How To Hold Your Digital Ad Agency Accountable

Brandon Welch 0:00
There’s a whole generation of people who learned how to just click buttons in Google, and because they could set an account up and get it to spend money and get some amount of clicks to you, they got elevated and called experts in digital media. And I mean no disrespect or rocks learned anybody, but they’re not experts. If that’s all they did you. What you want is a marketer who knows how to use the media, not somebody who is a media buyer who’s trying to pretend they’re a marketer.

Welcome to the Maven Marketing Podcast. Today is Maven Monday. I’m your host, Brandon Welch, and I’m joined by my co host, Caleb kinsman hat. Agee, that’s a fancy kinsman hat.

Caleb Agee 0:41
I got it this week, this week, and I had to, had to support it. Shout

Brandon Welch 0:46
out to our friends at kinsman journal, who are doing some incredible things to enrich the lives of leaders and both our community and across the nation, and you’ll be hearing more about them soon, but you should check out kinsman journal.com and subscribe to their newsletter. And they have

Caleb Agee 0:59
podcasts too. They have a podcast. I mean, don’t, don’t leave our podcast to go to their podcast. But yeah, when you’re done listening, listen, if

Brandon Welch 1:05
you like, and subscribe our podcast. You can bail now if you like, so just go over listen to it. Yeah? Unless you don’t miss out, yeah, you’ll miss out on a really, really, really juicy topic today, which is, we how to hold your digital ad agency accountable? How

Caleb Agee 1:19
to hold them accountable? This is it’s a fun one. It’s a little bit of a dangerous one for us. Not really. It’s not dangerous for us to say, but you very often

Brandon Welch 1:30
could be potentially throwing some rocks unintended. We’re gonna

Caleb Agee 1:34
shoot some shots over the bow here in a second. But everything’s gotten harder in marketing. That’s that’s the reality. It’s harder for us. It’s harder for those other agencies out there. It’s harder for if you’re trying to do it on your own as a as an Inside Business marketer, and when everything gets harder, you start asking more questions, which is great. The problem is, you weren’t asking those questions all the way along. Yes, right? And though,

Brandon Welch 2:04
and there are some agencies that are really going to be glad you asked these questions. They’re gonna be like, Great, let’s fix this together. And I just want to say the spirit of this episode is not go fire your agency. The spirit of this episode is, know how to collaborate with them and then, but, but if, if they can’t collaborate with you on things we’re about to talk about. You may have the signal that you aren’t with the right partner, yeah. And our heart is, of course, to help you eliminate waste in advertising so you can grow your business and achieve the big dream, which is why we’re here. Oh, yeah. And so as you’re going frustrated with my marketing or I’m not getting what I used to these are the conversations we host inside our client relationships as our agency. Yeah. That was built on my, I guess, passion or experience of not having somebody do this for me when I was the one spending advertising dollars and wondering if they were working, yeah. And so that’s the whole heart behind this podcast and everything that we do at Frank and Maven and the Maven mark, Maven marketer, and soon to be Maven method training. And so if you are wondering, hey, what can I do to equip myself with some better knowledge, just to make sure I’m not doing the big things wrong, like you could be doing the big things right and still be struggling a little more right now? Yeah, just just a product of the head ones we’re in. But how do I make sure I’m doing the big things right? How do I make sure the partner I have working on my marketing either internally or maybe it’s an agency you’re working with? How do I make sure they’re doing the things that are the best stepping stones to the way to success? Yeah, and

Caleb Agee 3:37
our goal, Brandon, we were talking to somebody just this week, and our goal is usually for you to try to work with people you have already Yeah, because their institutional knowledge, the background they have with you, is valuable, and to throw that away and just say, I need to start fresh. I need a new agency, is such a dangerous game to play. Yes,

Brandon Welch 3:57
try to quitting for the wrong reason. Yeah, yeah, if you’re gonna quit, it needs to be for the right reason. Right? You’re gonna quit a partnership.

Caleb Agee 4:03
So start here. We’ve got some questions that you can ask the these agencies, your marketing partners, to help hold them

Brandon Welch 4:10
accountable. Yeah. So we have, was it five? Five questions you need to be asked. It’s actually four. It’s four. But then we have some we have some thoughts. We had some thoughts to add on that. So number one thing I’m seeing, and Caleb mentioned this, I’ve gotten a number of people like, we’re getting some opportunities. People are calling us up and going, Hey, my agency is really not doing their job. And half the time I’ve looked at those and be like, they are doing most of the things, right? You seem to tweak it here. So I’m like, Oh my gosh. How are people charging money for this? That’s that’s happened. Was a lot this year, and it’s happening literally right now. So yeah, we’re gonna

Caleb Agee 4:43
do our best to not noodle through. We’re gonna work through the four questions really quickly. Yes, try to hit what you should be looking for quickly. So you think that is a takeaway. And then we’re gonna come back around to those four

Brandon Welch 4:55
questions. Give a little more a little more nerd. Yes, speak, but go simplify it. What

Caleb Agee 4:59
do you. Do About It, right? What do you do about the answers they have? So number one, how many different things are we doing? This is kind of a big question, but we’re looking at how many services are you paying for them to do? So look at your invoice from your agency. How many different are they Google ads, Facebook ads, SEO Services, website management, as like,

Brandon Welch 5:21
are they putting subject treatment on your bills? Are

Caleb Agee 5:23
Yes. And then the second side of that is not just what you’re paying them to do, but all the different medias that your money is going to so are you on Facebook, Google, Angie’s List, Yelp, Yellow Pages, whatever. You know I’m saying yes, all these different places.

Brandon Welch 5:41
And yeah, what happens is, it’s sort of death by 1000 paper cuts. The truth is, for any one media to work, and we’re gonna talk mostly about Google and Facebook today, but for any one media to work, it takes more of an ante than it used to. The idea of sprinkling, you know, 500 to $1,000 here, sprinkling 500 to 1000 to $1,000 here. This package came along from the Yelp rep, or some local, you know, TV station that wanted to add a little $700 thingy here, like that sort of mentality that over fragmentation of your media budget is going to kill your results. Yes, for two reasons. One, you probably aren’t making enough noise to begin with. The cost of that inventory, like you think of the universe and what it costs to get attention. That factor is just higher. It’s inflated. Like everything else, big ad platforms are charging more, Google and Facebook, we’ve talked a lot about specifically how Google is charging a lot more, and then, just by share voice, like, you have to think, if I’m I’m one of 500 people paying $500 to this platform in my area. Like, is that really going to get me somewhere? Yeah. Like, you need to be swinging big on fewer things. Yeah. We call that around here. We fill one glass at a time. That is a core value of our team. That is a core value of how we’ve always gotten results for clients. We do fewer things, but better and bigger, yeah. And so you want to stand out with a bigger share of voice, yep. So how many different things are we doing? And what I would hope that you would see is, hey, we’re doing Google really well. We’re spending, you know, four or five grand a month, if you’re up, if you’re a reasonably sized service company or professional service, which is most of listeners on this podcast. I like, if you’re below that, like three grand territory on Google, you’re you’re not spending enough to get an optimized result out of it. You’re going to get onesies, twosies, but you’re going to be frustrated with the sporadic nature of what you’re getting. Yes. So that used to be, that could be a grand or two, and I could get that kind of result, but I’m telling you the floor,

Caleb Agee 7:43
there’s a minimum ante there. You got to buy in at a certain level, and that’s so our advice is to make sure you keep it that the list of things that you guys are doing, you and your agency probably less than five. It’s probably three if you’re doing it, if you’re doing a great job,

Brandon Welch 8:02
we have clients that are growing at really nice rates right now, and we do three things for them, and they’re spending 567, $100,000 a year. So I’m saying if you’re until you’re at the you’re knocking on the million dollar territory. It’s like three to five. But three is fine, yeah, medium sized market, small towns that budget is going to go quicker, and you can start adding bells and whistles, but and for my money, those things would be I want to know I’m doing the best I can in Google. I’m just going to tell you straight up, we’re taking money from Google and we’re maximizing Facebook right now. It’s an under bot platform. The cost to reach people is getting better and better and better, and they’re getting better at earning conversions leads. So we’re generating 1000s of leads a month, just literally off Facebook campaigns. Yep, some of you that’ll be new, surprising and different, somebody, some of you that’ll be like, Duh, but just, just so you know, on the digital media side, now we’re leaving tomorrow marketing alone. Today. We, we, we bring that up to you guys all the time. That is, that is, that is truly the essence behind companies that are growing the healthiest, yes, but, and I’m putting just so you know, I’m putting 60 to 70% of my budget in broadcast and tomorrow marketing things, because that is what produces the most efficient customer after you get over the hump, yeah. But that 30% that 30, 40% of my clients money I’m putting I’m spending my first $5,000 on Google, and I’m spending my next 234, 1000, $5,000 on Facebook, and I’m writing that all the way up to If I’m thinking markets like Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Lexington, Louisville, even Atlanta. Like, I’m writing that up to 20, $30,000 before I’m trying to add some other dad, yep. So, because there’s more, there’s more results optimized there. So yeah, yeah, we promise to keep that short. Yeah. Do that at all. We

Caleb Agee 9:57
kept it going. But that’s

Brandon Welch 9:58
right, how many different. Things we’ll be doing, and it needs to be tight. Keep it keep it

Caleb Agee 10:03
tight. Yeah, what is my actual budget or spend that’s going into each media? So we don’t see that. This is a really short one. We don’t see this as often, but you need to pay attention to your budgets that are going into each media. If your agency pays your budgets to Google, to Facebook, to Hello. This actually is how it usually works for broadcast. We’re not really talking about that today. You need to make sure you see the the invoices transparently from those media that they’re paying. So if you hand if, if both their service and the budget are included in one lump sum. You, you need to be careful, like, yeah, just get out of there. Get

Brandon Welch 10:46
out of that. Yeah, that’s, that’s some that’s begging for lack of transparency. And so, yeah, you It’s plain simple. You need to, you need to pay the media company, or at least have visibility to those invoices. Yeah,

Caleb Agee 10:57
directly for clarity. So historically, maybe your agency would charge you 1500 bucks, and they’re saying $500 is our service fee, and we’re putting $1,000 into Google. You need to see that $1,000 on Google. First of all, there’s no perfect way to spend exactly $1,000 in Google, so you’re either going to be up or down

Brandon Welch 11:14
by $1 or two. At least. There’s just no perfect way to cut that out, like 20 or 30

Caleb Agee 11:17
bucks. Um, either way, even if they were so good at managing it, yeah, but what we do is we charge, yes, our service fees, but our clients put their credit card straight into the media, yeah. And they also can see all the billables, but it’s hitting their credit card instead of us playing pass through. So big fan

Brandon Welch 11:35
of just paying for that consultancy as as the line item, and you’re, paying somebody to manage that for you, not actually paying. We’ve had

Caleb Agee 11:43
a few scary times where we’ve looked into somebody’s accounts and they’re like, I’m paying $1,000 and only $200 of that was making it to the media partner.

Brandon Welch 11:50
And I could think of one that was really big. They were they were shipping them 15, $20,000 a month, and come to find out, a very small fraction of that was actually going towards media, yeah, and the agency. It was criminal, to be honest with you. So that can happen. So make sure you’re asking this question. Make sure you know where the money’s going to the actual media company next, we’re

Caleb Agee 12:09
moving more towards the digital ads platforms, probably primarily Google in this case. But first one is, what kind of campaigns Am I running? So question

Brandon Welch 12:17
number three, what kind of campaigns Am I running? Yes, we want to keep you out of the weeds here. But what I’m going to give you some things to look for, what is happening, because there’s a whole generation of people who learned how to just click buttons in Google, and because they could set an account up and get it to spend money and get some amount of clicks to you, they got elevated and called experts and digital media and I mean no disrespect or rocks thrown to anybody, but they’re not experts, if that’s all they did you, what you want is a marketer who knows how to use the media, not somebody who is a media buyer who’s trying to pretend they’re a marketer. You want to look for a very specific language, and hopefully you’re getting this consult from your people that, hey, we’re using this type of campaign. They’re telling you that it’s not that you have to totally understand or nerd out on it, but you want to be using local search campaigns. And Google literally has nine different types of campaigns in the platform you could select now, yes. And because some marketers are either ridden with shiny object syndrome or they and they just want to try and test all the things they don’t know how to help themselves.

Caleb Agee 13:30
Yeah. And Google’s pushing these other campaign types big time. They’re calling our office every day saying, can we tell you about display or search or discovery? Go

Brandon Welch 13:38
back to the episode with Kyle and I when, when we talked about Google is shaking the couch cushions, and they’re trying to maximize revenue in a down economy. That’s what that’s how they’re doing it. They’re they’re saying, Oh, you need to try this new campaign. Oh, just put a little bit of your budget over here. You know why? Because that’s inventory they’ve created, and it’s crap inventory. I’m just gonna be straight up so you want, literally, search campaigns. Now, what you don’t want I’m talking to my service companies. I’m talking to my professional service companies. If you hear the words performance, Max, run, we can fight about that later, but trust me, run your ad. Guys will be like, oh, let’s put a little money there. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Man, if you’re spending 20, $30,000 a month and you want to test a little bit of that. Fine, but man, my guys that are that are just trying to get the leads and calendars full do not do performance the way they

Caleb Agee 14:27
define that is a set and forget. Ai driven, yes, campaign

Brandon Welch 14:31
that is Google begging you to be robot, frauded by clicks. If

Caleb Agee 14:35
you are paying an agency to manage your search for your Google ads. You shouldn’t have them running a set and forget the type of campaign, yes,

Brandon Welch 14:45
performance, Max. Yeah. For starters, it’s nothing that can be managed. And while I’m on that topic, please don’t get charged for local service ads if you’re running local service ads like Google, guarantee. We talked about that last episode. Yeah, that is. You go, put in your information and it is, set it and forget it. And that’s a place you should probably be in Google if you’re a service company. Go listen to last episode to find out why. Yeah, local service, which is kind of in the search engine result page, put some money there, but there’s no amount of management that you should be really paying an agency for. Yeah, you know, that’s a side rant. But back to what kind of campaigns do you want to be running search and local service? Local Services, display again, until I’m spending 1015, $20,000 I’m not even considering that. It’s it’s weak, it’s not going to produce. It’s not a lead generation type campaign. They claim it’s good at branding. And I say there’s a lot better things you can do to brand your company, shopping, ads. If you’re e com, you should be there because it’s part of search, but you don’t want that as a service company, probably. And you don’t want discovery campaigns or smart campaigns, yeah. So like, if you have access to your Google Ads dashboard, you can go on there and say, Okay, you can look at this. And what you want to see is the search type campaign. There’s a column of the type of campaign you want to make sure it’s a search campaign. Yep.

Caleb Agee 16:07
The other thing, and I’m forgetting the exact term, help me with this, the expanded search network, is that, was that the

Brandon Welch 16:14
question to this? When you say, what campaigns say, Hey, do I have the expanded Search Network on on? Yeah, Google turns that on by default now, and just the basic thing you need to know about that is that they’re spending your money on crappy little third party websites and showing your ads there, and you’re getting bogus traffic, like there’s a ridiculous amount of the traffic on third party sites. Yes, when you don’t uncheck that button, that is a total waste. It’s robot traffic. It’s click fraud. We had,

Caleb Agee 16:43
we had one new campaign that went up for a week, and our client said, I’m getting double the leads all of a sudden. Why? What’s going on? But they’re not picking up, or they’re not available, or they never filled out. The thing we found that button was on, turned it off. Yeah, that was before Google told people they were doing Yeah, they literally snuggly turned it on by default, and we found it very quickly. But don’t get caught. You do not

Brandon Welch 17:10
want for clarity. When you say, what kind of campaigns Am I running? If they say Display, say, turn that crap off. You don’t want discovery. You don’t want smart you do not want performance Max run from those things. Okay, yeah,

Caleb Agee 17:20
here’s why. Let’s, let’s be really clear about this. When you’re spending money on Google, you are expecting to get a lead from that today. Customer, it’s a day customer, as we would call it. So you’re looking for somebody with a high intent that searched for the service you provide. They searched for attorney near me, or they searched for probably means they want an attorney, an attorney, and so you’re expecting that they have a high intent click. They’re going to click on your ad hopefully, and then they’re going to go to your landing page and convert. All of these others are actually tomorrow marketing efforts when you’re running display campaigns across games and recipe websites and all of these other things, which is what performance Max shows up in Gmail, it shows up in YouTube, all these other things,

Brandon Welch 18:06
some random it’s a random assortment. It’s

Caleb Agee 18:09
a it’s a random, yeah, and those are broad impression based medias. They’re actually not even caught pay per click. They’re actually based on the volume of the impressions you get. We are looking for high intent search leads, and if that’s not what you’re getting from these other campaigns, you’re in trouble. But

Brandon Welch 18:29
here’s what will happen, especially on your more like copy paste type ad agencies, if you’re paying for some package, what’s going to happen is your guy’s going to come, he’s going to look at all these impressions and clicks, and you’re going to go, Okay, what does that mean? He’s going, Oh, it’s really good boss. You know, I got, I got you 400,000 you know, impressions, and 82 clicks, or whatever. And you click the rates, and it’s like, guess what? A lot of those are fake, because they were on Ask yourself, when you’re searching for a barbecue recipe, do you really want to see an ad about a window company? Is that the time and place you’re going to devote attention to that? No, it’s not, and it’s not intrusive enough that it’s going to earn your attention. You’re going to scroll right past it. Yeah, it’s not going to equal that tomorrow. Impression that is good in other types of medias and broadcasts and things like that, yes. But the idea that you’re branded just because you had some random ads thrown everywhere, it just doesn’t add up. Yep. So you want to make sure those are off, which leads

Caleb Agee 19:20
perfectly into our our next and final point, which is, what is your cost per lead or or per opportunity? So we want to know this is $1 value. It is very simple to find if you’re using Google, Facebook, media, with a dashboard target.

Brandon Welch 19:37
Let’s be clear, don’t ask what your cost per lead is on other types of media, because they’re used for different things. That’s, that’s, I’m talking broadcast and print and billboards. That’s a, that’s a useless question in that environment, because those medias are not meant for lead generation, correct? They’re not meant for activation. They’re meant for priming people.

Caleb Agee 19:58
But when we’re running a just like. We just told you you were running local services, ads and Google ads. Yes, Google search campaign. You should look at that Google search campaign and say, What is my cost per lead

Brandon Welch 20:09
in that environment? The only possible way to measure it is to ask that, what did we spend and how many opportunities did it generate us? Because there is no such thing as a long term branding effect from a Google ad. It only shows up when somebody’s looking for it and they forget about it. It’s a snippet of text that’s out of their mind, and three minutes after they searched it,

Caleb Agee 20:27
yep, so you’re looking for that number, it’s going to be, I spent $2,000 I got 20 leads. Cost per lead is $100 yes, that’s it. And, man, that I think

Brandon Welch 20:39
most of you understand that that’s what you should be asking. And the reason we just threw rocks at all these other display and all that stuff is that that’s not a good way to measure those but on search and on targeted Facebook, where they’re lead generation campaigns, we’re gonna give you some ways here in just a second to like. If it’s not what you want it to be, start asking a couple deeper questions. But if your agency can’t just tell you, like, literally off the top of your head, like, in my clients sphere, if they called me up right now, I’ve looked at that number in the last week or two for every single one of my clients. And I’m not even the guy here that does that really anymore. I just, like, I know that as their consultant, and I know when it’s going up, and we have alerts that tell us when it’s high and all that sort of stuff. And so if you’re if your guy or gal isn’t telling you that, you need to reset that partnership, and you just say, Okay, I need, I need to be very clear with you about something. I need to tell you that I pay you to be a steward of the transactional dollars that I’m spending online. And it’s really concerning to me when you don’t know with, you know, pretty quick access, like they might have to look it up for a second, but it’s really concerning to me when you don’t know that what I’m paying you is producing a result for me that I can go, in turn make the money to pay you. Yep. So I need you to care about that more, yeah. And I need you to know that number When I ask you. And

Caleb Agee 21:57
I think hopefully it’s clear we have, we’ve done some other episodes, and we’re gonna work on this even more. But if I’m making up just for round numbers, $100 cost per lead, if that’s what you’re getting, you need to do the math to see that when that lead makes it through your appointments, your no show rate and your close rate, and then you compare that to your average value of a customer, yes, that that makes money for you, that that’s profitable. And so you want to make sure that that number’s in the range that I’m making money on this when it happens. And so yeah,

Brandon Welch 22:30
we have another episode on that called How to get more sales with math, yes, messaging and math, yeah. And basically, this is basic math. But if you’re paying $100 a lead, and you only sell one out of 10 of those. You’re paying $1,000 to get a customer. Is that okay with you? You’re selling a $30,000 solar system, it probably is. You’re selling a $15,000 roof, it probably is. If you’re selling $1,000 barbecue grill, it probably isn’t. Yeah. So what? Yeah. So based level, if

Caleb Agee 22:57
you can get it to a place where it is profitable, throw as much money into that media as you can, turn that knob

Brandon Welch 23:02
up, and that’s that’s harder and harder to do right now, but, yeah, very, very, very possible. So let’s review the four questions, and then we’re going to tell you what you can do to improve the result once you’re sure that your agency knows what they’re doing. Yeah. So review those four questions. Question number one was, how

Caleb Agee 23:18
many different things are we doing? Question number two, number two was, what is my actual budget or spend that’s going to each media question number three, what kind of campaigns Am I running? Question number four, what is my cost per lead

Brandon Welch 23:32
or opportunity? Okay, you’re gonna find out if you guys are popping the rag on you or if they are actually have some substance to their strategy, yeah, now let’s go back through those. So if that’s you know, that’s all you needed to know. Is the questions to ask. Great. Have a good day, and we’ll see you next time. We’ll see you next time. Click Like and Subscribe, forward it to a friend. But if you’d like to know just a little bit deeper knowledge,

Caleb Agee 23:59
or you’re not sure if you like the answers you’re getting from those questions. I’m

Brandon Welch 24:03
thinking of my least savvy, least like digital, hungry for knowledge, person I consult, and the answers I’m about to give I’ve written to where even that person who I love and adore could, yes, use this information. So I’m not going to nerd out on you totally, but let’s just say,

Caleb Agee 24:26
let’s, let’s talk about services. If you have too many services, think about your agency, and literally the service level they can provide for the dollars that you’re paying. So if they’re, if you’re paying them $500 a month, and they’re offering to do five services throughout the month for you. Let’s look at that objectively and say, Can they effectively manage Google ads, SEO, website, whatever else, ping pong, and I’m just making up things now. But can they effectively manage each of those things for you?

Brandon Welch 24:57
For that, we. We talked to a guy that was paying his agency like, $1,200 a month, fine, grit, fine, fine fee, yep, but they were claiming they were doing like, five or six different things for them, and I’m like, and one of those was SEO, by the way, huge red flag. If you’re paying 345, $100 for SEO, they do not literally have the time to do anything that works in SEO right now. Yeah, there could have been an argument for that five or six years ago, but that’s an antiquated contract. They’re they’re clicking a button. Yeah, listen to last week’s episode. Let me just be clear, it cost money, good money, to do good SEO, and the bar is extremely, extremely high for things it should be. That’s Google’s entire model. You should not be able to pay a little money and affect organic results. So I’m talking to my guys that have got little dinky SEO contracts. We do SEO and be very, be very clear, but we say you can give me $500 and I can do a couple dinky little things, but it’s not going to make you happy, and then you’re gonna be

Caleb Agee 26:02
mad at me. Rather you happy. Put that in your Google budget or we’d rather. There are better ways to spend just $500 but if you have enough, that’s where it makes it and

Brandon Welch 26:11
practically, dude, if it’s SEO, you want to, you want a log of all the things they’re actually doing, they need to be creating some level of content for you. There could be a few months of work, I could argue that there’s some technical things that they’re doing, and let’s be clear, monitoring and just keeping an eye on it is worth something. But, and that’s what a lot of these little dinky SEO contracts are doing. They’re keeping an eye on your results, and then if that, if that’s the case, they need to be giving you a ranking report. Did we go up down or we stay the same last month? But if you’re going, Hey, I’m, I’m at the fifth or sixth rank down the page, and I want to get to, like, second or third Dude, you’re gonna have to do some heavy lifting and expect to pay good money for that. And I’m not saying it’s not worth it. I’m just saying don’t get dinked around. Okay, yep, so

Caleb Agee 26:55
the the other side of that is too many medias. Yes, we and we harped on this, actually a lot at the beginning of this. But if you are paying, if you’re paying a little bit to a lot of places, media mix is a myth, and

Brandon Welch 27:08
two or $300 to Yelp here there, by the way, Yelp is probably not worth your money. Yeah, it sorry, Yelp.

Caleb Agee 27:14
This is the hard thing that we have to say. But what you want

Brandon Welch 27:18
to do on Yelp, just for clarity, you want to get 10 or 15 good organic rankings that get you on the iPhone screen, on series search and then Yelp’s advertising is

Caleb Agee 27:28
irrelevant, yep. So do a really good job on Google first, and then fill that box and or Facebook. Do a really good job on that and just take it, we say, one glass at a time. Take that and optimize it. A lot of times, these agencies are throwing in a bunch of different medias to cover the fact whether they know it or not, to cover the fact that the first media has lackluster results. Yes, and we gotta, we gotta make sure that we’re not just buffering a bunch of half hearted efforts trying to do one wholehearted effort, two wholehearted efforts, and fill those glasses all the way to the

Brandon Welch 28:06
top. Yes, yeah. So I think we’ve said all we can say about that. But last thing I would leave you with, if you’re not spending a couple grand a month on the media, committed to it, just don’t do it. Save your money. Save it up and do it big. Don’t get dinked. There it is. Okay, what kind of campaigns Am I running that’s simple? Your you turn off, turn off performance Max. Put that little crappy amount of money that they’re probably spending on that, put it all into search, yep, search campaigns and LSAS you’re looking

Caleb Agee 28:36
for today customers. Advertise like you’re getting today. Customers. Okay,

Brandon Welch 28:41
last one, what do I do about a high cost per lead? Yeah, let’s say, let’s say you do have that dialog with your agency. Let’s say they know, you know, by the way, like you could have a profitable lead cost on your end, you need to be knowing what’s the quality of those what percentage are turning into appointments, what percentage of those appointments are turned appointments are turning into sales? Divide that all out and figure out if I had $100 lead and half of them convert to appointments, then I have a $200 cost per appointment, and if half of those turn into sales, I have a $400 cost per sale. And if that’s acceptable within my profit margins, good. Now, I know nothing’s on fire, but let’s just say I want to improve it. I want to say, Mr. Ad Manager, how do I get my, you know, cost per lead from 100 down to 95 Yeah, or 100 down to 90 right? Yeah. Here are the things you want to ask. And I would throw red flags if you ask these two questions and your and your digital media person can’t produce a fluid answer. You got a problem. Most important question, what is my conversion rate on my landing page? It’s the biggest leverage I have. Yes, I just said a fancy term, conversion rate that just simply means what rate of what percentage rate of the people that. Visit my page are turning into a phone call or a form fill. Okay, so if I got 100 visits, how many of them turned into a lead, either via a form fill or the my phone call, my phone rang? Yep, they can track that. If they’re not fire them, you can track that on your end and verify because you know how many dadgum leads you went on, right? So what is an acceptable conversion rate? If you’re in the three to 5% conversion rate from like Google campaigns, yeah, you’re probably okay, and you’re probably within average, like the average in the industry is, like 3.7 or something like that. Okay, that is good, possibly profitable, but not great. But you know, you’re not on fire, yep. Below three, you got problems. You can improve that. And practically what you’re doing about that, you need to work on the structure of your landing page. It’s about words and offers and clarity of next steps, and we did an episode on how to get more leads without spending $1 on advertising. All about conversion rates and landing pages. You should go check that out. Nate’s going to put the link to that episode in the comments of the podcast, but practically, you got work to do on that landing page. Experience, okay? I bought a visit. I paid for a click to get here. Now, what happens, and if, if you are just saying your local roofing company since 1982 and you’re just, you know, talking all about you, you you and you’re not making you’re not answering questions that the customer has, you got problems, and that’s you need somebody. That’s what I said earlier. You need a marketer, not a media buyer. You need somebody who understands language and persuading customers and what people are looking for online.

Caleb Agee 31:54
Anybody can get you website traffic? Yeah, literally, anybody. You could do that today. You could get yourself website traffic. Yep, anybody can do that, but turning it into an opportunity, in one hour, you could have be paying for traffic. Yep, the difference, a marketer can turn that into an opportunity for you to get some new business. What

Brandon Welch 32:12
kind of traffic is it? And can you serve that traffic enough to where that they can pay you? Yep, right? They’re valuable. So conversion rate, if you’re going, okay, my cost per leads 100 bucks, or maybe my cost per lead is really high, the first question, what’s my conversion rate? And if they say anything below three, you’re like, Okay, you need to spend some time improving the

Caleb Agee 32:31
quality actually, before the conversion rate question, when you hear your cost per lead number, you need to ask, what was it last month? And what was it last year? Yes, same time period exactly. You need to see the trend, because there is seasonality, there’s seasonality and interest, there’s there’s also you want to see the trend as far as is that good, bad or about the same, up, down, about the same, yeah,

Brandon Welch 32:54
for clarity. But even anything below a three, even on a bad season, sure you got problems, yeah. So, but it could be really high in spring and a little bit lower in summer, because people are in consideration mode, not buying mode. But dude, three, three is your floor. So with that,

Caleb Agee 33:15
if they can’t tell you that,

Brandon Welch 33:19
send them this podcast would be a great idea, and then maybe start looking for somebody who is a little bit more pro in the messaging and landing page experience department. Second question you can ask, this is getting nerdy, but if you’re going, okay, man, I’ve got a good landing page. I know I do. I’ve got a good guy that knows my customer well, and I’ve got a good, you know, system that has worked in the past, but my cost per lead just keeps going up. A good question to ask is, what’s my cost per click? And cost per clicks are really useful to understand trends. There’s not necessarily an objective, good cost per click or bad cost per click, but if all other things are the same and are in, you know, in that five plus range conversion, and, you know, I’ve got all the other things checked, and your lead cost is really high, it’s probably your cost per click, meaning the media like Google is starting to charge you double, or even triple, I’ve seen for the same visitor, yep, supply and demand. There’s fewer people searching for a lot of categories. Google had to get more money because to please their shareholders, so they started jacking up the price per click

Caleb Agee 34:33
and or competitors showing up into the into your space, driving up the cost. I

Brandon Welch 34:38
do not have, I don’t think a single account right now that is paying a lower cost per click than they were last year. It’s almost all higher. Yeah, objectively now, there’s ways we’re combating that with better conversion rates and branded like if people are searching their name, like our guys that are on TV, overall, they have lower cost per click because they’re people are searching their name, which is a. Be cheaper click, yeah, but like, I’m talking your category term, window replacement, Atlanta, that’s twice as much as it was a year ago. Yeah.

Caleb Agee 35:06
What was the the stat we saw digitalmarketer.com was saying 200% 198%

Brandon Welch 35:14
is the year over year average for

Caleb Agee 35:16
Google’s cost per click, or no, as C was, CPC, CPC, right? Cost per click? Yeah, yeah. So,

Brandon Welch 35:23
so you’re paying double unless other things in your system changed meaning, unless your marketing got better, your language on your website got better, you’re paying double the click and you’re getting the same result. You double dragged budget for half, you know? So you should be asking some questions about you should be asking some questions. So, questions. This is why our phones are ringing. People are reaching out because they’ve heard the podcast, they’ve read our books. They’re aware that we’re the guys going stop wasting weight on advertising. And so this is why we’re getting this why we built this episode. So those are your four questions. Anything further than that, and if it’s just convoluted and you’re not getting clear answers. Man, I would, I would start looking for other partners. I would and Megan, or anybody on our team here would be happy to have a conversation with you about just doing an audit and giving you some high level advice. And I will tell you, like, even in the last week, there’s people I’ve told, like, stay with your agency. Ask them these questions, manage them better. And because there’s, there’s something there, we will be the first to tell you if that’s the case. Yeah, there are some I’m like, I’m sorry that that happened to you. Yeah, you know, I don’t see a skill set there that’s going to improve. So, yeah, um, just keep thinking

Caleb Agee 36:34
about how we’re going to sign this episode off. Yeah, marketers who can’t teach you why? Yeah, isn’t that? Are just fancy. That’s what we say, isn’t it? We sell a guy, we say it every, every time. And you need to be looking for marketing partners who can teach you why your numbers look like they do.

Brandon Welch 36:49
That’s exactly right. Yeah. It’s not that you need to know how to build the clock, but they needed to tell you what the time is, and you need to need to know how to read the time. Yeah, yeah. It’s powerful. Yeah. Thank you so much for listening. I hope this was helpful to you. If you know anybody that’s just been, you know, complaining about their marketing, send this to them. Yeah? Like our gift like this is why we put this in the world. We don’t want anybody struggling with this. We want everybody to be better marketers. We want you to be better growing your company so you can do all these fun, wild, awesome things in your community and for your employees. And I truly believe small business can save the world, yeah, and so that’s why we do this. That’s why we come back here every Monday to answer your real life marketing questions, because marketers who can’t teach you why

Caleb Agee 37:32
are just a fancy lot. Have a great day.