04:36].07] So that’s my story.

Joe Fairless: Well, let’s talk about your focus in drilling down to the pay-per-click campaigns. First off, what is pay-per-click, and then how do we set up a campaign for success?

Scott Corbett: I know a lot of people are gonna know this already, but just to make it clear – there are a lot of ways to generate a lead, and let’s maybe talk about seller leads, because that’s something most people can appreciate. So you can send out postcards that you can use direct mail, mail them out to people that you choose, with a phone number, and say “Hey, call me if you wanna sell.” That’s one really good way. So you’re sending out these things, you’re hoping for a 1% or 2% response rate, and you’re essentially putting these out based on certain criteria and you’re hoping that you’re gonna hit the right person, with the right message, at the right time… And it works. It’s just a numbers game.

Pay-per-click though is a different animal. Instead of the investor initiating the action, it’s actually the seller initiating it. So pay-per-click comes into play when somebody actually sits down at their computer or on their phone and they start to search for information or they start to find out something that can help them solve a problem.

In the case of a seller, that could be all sorts of issues, anything from “Hey, I’ve got a house I’ve just inherited from my uncle” to “Oh, we just got relocated and I’ve gotta sell this thing fast, and my agent says I can’t list it as it is. I need to sell this thing as is!”, or a distressed situation, like a foreclosure or something else. “Oh my gosh, I had three rental properties in Houston, they’re flooded now. Who buys flooded properties?”

So somebody goes to Google and they’re looking for answers, they’re looking for solutions, so I think you can see just from the two contexts of direct mail versus PPC the direct mail lead is likely to be more motivated in doing something faster. Not that you don’t get motivated sellers with direct mail, because you do, you can, but in general, a PPC lead is gonna be more motivated, because they’re the ones who took the first step. Does that make sense?

Joe Fairless: It does.

Scott Corbett: Facebook is kind of a hybrid of those two things, but let’s leave Facebook advertising aside, because that’s a podcast by itself, probably.
Joe Fairless: So you’re talking about Google AdWords… Is that basically it?

Scott Corbett: Yeah, Bing can be a factor, but we tell our clients, “Don’t even talk about Bing until you’ve completely maxed out what you can do on Google”, because there’s so many more searches, and in most markets they’re a better quality lead. But yeah, let’s talk about AdWords. That’s the main system we use.

Joe Fairless: All of our friends in Redmond, Washington – I hope you were covering your ears for that previous part. Okay, pay-per-click – how do we set up a campaign for success through Google?

Scott Corbett: Alright, there are some key elements with a campaign. And again, I know most people are familiar with this roughly, or maybe you’re running a campaign yourself or you’ve hired somebody else to do it, but pay-per-click is all about words; it’s a word-based system. We call them keywords.

A minute ago we talked about selling flooded properties in Houston, so that idea, like “Hey, I’ve gotta sell my flooded rentals in Houston. I can’t deal with this anymore.” That’s the thought in someone’s mind; well, that thought is gonna turn into words that they type into Google. So your first job is to make sure that the words that you imagine your potential seller will use when he/she goes to type in something into Google, those are the keywords that you’re including in your campaigns. We call those keywords, and there’s a lot of them.

We tend to group them by theme. There could be just a distressed theme; the cover foreclosure keywords, for example. You could have a whole inherited house set of keywords… But anyway, the main thing is make sure that the keywords are relevant to what you wanna do.

I could say something about negative keywords… I guess we’ll talk more about that later, but I will also just say to everybody that Google also lets you put in words you wanna exclude. And by include and exclude, what I mean, Joe, is the first thing you’ve gotta do is tell Google when to show your ads and when not to. You don’t want your ads as a real estate investor popping up when someone types in “sell my BMW motorcycle.” That’s not your thing, unless you love BMW motorcycles, but still that’s not your thing. You wanna buy houses, so Google needs to know when to show the ads, and they also really need to know when not to show your ads.

For example, a few months back Google started doing something really weird across almost all the campaigns we manage, which is they started showing ads for things like, “Hey, I wanna sell my motorcycle”, “I wanna sell my coin collection”, “I wanna sell my boat.” All these weird things that had nothing to do with real estate. So the way we stamped that out was we went into the negative keyword list in these campaigns and we’ve started adding things like “motorcycle”, “boat”, “collectibles”, things like that.

Joe Fairless: It’s more intelligent over time.

Scott Corbett: Yeah. And basically, you’ve gotta know how Google makes their money with AdWords. It’s called pay-per-click, so that means you as the bidder, you pay when someone clicks your ad, and only then. But keep in mind that Google only gets paid when someone clicks your ad. So they have a vested interest in making sure that your ad is going to show as often as possible, because it gives them more opportunity to get the click and get paid themselves.

So the negative keyword list is super-important, because you basically wanna exert control, so that when Google – like they do occasionally – errs on the side of showing your ad more often, with the hopes of getting more clicks and making more money, that that’s not counter-productive.

I’ll just say this, Joe, these real estate keywords are more and more expensive. A few years back on a good keyword you might only be spending $8-$10/click, which is still a lot of money. Now, in a lot of markets you’re paying upwards of $30, even over $40/click for these keywords, for the really good ones. And that adds up really fast, so being really sharp with your keyword list, both the inclusion keywords (the words you want your ad to show for) and the negative, the exclusion list; you’ve gotta really get that tight. That’s one big thing.

Joe Fairless: Okay, so first is identify the keywords and know what you should be including and excluding. When you’re starting out, how do you know which ones you should include and exclude?

Scott Corbett: There’s a variety of answers to that. You’re in the business, you talk to sellers often, I assume… You know the kinds of things that are in their minds, and you can just really start to create lists of all the words that the seller might use when sitting down to try to solve that problem of having a house that he/she no longer wants.
There are also lists available online that certain people had put out over the years. Some are better than others, I’ll say that, but you can at least use it as a starting point. So just do a Google search for “real estate PPC keyword list” and you’ll have a leg up, for sure.

Now, guys like me, just because right now we’ve just done this long enough, we’ve learned from experience… So that’s another thing I’d say to you, whether or not you’ll hire a company like me – learn from experience. There’s a way to go in and actually, from inside AdWords, to tell what keyword people actually typed in that triggered some activity, and look at those reports, because not only are you gonna be able to identify new keywords to use from those reports, but you’ll be able to figure out new ones to exclude. That’s kind of like a weekly hygiene that we do on our campaigns, to let the actual searchers and the keywords they’re using over time, let that teach you. Because the name of this game is just getting a little bit of an edge over your competition, particularly now that there’s a lot of venture capital money coming into this space, with OpenDoor and OfferPad and others, and the incremental edge is what’s gonna allow you to continue to compete with these guys who are backed by VC money, and it’s not easy. So that’s what I would suggest for the keyword list – either do it yourself, use online lists, or get a consultation from someone who’s been doing it for a while.

Joe Fairless: Once we have our keywords identified, what we’re including and excluding, then what?

Scott Corbett: The other core pieces of this are — I’ll try to keep it fairly high-level so it’s meaningful for most people… You have to clump those things in what we call ad groups, and then you have to write ads that are tied into those ad groups. Google’s whole thing – not just for PPC, but the whole thing about their search engine is relevancy first. So with the organic search results, they screen first the relevant website to show, and second by authority. Well, it’s kind of the same thing with PPC.

Google wants to see that when someone types in a particular keyword, like “sell my flooded home”, that your ad is also going to have something to do with the intent behind the keywords. So does the ad address the searcher’s intent? Obviously, you’ve got a wide variety of regions someone would want to sell a house, so you wanna group those together in ad groups and then you want your ads to be relevant to the intent that matches up with that.

I’ll even maybe take it a step further, Joe, and say that once they click, the landing page they land on needs to continue to be congruent or consistent with that intent, the keyword to the ad, to the landing page. The best case is when all three of those things line up.

Joe Fairless: The keyword, to the ad, to the landing page, and it’s a consistent theme throughout, and it’s all addressing the theme that you identified when you first were talking either “foreclosure” or “inherited house”, or whatever.

Scott Corbett: Exactly. All the main reasons why someone would sell their house to someone like a cash buyer.

Joe Fairless: Okay. That’s fairly intuitive, but I imagine, like a lot of things, it might be intuitive but in reality people don’t execute on that… So where do you see people miss most often when they do it on their own?

Scott Corbett: Yeah, good question. I’ll say this, I know there are always some hardcore do-it-yourselfers out there – to those people I’ll say Google has really good training on how to use AdWords that’s free. If you’re one of those hardcore do-it-yourselfers, take advantage of it. But with that, there are some other common mistakes that we’ve seen… For example, most real estate investors only wanna buy within a certain area. That could be something as big as like the Phoenix Metro area, or it could be something as small as a particular set of zip codes, and it could be everything in between. In fact, some people wanna buy across an entire state, for example. But know what that is, that’s my point. We call this geo-targeting or geofencing your ads.

Clearly, if you wanna buy houses in Augusta, Georgia, you do not wanna buy houses in Augusta, Maine, right? And you also don’t wanna buy houses in Fresno, California. So when you go to set up your campaign in August, you can tell Google in a variety of ways – probably a little too techy to get into – which zip codes you do and do not want your ads to show to… And maybe I should just say this, too – every time you sit down at your computer, Google can kind of get a read on where you are, through a variety of signals; I’ll just leave it at that. Google thinks they know where you are when you search, so what you’re doing with this geofencing is you’re essentially guiding Google to say “Hey, when you think someone’s sitting in downtown Augusta, Georgia, show them my ad, but if they’re sitting in August, Maine, don’t, and certainly not in Freno.” So the geofencing question is a biggie.

There’s a subtlety around this too, Joe, where you can tell Google “Only show my ads when people are in this area.” Or you can open it up a little bit and say “Hey, what if somebody’s sitting in Macon, Georgia, but they type in ‘sell my Augusta, Georgia home for cash.’ Do you wanna show them the ad?” Well, that’s a judgment call, right? It’s the whole out-of-state landlord question. Do you want to actually try to include these out-of-state property owners? And without getting into it, I’ll just say this – it’s a judgment call and you can do it either way. If you open it up to those people, you’re inviting a lot of leads that you’re not gonna want, but it may be worth it. So it’s just a judgment call.

And there’s even a third way you can target things based on interest, but I won’t get into that. That’s too esoteric. The geofencing though, that’s critical. Think about the potential to waste money with AdWords is just huge. The wrong keywords going to the wrong people in the wrong places – you can waste a lot of money, so geofencing is one thing that can help tighten that up.

Joe Fairless: That does make sense. What’s another common mistake you see?

Scott Corbett: Probably two biggies come to mind. You know how we talked about in the best case that intent is represented by the search term, it matches up with the ad that someone sees, which then when they click it, it matches up with the theme or the language on the landing page they end up on? So that third piece is a common mistake, the landing page. I say landing page – that’s kind of jargon, but it makes sense here. I click the ad, and you have to land somewhere, you have to go somewhere.

A common mistake is people run PPC traffic back to a homepage of their website, and some websites are better than other websites. Some of them are optimized to generate phone calls and web form submissions better than others. But even a website that’s well-optimized, it’s typically gonna have some things on it, like navigation links, too much stuff…

Joe Fairless: Yeah, distracting, shiny things…

Scott Corbett: Right, exactly. And the last thing you wanna do is let that really valuable lead you just paid $20, $30, $40 for to get distracted by some extraneous element on your homepage, start clicking around and pretty soon they’re looking at the properties you have for sale, because they’ve gotten pulled into that side of your website.

So that’s probably the most common problem with do-it-yourselfers, sending traffic to a page – usually it’s the homepage of a website, or it could be that you have some interior page, but it’s still likely gonna have a lot of distracting elements. So a good landing page is actually going to be really focused, it’s gonna have clear and obvious directions for how to get in touch with the buyer, through “Call this number” or “Fill out this form.” It’s gonna be unambiguous about what to do if you want an offer on your house. It’s also not gonna give them a lot of options for escaping that little ecosystem of the landing page, so once they landed they should either take the action you want to, click the Back button, or just close the browser. Those should really be the only three options.

Joe Fairless: And I get that and I totally understand that’s the right approach… The hesitation that I’ve had – I don’t have a lot of experience in doing PPC campaigns; in fact, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve done that, and it’s a big fat zero for how successful it’s been, so here’s a cautionary tale… What I thought when I did my PPC campaigns was that I wanted to send them to my website, not some leadpages/landing page that’s specific t the offer, because I wanted them to get to know me more, because on my website I’ve got all these “About Me” and “Here’s my blog”, so I thought I would establish more credibility that way, but the reality is I wasn’t getting any leads at all to opt-in, because I think they were getting too distracted. So I understand where you’re coming from, but I didn’t get it whenever I was doing it for myself.

Scott Corbett: Well, that very well may be. And heck, there could even be a case for a brand-building campaign where getting the lead isn’t necessarily the name of the game. Maybe you are trying to drive traffic to your blog, for example, and you really just want them to hang out on your blog, click around and listen to your podcast. So everything I’m saying is really from a pretty hardcore direct marketing perspective, where all that really matters is the lead… So I hear you.

There may have also been some mismatch, Joe, between what they’ve searched for, and then what they’ve found on the other side. I don’t know, but it’s possible.

Joe Fairless: Anything else that you wanna mention as it relates to pay-per-click campaigns that we haven’t discussed?

Scott Corbett: Well, one common mistakes I’d say is not doing retargeting. Retargeting basically is — you know how if you go to Amazon and you look at a set of golf clubs, and then lo and behold, the next day when you’re on ESPN.com, checking sports scores, you see an ad right there for those exact golf clubs that you looked at yesterday?

Joe Fairless: Yeah.

Scott Corbett: That’s retargeting. They cookied you and they’re reminding you about what you were interested in yesterday. You can do the same thing with this. If somebody hits your PPC landing page… A typical landing page for us is gonna convert like one out of every five people, so it’s gonna convert at about 20%. So what about the other 80%, right? Well, retargeting is a way to get a second bite at the apple, and a third, and a fourth, and a fifth, and a thirtieth, because you can continue to show them ads after they’ve come to the PPC landing page… Because they got there for a reason, right? But maybe life intervened, or it wasn’t the right time, so retargeting allows you to follow them around the internet and remind them that you’re there. Like, “Hey, we’re still here, and if you still wanna talk about selling that house, here we are.” And you can also retarget them on Facebook, so it’s not just on the Google network of websites.

So not retargeting is a big mistake. Another one is not supporting your campaign with the right budget. Joe, I don’t know, when you were doing PPC, back then if they actually had what we call the Right Rail… Your ads could appear at the very top, but then they also had that thing that went down the right column, with a bunch of other ads. That went away a couple years ago, and you can really only count on three ad spots at the top now.

AdWords is an auction system — without getting into the nuances of how you get in the top three position, you’ve gotta have good, relevant ads that go to good landing pages, but you’ve also gotta bid enough to be there.

We talk about the average position of an ad… We like to say that your average position needs to be 2.5 or higher, because that more or less guarantees that you’re in those top three spots… And occasionally there’s a fourth spot, but for people who are too conservative with their bidding and they drop down to position four, five, six, seven, that’s way down at the bottom of the page now, and quite honestly, most people aren’t gonna scroll down far enough to even see your ad. So you’ve gotta support these things with the right budget, so that your ad actually shows at the top of the page. That’s a big mistake.

Joe Fairless: These are a lot of good lessons that we could probably talk an episode about each of these. I wanna ask you a really quick question on retargeting – how do you retarget? How do you actually implement the retargeting?

Scott Corbett: What’s the strategy for it?

Joe Fairless: No, I mean… I get the concept – you really laid that out really well, but specifically… I’m on my computer, how do I retarget?

Scott Corbett: The short answer is AdWords makes it easy to set up. You go and you actually create a separate campaign for just the retargeting, and AdWords allows you to do what they call “building an audience.” So you build an audience of people who land on your PPC landing pages, or by the way, you could build an audience of people who land on your website. It doesn’t just have to be on your landing pages. Then through some settings you basically tell Google, “Hey, show these ads to this audience.” Then it’s the usual kind of bidding and create good ads and everything, but that’s basically the process. It’s all inside AdWords.

Joe Fairless: Easy enough. AdWords is the way to go, and you are our guide to navigate the process, and I’m grateful that you’ve spent some time with us. How can the Best Ever listeners get in touch with you?

Scott Corbett: Well, it’s been a lot of fun. I do love this stuff, and I’m having to hold myself back from going on and on about it, because I get way too technical too fast, but thanks for asking. Probably the best way is through our company website, which is lightmarkMedia.com. You can find me there, there’s phone numbers, web forms; read more about us, read more about PPC, and we’d love to talk to you.

Joe Fairless: Well, this was certainly a crash course on pay-per-click advertising, and that is an effective way for us to get more leads, that’s for sure. I love how we… Well, “we”, I can’t take credit for — YOU talked to us about the common mistakes that the investors tend to make, and that is we’ve got to geofence our ads, make sure we’re geofencing our ads. Also, identifying what is the theme throughout, and making sure that when they get to our website, that it’s a dedicated landing page, or at least there’s not a lot of shiny objects that could distract the person who you’re paying your precious marketing dollars to acquire, for that person to then go click on other stuff.

Plus, just how to do the PPC campaigns, from identifying the keywords, to making sure that you have the right theme throughout, and the right landing page… So thanks for being on the show. I hope you have a best ever Sunday, and we’ll talk to you soon.

Scott Corbett: It was a pleasure, Joe. Thank you so much.

Announcer: This is Theriault Media.

Announcer: Broadcasting from Theriault Studios in Glendale California, it’s time for Epic Real Estate investing with Matt Theriault.

Matt Theriault: Hello, and welcome to the Epic Real Estate Investing podcast. This is the show where I show people how to escape the rat race using real estate, and to make this happen for you the first step is just shifting your focus. Just shift your focus from making piles of money to creating streams of money, that’s where it begins and you only have to do that once and then you just have to embrace that shift and your escape from the rat race is going to be at least 10 times faster than those that choose the ultimate path. Let me clarify, I just want to make sure that this isn’t getting misinterpreted, this is not get-rich-quick, that’s not what we’re promoting here. If that’s what you’re looking for you’re in the wrong place. But it is get-rich-quicker, and it’s getting rich permanently.

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Matt Theriault: They could be gone by the time this airs, so you want to go quickly, but still even at full price it’s going to be a great deal and it’s 100% money back guaranteed so, you can’t lose. Got a good show for you today, a show on regeneration. As we’ve talked the last several weeks … I don’t know, maybe it’s six to eight weeks or so, on how to convert leads to contracts. Let’s shift the conversation a bit, let’s talk about a method of actually generating leads. A method of automating regeneration so you can use what you’ve learned here over the last six weeks or so. I found that this method is frequently discussed, but I also found it’s rarely understood, and not understood completely. I brought on one of my strategic partners to explain pay-per-click advertising. You might have heard it referenced as PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. In fact, our guest runs my PPC campaign, so I thought what better person to have on and share with you what it’s all about and clear up any misconceptions, and answer any questions, and if it makes sense for you, how to put it into practice for yourself, into your business right? So without further ado, from Lightmark Media Mr. Scott Corbett. Scott welcome to Epic Real Estate Investing.

Scott Corbett: Thank you Matt, great to be here. It’s a privilege.

Matt Theriault: Yeah, I know we’ve been talking about this for a long time, and I’m glad we finally coordinated our schedules and got you here. I know you’re a busy guy. Let’s get started with what is PPC? What is pay-per-click? let’s just … For some people, they might … When I say PPC, every once in a while someone will say, “What is PPC?” So let’s just start with the basics and then we’ll work our way up to where it is and where it can be in our listeners’ lives. So what is PPC and what’s the basic principle of how it works?

Scott Corbett: Alright, so let’s paint a scene here.

Matt Theriault: Okay.

Scott Corbett: So you inherit a house, or you got a sudden job transfer and you’ve got to move, or you need to sell your house for whatever reason and maybe it needs too much work to sell it on the retail market, so what are you going to do? In situations like that, the way most people today go to solve their problems or get information, is they sit down at the computer, and they go to Google. You sit down, you type in something like, ‘Sell my house as is.’ right? And then there are a million versions of phrases like that, but some phrase basically says, “I’ve got a house, and I need to sell it.” It’s usually a situation that reflects someone’s awareness that they can’t just go to a real estate agent and sell it the usual way. So anyway, whatever that phrase is, they sit down and then the search result page comes up. There are three kinds of results that you can see on these pages, sometimes two, sometimes three, I’ll explain what I mean. In either scenario, at the very top, you’re going to see three to four ads for companies like yours Matt.

Scott Corbett: Those ads are basically what we’re talking about with PPC. It’s that first, that top section of a search results page, where advertisers, or a company like yours Matt, are paying to be there, right?

Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Scott Corbett: Well they aren’t just paying yet, but they’re paying for … they’re in the system, and they’re willing to pay if somebody clicks the ad. Just to be really clear on the rest of the page, the other one to two sections of that page that you might see, one optional section would be like a map listing. Some of these searches trigger map results, most of them don’t. Then down below you get the regular so called organic listings, which is you got to basically do some good SEO to show up for those. In all cases the way to guarantee that you’re going to be on that page is to pay to play, right?

Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Scott Corbett: The organic listings, and the map listings, that’s basically up to Google’s arching formulas for who gets to be there and who isn’t. But the way, you can guarantee a seat at the table is to actually show up and be willing to pay. All right, so if you’re willing to pay then you have to get up set up in their backing system, it’s called AdWords, and Bing by the way has a similar system. You essentially … The short version is you pick out the keywords you want to bid on, the keywords where someone types in versions of them, you want your ad to show. Then you have to write ads, then you have to have a place to go when they click the ad, your website, or a special landing page, and then you have to set a bid for what you’re willing to pay for that click. That’s the basics.

Matt Theriault: Okay. All right. So someone comes in and say, “Hey I’d like to sell my house fast.” Or, “How do I sell my house fast?” That could be one of the keywords and that ad comes up, and the fact that it’s called pay-per-click, you don’t have to pay unless the person actually clicks on your ad. Correct?

Scott Corbett: That’s right.

Matt Theriault: Okay. So you click there, and then that takes them to … You can link that to your own web page?

Scott Corbett: Exactly yeah. That’s like the second half of making this whole process work. By the way, I just want to say this isn’t cheap. It’s expensive and getting more expensive practically every quarter. Most of those keywords that are pretty likely to have a motivated seller behind them, most of those keywords now every single click is going to cost you probably around $20 or more. You got to be ready for that click when it happens, and by being ready I mean the place where they end up needs to be strong, it needs to be congruent with what the ad said, what you’re promising. Just as a side tip Matt if I may, we run like about this point 4 million dollars a year of motivated seller advertising of this type, and we’ve tried lots of different kinds of landing pages, we’ve driven traffic to regular website. I can just tell you what we found, is that it’s a bad idea to send this traffic, which is expensive, through a regular website because there are too many options. Like up in the top navigation, when you’ve got ‘contact’ and ‘about’ and maybe a link to your blog.

Scott Corbett: If it’s a regular website they’re going to be a lot of options in the navigation, and probably some options on the page itself. They’re really only three things you ought to let people do after they click through your PPC ad. So when they hit that page, we use dedicated PPC landing pages by the way. That’s our solution so-

Matt Theriault: What is that dedicated … So it’s a landing page that only filters PPC traffic?

Scott Corbett: It only takes PPC traffic, we don’t even let Google index these pages so they … That you can’t get through it anyway other than clicking that PPC ad, and it’s for a couple of reasons; One, because if you’re having multiple sources of traffic like social media traffic, and organic Google traffic, and pay traffic going to the same place, it’s a lot harder to figure out your marketing ROI by traffic type-

Matt Theriault: Got it.

Scott Corbett: And so we like to just isolate PPC in its own ecosystem so that you know exactly what your ROI is at the end of the day. You know what leads, or PPC leads, you know how many of those went under contract, what you made. It just keeps it all separate, but it’s also the case along the lines of it being a bad idea to send PPC traffic to your website is that you’re more likely to get somebody to do one of the two things you want to happen, which is to either pick up the phone and call you, fill out a web form. You’re much more likely, it there’s not a lot of distraction on that place where they land, right?

Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Scott Corbett: So really when somebody hits that page, they should only have three options; which is to do one of those two good things, which is call or fill out a web form, or to hit the back button, or to close the browser. There should be no other options. We just found if you do that the net effect of it is, should get more phone calls, and more web forms, if it’s a landing page that kind of boxes them in that way.

Matt Theriault: Right, right. I can remember … ‘It’s making me think of something back … I don’t know this was probably what? 15 years ago, 18 years ago. When I was in a multi-level marketing company, the whole strategy was to invite people to your event, and they said the more questions you answered when they asked after you had sent out that invitation, the less likely they were going to show up. So I’m thinking of this landing page like you don’t want to give them any other options, and to get their questions answered you want them to actually show up and that will be in the form of a phone call, or web form. Same psychology it sounds like-

Scott Corbett: Yeah exactly. I mean you have to say a little bit just so they know they’re in the right place, and you’re the kind of company that can help them. And you want as much as you can let them know that you’re trustworthy. If you got something like a Better Business Bureau logo you can put up there. If you can put a testimonial up there from a previous seller or something, that’s really good. You really just want to satisfy them that, “Okay, these people are the kind of people I need to talk to. They seem legit, and now what I’ve got to do next to really find out if they can help me is call them.”

Matt Theriault: Got it. Okay. That’s the basic structure.

Scott Corbett: That is the basic structure. I mean it’s search marketing, so people go their computer to solve a problem, or gather information, and you are just trying to show up and meet them there in that moment when they’re doing that. If you can meet them there with a solution to their problem, that’s a pretty good place to be. Can I just talk about one difference between PPC, and direct mail Matt?

Matt Theriault: Sure. Absolutely.

Scott Corbett: Okay. I’m sure a lot of your listeners understand direct mail marketing, which is super effective when it’s done right. Where you’re sending out postcards, or yellow letters, or whatever based on certain criteria to people on certain area. You got … just to make this really clear by contrast, imagine the difference between somebody who … maybe it’s an elderly person, they’re sitting on a home that’s fully paid for, maybe they’re starting to think about moving into an assisted living facility, or something but they’re not really serious about it yet, just something they think about occasionally, and they get through direct mail letter, and they go, “Oh okay, so Matt says he can buy my house for cash and I don’t have to fix it up. That’s pretty interesting.” What they do next is basically going to depend on how serious they are about it in that moment, right?

Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Scott Corbett: And there’s no telling. Maybe … And this does happen, and you know Matt. Some of them actually go, “Oh my gosh, this is perfect timing. That roofer just came by and gave me that crazy estimate on the roof after Hurricane Irma just blew threw through. I don’t want to fix that thing, I just want to be done with this house and go move in with my daughter on Oklahoma.” That person, after they get that direct mail piece, they’re probably going to call you, right?

Matt Theriault: Right.

Scott Corbett: But 9. … what is it? Nine point 9.95 times out of 10 what happens with direct mail?

Matt Theriault: Nothing.

Scott Corbett: Nothing?

Matt Theriault: Yeah.

Scott Corbett: Exactly. It’s just a numbers game. Like I said it totally works as long as you understand some numbers game, but the contrast ad would pay-per-click. For pay-per-click, you’re not the one reaching out to them, they’re the one reaching out. They’re the one taking action initially. They’re sitting down, they’re trying to solve their problem. In that sense just inherently, you’re going to get a higher level of motivation. I’ll also say … Matt, you know this. It also means you’ve got to be on your game if you get one of these leads that you probably paid at least $100 in clicks for, if not … In some of the markets we’re in it’s over $300 per lead. Apart from the money, you’ve got to really be on your game. Like you’ve got to answer the phone when it rings, or you’ve got to call them right back, or for the web form lead, you’ve to have either a sales guy, an acquisitions guy on your team, or you’ve got to be the one contacting them right away because you know how it is today, if you don’t get an answer immediately, what do you do? You just go back to that Google page right?

Matt Theriault: Right, or click the next thing down exactly.

Scott Corbett: Yeah, exactly. So it’s kind of a two edged sword of a really motivated lead. On the good side, they’re actually motivated, they’re ready to talk to somebody, they want to find out what their options are, but they’re impatient and they’re not going to wait around for you. So if you don’t step up and help them right away, they’re just going to move on to the next person.

Matt Theriault: Right. What I’m hearing is as you’ve kind of run a distinction between pay-per-click and direct mail, both are very effective, and both work, but the pay-per-click lead we’ve discovered it a higher quality lead because they are seeking us out, and typically they are motivated. Also that they are impatient, so you need to be quick when you respond to them. It’s not like a motivated seller … or a direct mail lead where that you can, “I’ll get back to them on my lunch break.” or something like that, and you need to be competent. These aren’t leads that you want to practice on so to speak if you’re just getting started, is that pretty accurate?

Scott Corbett: I’d say that you need to be ready to have that conversation. Yeah definitely. It sounds like what you guys have been doing on this podcast is probably the kind of thing people should have thought through, how do you talk to these people? How do you figure out what their pinpoints are? What they’re really looking to do, I mean it’s kind of standard sales stuff, but it’s a particular situation when you got home sellers. You need to … They either need to be coached by someone like you Matt, or they just need to have the experience of how to talk to these people before they start spending money on pay-per-click. Yeah I agree with that.

Matt Theriault: Perfect. That’s kind of a little bit was my philosophy on converting the lead first before you spend money on generating them. We’re talking about, … You said minimum probably $20 a click, or average $20 a click, how much does someone need say in a monthly budget for pay-per-click to be effective for them, or to be worth the effort? Or worth the cost?

Scott Corbett: All right, so I’ll just go and say that is a tough question to answer-

Matt Theriault: It depends?

Scott Corbett: Yeah. Because first of all real estate is local, and that’s true in pay-per-click as well. Even with pay-per-click, in every single market we manage has gotten more expensive in the past year or two. That rate of increase is a lot higher some places than others. This probably won’t surprise you, but San Diego leads are a lot more expensive than Tulsa Oklahoma leads. Is the value of a deal in San Diego greater than the value of a deal in Tulsa? Even like on a wholesaling basis, yeah.

Matt Theriault: Yeah, quite a bit.

Scott Corbett: It is, you know?

Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Scott Corbett: Here’s the thing, you still got to be prepared to invest some amount of money to play in whatever market you’re in. Here is some guidelines, I can’t really give you an answer other than to say we find that you’ve got to get a certain amount of data through the system before you can start to make anything better. By that I mean, a certain number of clicks, a certain number of conversions, which is basically a conversion just means either a web form, or a phone call. Somebody actually showing up and saying, “Hey, I want some information.” Or, “I want help.” In general, if you’re not willing to spend $1000 bucks a month on clicks, it’s going to be tough to get any information in how the system improve over time.

Matt Theriault: Okay.

Scott Corbett: But that said, $1000 bucks a month is not enough in San Diego because the clicks can actually be as high as $50 each there. It is market by market. One thing to think about just knowing the numbers of your business is important as a starting point, so you … Let’s just say you’re a wholesaler, you probably know in your market what kind of wholesale commissions you can get, maybe there’s a range depending on what kind of house it is. Or if you’re a rehabber, you know, you have a pretty good idea of what your profit margins are on different kinds of houses for doing it for rehab a fix and flip. Start at that point, and know where you want to end up, and then from that back into how good you are in the acquisition side.

Scott Corbett: So do you typically need around 20 leads to get something under contract? Do you need 15? Do you need 30? My clients … by the way on that little note, always get this question, “How many leads do I need to get something under contract?” Again there’s a range of answers that I hear, but it’s basically everything from like the upper teens, like 17, 18, 19 leads per contract all the way up to about 35. I think it’s a combination … That’s a pretty big difference right? One is like twice as high as the other. I think it’s a combination of the market, and what we’ve been talking about already today, which is how good you are on the sales side.

Matt Theriault: Right.

Scott Corbett: How effective you are with making offers, talking to people, building a rapport, or things like that. Anyway if you know your numbers, let’s just say you know you can get … Matt, do you mind if I ask you, in your market do you wholesale deals?

Matt Theriault: Yeah. There’s the stuff we don’t want to hold and we’ll wholesale that.

Scott Corbett: Okay.

Matt Theriault: Yeah.

Scott Corbett: What’s an average wholesale commission in the markets you buy?

Matt Theriault: We’re between 8 and 12 probably for just straight wholesale.

Scott Corbett: Yeah, maybe we can just say 10,000 average for wholesale deals. You’d probably be pretty happy if you can get that deal under contract for like 2000, maybe even $3000, that still leaves some meat on the bones for you.

Matt Theriault: Right.

Scott Corbett: And of course the lower the better. Whether it’s direct mail, or it’s PPC, you just got to have an idea of what you’re willing to spend to get something under contract and just break it down from there. If you’re willing to spend $2,000 to get a house under contract for PPC, and let’s just say generally based on your experience you know you can close one out of every 15, or 1 out of every 20 leads. Let’s say it’s 20, that’s going to take you a certain amount of leads to get it under contract, how much those leads cost you. You just got to figure out the math in all of this, and that’s really going to give you an answer on how much you have to spend to get like … Let’s just say to get one deal a month maybe. So it’s all math-

Matt Theriault: Totally, it’s no different than any other form of advertising that you would do.

Scott Corbett: Yeah.

Matt Theriault: The one cool thing about this is that it’s a little bit more … the results in the measuring a little bit more tangible, and a little bit more … like you can see it because of how AdWords reports.

Scott Corbett: Yeah.

Matt Theriault: Right.

Scott Corbett: Absolutely, and you know what you spend, you know how many leads you get, and I’m sure most people understand they have to have some kind of internal tracking system CRM or something where they can actually know … ‘Cause I mean, you don’t get all these leads and a contract in the first week right? I know you know that.

Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Scott Corbett: So-

Matt Theriault: Right. So my question was … Oh it just left me. There’s a lot to this, I mean this is essentially a business in it all of itself that’s why you do what you do. I remember … I don’t know, maybe nine, ten years ago I set out to … I bought some little information product course on how to set up AdWords and went and set it all up myself and did it, and I just freaked out ’cause I was just watching click, after click, after click, and watching the money come out of my account, and I wasn’t getting any leads, I was just watching the clicks happen. Then I thought about all the different things that Google had gone through with their SEO algorithms and stuff like that, and now I’ve seen how there’s no more ads on the side of the Google results, throughout the top, or the bottom. What are some of the significant things that have changed that you can share with people that think that they might have tried it once before, decided they didn’t want to do it, maybe they want to revisit it now, or maybe they think they know it, but they just haven’t done it recently. What are some of the big changes today that just say a year ago?

Scott Corbett: Well, you know … Oh my gosh so many things have changed.

Matt Theriault: That’s what I’m gathering, that’s why I asked. That’s a big giant can of worms, and that’s okay, but I was wondering if there is something significant that makes you … can be like the deciding factor, or the tipping point whether you want to take this on yourself, or whether you want to do it at all, or whether you just want to hire someone to do it for you because once you’ve figured it out, it’s definitely worth it.

Scott Corbett: I want to acknowledge that I’ve got a biased … I run a marketing agency that does a lot of PPC for real estate guys. I hope everybody understand that-

Matt Theriault: Oh totally.

Scott Corbett: … I’m speaking from a certain perspective here, okay?

Matt Theriault: Sure.

Scott Corbett: But acknowledging that, I just want to tell you what I really think, is that this is something that needs to be done either after a great amount of research and training if you’re going to have to do it on yourself, or have someone on your team do it, or you just need to hire somebody to do it who spends their … who’s full time job it is to keep up with this stuff because … I’ll just give you a little example and keep in mind I’m a professional shop. I mean we do these stuff all day long for lots of people, and so here’s something that just crept up on us in August, and I could … it’s still going on to some extent, but we’ve stomped it out for the most part.

Scott Corbett: I don’t want to kill people with a lot of technicalities on how Google AdWords works, but I’ll just say this, for those keywords that we just talked about, those phrases that people type in, you can bid on them in different ways, and there’s this one was called broad match, or modified broad match, which is basically it means that different versions of the thing you’re bidding on, your ad will get shown for it. What was happening is that we use some of these broad match keywords in our campaigns because they actually get a lot of traffic. You can’t predict every single way somebody is going to phrase something, right?

Matt Theriault: Can you give me an example? What’s a broad match keyword?

Scott Corbett: Yeah. ‘Cash for house’.

Matt Theriault: Okay.

Scott Corbett: Imagine all the different versions of that so, ‘Sell my house for cash.’ ‘Companies I can sell my house for cash to.’ There’s a million versions of it.

Matt Theriault: Got it.

Scott Corbett: Basically, again I’m really oversimplifying but broad match means a phrase that includes these main keywords in it. Right?

Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative) doesn’t have to be exact, it’s a broad match.

Scott Corbett: Yeah, it doesn’t have to be a match. They’d only have to be in a certain order, but what we found starting in August, where … We’ve been doing this a long time, we monitor our keywords, we monitor … One thing we do, and anybody you ever hired for this, they ought to do this, on about a weekly basis you ought to go in and actually see what people search for, or that got them to click your ad. If you see some bad things in there, and some things that are inappropriate, like somebody actually typed in, let’s just say something about wanting to buy a house, instead of sell one, then you need to start to create what’s called the negative keyword list and put all those “buy” keywords on your negative keyword list. When you put in on your negative keyword list it basically tells Google, “Hey, don’t show my ad whenever these keywords are part of somebody’s search.” So it’s basically like, “Blackout my ads when somebody types in any of these words.”

Matt Theriault: Got it.

Scott Corbett: And we do that for all of our campaigns regularly. What we started seeing in August though Matt was, for these good old motivated seller broad match keywords that have done so well for so many years are very predictable, and very dependable, all of a sudden some weird things started to happen. By weird, I mean it was a bunch of different versions of people all of a sudden wanting to sell their boat for cash, sell their car for cash, sell their old golf clubs for cash. All these weird non house related searches started happening in a majority of the campaigns we manage around the country. Google won’t tell you anything, it’s like a black box. I can just tell you that what we ended up concluding was that Google just changed their algorithm about these broad match keywords, and they did it without telling anybody. What the effect was for somebody like you Matt, if anybody here was actually bidding on these so called real estate keywords, was all of a sudden you start getting people calling you wanting to sell their car, or sell their golf clubs, or all these things that you have absolutely no interest in. What that means is (A) You got charged for a click that is completely useless to you, right?

Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Scott Corbett: And (B) All of a sudden now your campaign is not working as well as you’re blowing through your budget, you’re getting fewer legitimate leads, so your true cost per lead is going way up. It took us a couple of weeks to really become aware that this was happening across most of our campaigns all across the country, and then it took us another couple of weeks to fully stamp out all these weird little things that people were basically paying for that were utterly useless. Because there’s so many of these weird little ‘buy this’, and ‘buy that’ kind of keywords that this real estate ads started to pay for. My point is you got to watch these stuff, because even … We have a very good system for setting up these ads, and monitoring them and what not, and it still caught us by surprise. It took some serious effort to figure out what was going on, and to stop it, and basically stop the bleeding with the money so that these accounts can actually get back to doing what they’re supposed to do.

Scott Corbett: This is just one little example about how Google will do something in the back end, even not anything as dramatic as taking away all the ads in the right hand column, you know?

Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Scott Corbett: I mean [inaudible 00:35:48] pretty dramatic too, but little things that you might not even notice, and you’re probably not surprised to hear that Google made this change in a way that benefited them right?

Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative)

Scott Corbett: Because they don’t get paid unless … They get paid by someone clicking these ads.

Matt Theriault: Right.

Scott Corbett: So they have a vested interest in generating as many clicks as possible. Is it really a surprise they opened up their algorithm to create … to have your ads show more often for more things? No it’s not a surprise because that makes it much more likely that more clicks will happen and they’re make more money. It’s like advertiser beware. You have to be very careful when you’re managing a campaign like this, that things like that don’t just slip out of control because I did the same thing you did 10 years ago. I was first managing my own campaigns, all of a sudden you look down and you’ve spent $300, $400, $500, or $1,000 or more in a single day and you haven’t gotten a single-

Matt Theriault: Lead.

Scott Corbett: Lead, or sale, or whatever. Oh my gosh. I can even tell you horror stories about guys who’ve blown through tens of thousands of dollars because they had a setting wrong in their Google AdWords account. Terrible things can happen. If you’ve got somebody who is the ultimate do it yourselfer, who doesn’t want to pay a company like mine to do it for them, then I will say this Google has free education about their system. You can go and you can … They’ve even got courses on Google AdWords that you can take, and you can sit through, and learn a lot that way. Of course, you can buy books, and everything but just be careful, be very careful as you do it.

Matt Theriault: Got it. Got it. So is someone wanted … ‘Cause there’s always one out there, the ultimate do it yourselfer, where would they go to find that free education?

Scott Corbett: I don’t know, you go to Google of course, you know.

Matt Theriault: Got it.

Scott Corbett: And you just google AdWords training, and then go to Google’s version of it because it’s free. There are other ones you can buy these things, but Google’s is very good, and it’s free, and it’s … If you really want to make sure you know it then they’ve even got a way where you can take a little test at the end where you got to pass it.It will tell you how where you really understand it, I’ll put it that way.

Matt Theriault: Mm-hmm (affirmative) okay. Google it is the answer.

Scott Corbett: Google it. Yeah.

Matt Theriault: And then for those that are like me, and I think this is probably for most of my audience that have no interest in doing this yourself, or doing this ourselves, if they wanted to get in touch with you to discuss the possibility of you doing it for them, what would be the best way for them to do that?

Scott Corbett: Well you can go to our website lightmarkmedia,com L-I-G-H-T-M-A-R-K-M-E-D-I-A .com and right up top there’s a … I think the very first thing that you see is this thing to see if your market is available because … This is the sort of thing where it’s hard to do a really good job for multiple people in the same market. This is a tough question for a company like mine because not only is every market different, like in Los Angeles we have more than one client for example, right? That is a huge market. What is it? Like 14 million I think or something-

Matt Theriault: There’s a lot area.

Scott Corbett: Yeah. Contrast that with Asheville North Carolina, which has a couple hundred thousand people. This is essentially … unlike direct mail, there is a finite number of searches that are relevant, appropriate, searches, or searchers out there month, after month, after month, after month, and so basically what we would figure out is whether someone’s market was available. Once we know that it is then we can do things like do some data analysis and actually ler somebody know like, “Hey okay. In this market, in Oklahoma city, we think PPC cost per lead would be about $125. So you got to basically plan on spending about $2500 bucks before you’re going to put something under contract. Does that make sense for you yes or no?” We can help when we know where someone’s actual market is. So yeah, go to the website, that’s the best way.

Matt Theriault: Cool, and then the little orange button … I just went there, there’s this little orange button that says, “Get a quote.”?

Scott Corbett: Yeah that works too. I think that you’ll just have to say, “Hey I’m interested in PPC, get back to me.” And-

Matt Theriault: Okay. Oh you do a bunch of other things you do SEO, social media, contact marketing web design, web development branding, marketing support. You’re the whole enchilada, and I thought you’re just a PPC guy. How sweet-

Scott Corbett: We’re the whole enchilada as long as you have a real estate, or alternative investing, or private capital kind of business. Like if you’re a plumber, or an electrician, or a dentist, you need to go somewhere else, but if you’re in real estate we can help.

Matt Theriault: Okay perfect. Awesome Scott. Thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for sharing your wisdom, and I think you did a great job of demonstrating that you have a choice to make. Do you want to be in the real estate business, or do you want to be in the PPC business? There’s a lot involved in both right?

Scott Corbett: Yeah, there is, there is, and I’m also happy to tell anybody, “Hey here’s what our fees are, factor that in. Can you afford to pay somebody like me and pay Google, and still get something under contract in a way that works for you?”

Matt Theriault: Right.

Scott Corbett: Happy to have these conversations with anybody.

Matt Theriault: Cool already. Well thanks again Scott. Go to lightmarkmedia.com, lightmarkmedia.com just like it sounds, and on the homepage just get a quote, and you can also … there’s also a button in the middle to see if your market is available. That could probably streamline the process a little bit for you, but if you have the chance talk to Scott, he’s really smart and that’s why I hired him for our business. Talk to him, see it makes sense for yours. Already, until next time God bless, to your success, I’m Matt Theriault, living the dream.

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