Disclaimer: This transcript was auto-generated using AI-powered software. Please excuse any typos or grammatical errors.

To listen to this podcast episode, visit Ep 49: Convert to Conversion Campaigns for More Conversions.

Kevin Oakley 00:12

Welcome to Market Proof Marketing the weekly podcast from the marketing minds of Do you convert.com or we talk about the current state of all things digital and how they impact Home Builders and developers around the globe. We’re not here to sell you. We’re here to help you and to try and elevate the conversation. I’m Kevin Oakley and with me today, as always, is the ad Dr. Andrew we are here. This is a number 49 I think he’s getting way too high for me to count. So this is 49 maybe it’s 50 I think it’s 49. Well, no, I see cuz we got a special guest for episode.

Andrew Peek 00:39

Oh, yeah. That’s right. I forgot the big bio. That’s a big number. 50 times say an hour each a lot of time. Wow. Some might say too much time. Too much time too much time on your hands and Becca’s here this week and we have some awesome stuff to talk about breaking news and search like the news, breaking news soundbite and everything

Kevin Oakley 00:57

yeah, we’ll get that that’s gonna be kind of newsflash, all of the show is this breaking news. So actually, I’m gonna Well, let’s do storytime first. As always, we don’t want to break tradition just because we got some highs. And I’ll I’ll get started. So I just this is an interesting story to me, because I’d never done the math on this before. We had a builder that we work with who has one particular community that they’re struggling with, it’s really more of a product issue, marketing and sales, everyone’s in kind of agreement. But at the end of the day, they still want marketing to solve it products a little overpriced, and they’ve already spent more on this one neighborhood than all the rest of the division combined. And things still are not moving quite the way they want it. So one of the things that happened was someone on the team started doing a Google search and notice that the ad for Google wasn’t showing up as often as they might like it to so they reached out and so I crunched some numbers. And this is totally not 100% accurate, but it’s a good guesstimate for this one builder in one market and it’s one of the let’s just say top 15 competitive markets in the country. Maybe top 10 even but if they wanted to show up every time that someone in their own geographic area typed in any of the keywords in their current Google Ad account and show up in first place and remember the way that you convert does paid search the word new 98% of time has to be in there. So this is for new construction only to show up at the top of that search. It would require them to spend $88,000 in the month of February, which is a shorter month, a

Andrew Peek 02:25

few dollars.

Kevin Oakley 02:27

dollars. Okay, so you know, I had another conversation later someone else and you know, if you do the math on that, let’s say there’s 20 larger builders in that market Google makes a lot of money off paid search. It’s kind of a cool story, bro. But they do they make a ton of money off paid search. And here’s the difference that I The reason I find this so interesting is when times were tough in the previous cycle builders tried to spend more money at first on print and everything else that they were doing back in 2007 2008 2009. And it didn’t work. So they stopped doing it and they either cut back on their budgets or they pivoted like We did at heartland over to digital because it was working. What’s different about this time and I’ve said this before, but I just want to reiterate it. What’s different this time is when things get tough builders are going to do the same thing. And we’re seeing that they’re spending more on digital. But here’s the kicker digital will always still work as long as it’s set up the right way targeting the right people, and there’s anyone in the marketplace that’s going to be your best way to reach them and get the action that you want to occur. And so instead of being this pattern of try that doesn’t work stop or adjust. What happens is try it it works but it gets more expensive. And the big builders say, Well guess we got to pay more and they just push the money down that way. Whereas the smaller builder you’re in a much trickier spot now, as as this cycle comes and thankfully we’re not in a full on, you know, decline anywhere really in the country. That would be really interesting if it happened right now, because so many things are changing. I think small players could still make it work but just the craziness of the amount of budget or spend that you would have to do in order to get a similar reach or Exposure compared to just a couple years ago that that just seen that number made it all much, much more real me. So I wanted to share that story.

Andrew Peek 04:07

And that’s that it’s crazy, I’d say for that market. Yeah, it’s like triple the cost from like a couple years ago, right? Yeah, like, I’m just saying about like a cost per click, and I’m sure there’s more available search volume. Now those words unsavory

Kevin Oakley 04:17

you would think but also, as we’ve talked about, before searches getting split, not just in Google, but it is going straight to maps or straight to YouTube or straight to social where you’re asking people for their advice, or looking people up there. So it’s a it’s just what works works. It’s just going to become more expensive. As more people realize that works. Or in these auction based platforms like Google and Facebook, you’re just gonna pay more for it. Unless you can find a better way to do it. See, I guess it all does tie back. Yeah. Our big news

Andrew Peek 04:46

I’m gonna say that’s

Kevin Oakley 04:48

awesome story. Becca, what do you got?

Becca Thomas 04:50

Well, this week, I was working with builder partner to set up some social ads and landing page to increase traffic to one of their properties. communities, and they looped in the LLC to let them know what was going on. So they could adjust any processes and follow up on there. And then as a result, they ended up with about 70. Leads this week. So that again, I broke up seven or 70. We last week. Yeah, I

Kevin Oakley 05:18

didn’t really break up. I just I wanted to hear it again.

Andrew Peek 05:21

You said it’s like another 70. No big deal. There’s another 79

Becca Thomas 05:26

to 70. So I mean, that’s a lot of a lot of work for those OSC s and you got to make sure that they know what’s coming down the pipeline.

Kevin Oakley 05:34

Amen. Yeah. And most of the time, that unfortunately, doesn’t happen. And yeah, an extra 70 leads in a week without having a good process that’s efficient for you set up to respond to that or just even mentally know, it’s knowing it’s coming. Yeah, preparing for it. Yeah, that’s a big deal. I thought 10

Andrew Peek 05:48

a day. That’s a lot of new people. 10 a day kind of similar

Kevin Oakley 05:50

to how we look at email marketing, where with our builder partners, we help a lot of them develop the email templates that go out but we never ever, ever hit the button to hit send Because the OSC is going to have to should be ready to be able to respond to this little mini wave of people that’s likely to go to the site whether that means may in the chat be paired for a couple extra phone calls. You know they just you want to send that email out when they’re prepared to respond right

Andrew Peek 06:14

make sure they’ve eat make sure they got their coffee it’s in the email phones will blow up

06:18

Yeah, you wanna you want to make an

Becca Thomas 06:20

angry No,

Kevin Oakley 06:22

you want to make an OSC not too happy send out a mass mail to your entire database on their drive home from work on Friday. Yeah, that’s not a great way to start the weekend. I’m not good now. Andrew, how are you? Yeah sorry time this

Andrew Peek 06:35

Yeah, so quick little update on the house. We are we had our pre drywall walkthrough with our builder so awesome. It was really we haven’t gone upstairs is two story home we haven’t gone upstairs yet. So actually going upstairs like this is awesome. Like this feels like a house. Here’s our bedroom. We could no picture of it already. Here’s the loft. Here’s all these rooms super exciting. We also had a third party inspection the following day. My wife mainly sheets like Hey, want to do this. She’s heard stories. Just talking to people yeah, how you should really do this, which is interesting. builders are scary. So I’m like, Sure, let’s do it, like make her happy. Yeah, sounds good. How much is it? Oh, it’s gonna be like, it’s not much money at all. Yeah, nothing, not not a big deal. Okay, find someone. And so she found them someone through our realtor who sold her home. And this inspector has worked with our builder before. So he was already set up with insurance and all the documentation so that he could go on to the job site and be legitimate. So he got there took a very short time, and he only found one thing wrong. So that’s good. And it was such a minimal thing. I mean, I said aloud, it’s super important. But visually you’re like, that’s like very small. There’s a hurricane strap, which connects the trust to the framing little piece of metal like 10 inches long by two inches wide. And when they put a frame up on the walls, the nail on the other side, you know, pushed out the strap on the on the truss on top, if that makes any sense. So like this tiny little thing that he’s made, he’s like, that’s it. They’re doing awesome. And he complimented the builder. He talked to that Superintendent on site. So they got along and it was good. Yeah, so it’s real positive. We’re excited drywall starts on Monday. So it’s gonna turn into something real here that so there’s something

Kevin Oakley 07:58

magical about working for Do You Convert is apparently your construction process goes incredibly smoothly like two to four to here

Andrew Peek 08:08

I think yeah we started out a little a little bumpy but you know who knows and then yeah it’s been it’s been good so far

Kevin Oakley 08:14

I want to circle back to on your guys’s experience in the pre drywall meeting was it pretty much just a checklist of this is where it should be or was there some education involved what talk to me about just a little bit more about that experience?

Andrew Peek 08:27

Yeah, so he he went through and he did a good job of not selling he went through all the efficiency that I guess there’s a lot more to the story so I’m glad you pulled out all the things that KBs doing to make the home efficient especially down here in Florida we could spend a lot of money on our cooling during really all year round except for January February, so he showed those things while going through the house going okay, here’s the outlets here. Here’s the one you added here’s all the you know extra lights they added in the kitchen. That’s thanks to you Mr. Kevin. You’re like hey you need to add as many looking never have too

Kevin Oakley 08:55

many lights in the kitchen. So I think no such thing I think we added like

Andrew Peek 08:58

home I think was closed Attend total across the whole house. Oh, I’m more expensive than your third party Inspector, or there you go. Yeah, that’s what I’m blaming you and Lindsey the whole time during like, we really need that. I’m like, Yes, there’s only two like we need or like, doesn’t that make sense? Or there’s only one like, we need like another one like or feet that way. And they have they pick it and center and everything was great. So we went for that. And we went through all the Yeah, I guess that was every day. Okay. So contracts, like taped to the windows, the selection contracts. So they’re don’t check, check, check. We review that with them. Yeah, awesome.

Kevin Oakley 09:27

Well, I mean, how much how much more education they do for you during the final walkthrough? Yes, usually, slash sometimes that’s what builders use to draw your attention away from please don’t put blue tape there or just ignore you know, like, let me show you where your shutoff valves are and all those other things, but I imagine that’ll come later. Sure. Becca, how about you? Did they do much education during your walkthrough?

Becca Thomas 09:47

No. It was basically a checklist of all the options that we selected, making sure they’re all in house along with all the electrical options and just making sure everything was where it needs. Make which of course it was. So it was pretty easy but they must know you work for deconversion So

Kevin Oakley 10:06

one last question for both of you that and what’s one thing that they could have done to make your experience at the pre drywall meeting better slash something you’d want to talk about the others at this as

Becca Thomas 10:16

well I would say we noticed we forgot two things. One of them is escaping me right now but the other is floor outlets in our gigantic living room. So as of right now, we don’t really have any place to plug any floor lamps in and I think it would have been nicer earlier on if when we were going through the contract prep process if they had said hey, there’s no floor outlets in the in the living room. Do you want to add one because when we got to be pre drywall, my husband was like, there’s no outlet. Do we want to put one in I was like, well, we’re on a crawlspace and the builder hopped in, he’s like, well, if you do it now it’s a change fee plus this plus that so you better off today. Add it afterwards, because it’ll slow down construction. So I think if they had moved that earlier, we probably wouldn’t have had that one hiccup

Kevin Oakley 11:08

got it. Yeah, that’s definitely something on the checklist of salesperson is never going to know to remind you or designs to you or wherever you made that selection unless they get that feedback. So that’s the one good thing about it is since we’re in the business, we understand that it wasn’t an intentional mistake, but it is good feedback to give salespeople are designed to do folks when those things happen, not to blame them, but just to say, Oh, yeah, you know, next time might want to remind people because like, my other tip that I always tell everyone is put a switched outlet wherever you want your Christmas tree to go, because then you don’t have to have a button to push or reach under the tree to unplug every night. Now you just got to turn the switch. You know,

Andrew Peek 11:42

that’s a really good idea.

Kevin Oakley 11:43

But I would never have known that if someone who wasn’t in the business for 15 years didn’t tell me that right. There’s there’s no checklist to say. Make sure make sure that’s in your home. That’s

Andrew Peek 11:52

I don’t have any specific things for the builder. But I’d say in general, just things that can reduce any possible negative Stories after because, you know, we were talking I think we had every drywall I talked like rebuild report. But Lindsay Oh gosh, she who knows 2030? I don’t know, she knows everybody. And like, so we met our neighbors leaving. They’re like, are you neighbors for like, yeah, how are you? And she somehow knew, like half the people we met, but there’s like five of us out there. And they just had complaints about this or that. And none of them were like a issue. I was. And I afterwards, Lindsay, I’m like, no, that there was not like a concrete complaint about anything. It was just like, oh, that over there, they get this. We don’t hit that, that it was just negative talk. But they were certainly things that I think the builder communicated differently with those buyers. And it just so happened to those buyers all bought inventory, completed quick moving homes, and we’re building so our experience is different than theirs. And they kind of had this feeling like that we’re treated better. And we knew more, which we kind of do. I mean, we’ve had but yeah, you’ve said it right. Yeah. Right. And but they’re like all their things. Like they just weren’t aware. So they’re, you know, there’s some frustration already with them. And sure, I’m like, What is this and so if we were already negative, not happy? I’d imagine that that would even add more to it. Just the stories that we tell people like oh, how’s the house going? Well, you know, That’s good. But we talked to the neighbors, they got this going on. So we’re a little nervous, but I think it’s somewhat not that you can follow the conversations. But if there’s things that that builder do or a builder do, you’d have to prevent those issues from popping up. And I think that’s, that’s definitely worthwhile.

Kevin Oakley 13:12

I always we tried to come up with different ideas of something for the construction supervisor or project manager to give homeowners again, not not nothing big necessarily, but it back in the day, it might be a small like 30 picture leather photo album, with a couple pictures already of the construction process so far put in there and like the boss logo of the builder, or even something as silly as you know, here’s movie tickets or gift cards to the coffee shop around the street because I know you’re gonna want you’re gonna be driving by a lot and you know, get to know you’re there. You’re moving into just something small. But I think just going back to Caldi’s law of reciprocity, it never hurts to say thank you and it never hurts to give a small token of appreciation, especially because you don’t usually get that from the construction side. You might have gotten out on the sales end or we’ll get it later when you close but you don’t usually get something from construction. Very good yeah that’s a good idea yeah that’s a good idea or just something not specific to what you’re doing but just something that they could add to that experience to make it better

Andrew Peek 14:08

yeah interesting sure is something great if with material from the site not you know like make a name of like the last name like hey this came from a scrap piece of Dubai for but

Kevin Oakley 14:17

there are there are builders I think it’s part D in California someone encourages the homeowners to write their names or put a stamp or something like on some of the two by fours they’re going to get covered up by the drywall so it’s just kind of like a hidden secret now that you know is there no one else will that’s pretty much makes it personal, you know, and then dad picture document that somehow anyway, that was a that was a long video. All right, here we go into the news. We only have two news stories. And the first one’s not really even a real story but a tease of what’s to come our good friend Tim flake from glow hearth and home technologies sent over a report that he got done by we’ll just keep it secret from now. We’ll tell you all about it next week. But it does a much more thorough job of looking at the top 50 Home Builders by several different Mac metrics on social media and they looked at Facebook Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube report on the top 50 results for total engagement engagement per post reaction conversation and sharing slash amplification if we go back to the builder magazine article that started all this haha top 25 most liked builders on Facebook number one was l&r lead number two was Taylor Morrison. Number three was Clayton properties. And when we skip down here and their case to uncovering all channels, overall engagement per post, the villages came out number one followed by Bloomfield homes tried homes USA to laugh at the village. Right, they’ve got the time to day job, and they have those engagements were probably please stop sending me ads or whatever, but nowhere to be found in the top 15 are those top three companies as identified by the previous article now we’ll have more analysis of that. But it’s just interesting to see let’s look at most shared in terms of amplification content on social media habitat is number one entity, I think. Yeah, that’s Yeah, it does. There’s more story there, whether you’re in the new home market or not. Well, we’ll break that down in more detail we’ll have we’ll have it set up because it’s a massive document and enroll to send a link to it so you guys can check out the details but just wanted to tease that before we get into basically the only thing we’re gonna be talking about for the next who knows how long which is at Dr.

Andrew Peek 16:28

Facebook changes the rules for real estate ads, they actually changed it or a lot of ads, anything where you could really should not discriminate they are laying the law down, huh. So what does that even mean? So for builders, we will not be able to change the age that we target so it has to stay default 18 to 65 less, we cannot select male or female we have to say everybody all and then we also will no longer be able to target by zip code. And that also means what people got problem with that one, they could exclude zip codes, which isn’t too common. So we have to have at least 15 mile radius now, which is a big compared to what most people are probably running 50 miles. Yeah, I would think so. Yeah. Sounds Sounds a little frightening, right?

Kevin Oakley 17:08

There were lots of questions immediately when when we pulled this up back on my birthday, March 19. And we were just like, Okay, well, it’s being very specific about some of these things that it’s taking away. And of course, no way we should probably just start by saying obviously discrimination of any kind is not cool, not the right thing to do and nothing that we would ever have encouraged people to do in the past. However, the kind of the thing going through my mind because this conversation has come up several times over the last few years is well are we allowed to select different things like income or gender or age and here’s just the way that I’ve thought about it I still struggle with this is while I applaud making the changes to be to not let the bad people do bad things as easily totally get that mark. But every media by its very nature is targeting somebody right? And I go back to radio just because it’s the easiest if I advertise on heavy hard rock, probably not as powerful popular with certain racial and ethnic groups in the city, right? Whereas country music, right, there’s also there’s a certain demographic, a certain profile a certain audience that that station is designed to reach even geographically, right? If I do the public radio station here that has a much weaker signal, I know that I’m going to be targeting pretty much the downtown workers and city dwellers more so than the suburbs, because the signal is just not that good. The further out you go, all that’s floating through my head, I’m like, well, Andrew, we had to figure out very quickly is the things in the press release about no longer being able to target by age and this one, that one in particular, out of the gate, you’re like, what is what is the 55 plus community do if you know that it’s like it’s not age targeted? It’s age restricted? Only people over the age of 55 are allowed to buy and live here. Whoops, well, you’re gonna have you are now forced to show that ad to 18 year olds, they have grandparents hopefully.

18:54

And I love them and

Kevin Oakley 18:55

so there’s that and then the target by gender. It’s like okay, well, you know, that Makes sense, but at the same time, we all know that women drive like 98% of home buying decisions are influenced heavily and so is that discriminatory? Or just a best practice? Right? So that one you know, hey maybe women now get served a few less ads from real estate companies because they’re forced to show it to men and women but honestly, the the impact there is huge. It’s just it was slightly better. So when in doubt, we chose women but the target the zip code, one was the one that really got me concerned and that’s when I was like, okay, is are they saying zip codes as an example? Are they very specifically saying zip codes and so thankfully, we already had a pre scheduled call with our contact at Facebook who gave gave Andrew some additional insight email and that

Andrew Peek 19:40

one, the way she gave it to me was people so this applies to jobs. So employment credit, anything to do with finance, credit, not banking, like free check count, but apply for a loan. So those types of options and then housing and so she applied to me that credit offers were very worthy. They were those were the rule breakers. So whether it was for credit repair, which that would follow On me credit, or mortgages or shorter term loans, things like that were those people were the ones being naughty. So that was a real focus.

Kevin Oakley 20:07

And then it was exclusion if we’re gonna change this stuff, right?

Andrew Peek 20:10

And we just got looped into it, right? And it’s she did say it to us. It’s like, well, that’s all of our ads, but it’s ad specific. So it’s not necessarily it’s not account specific or business specific, these rules, which is super confusing to understand. But if you say house, even though an event is not nice, it’s great. You get really great we were trying to talk to her like we’re a bank, if they’re having a grand opening at a bank, and they had like pizza and all this stuff and food, whatever. Like they could technically run a two mile radius ad where it’s like coming out but if they were to say certain words in their ad a that would then get flagged as Reddit Reddit, did she so it gets a little weird. So I’m just like, okay, we’re just all housing. So let’s just be safe and not try to push the rules. Did she give you any insight in terms of how they’re going to go about with enforcement? Is it like three strikes rule or they’re going to warn you and then just don’t do it again? Or like how tough Did you get a sense of how tough they’re going to be? Yeah, she she did imply that their intent is not to Are those that are behaving and like very much everyone i’m sure listening here like it’s not a ad account disapproval or deactivated. But the ones that are very obvious on that they will pick up those people like maybe with had 10 disapprovals before and not disapprove like, oh, the link was bad or something like that but like they were clearly doing something they shouldn’t and their whole behaviors tracked on Facebook, obviously they’re looking at us differently than a personal account. So that’s it. She said it’s lenient they’re not looking to like kick people off of Facebook and not take their money.

Kevin Oakley 21:27

So it’d be more like the warning that you get when you have too much texting or add up to maybe not letting the ad run but you’re not going to get like you said your accounts not going to get shut off as long as you’re within that, like you’re clearly not intentionally doing something great,

Andrew Peek 21:41

right kind of like when we had was that last year after after Mark was after Mark Zuckerberg I talked about him like he’s one of my friends or something. Yeah, Mark, no big deal. I visit his house and I really took away the targeting options and which has the options and then first, they just had like a warning and it still ran but eventually the next step was like oh, that had you know the income or something like that in there or there a homeowner then the adjusted run and it was paused. You’re like what’s going on here? This is really weird. And then you look at it, those things, but I got that it’s gonna go that way. Like it’s just gonna be kind of soft like it fixed. Yeah, sure misbehave. So

Kevin Oakley 22:11

we’re gonna go into solution mode here in a minute. But I want to simmer a little bit more on the geographical stuff, because I just want to have a philosophical discussion. And we put this in the article, real estate is generally considered to be a local thing. Right? It all varies by locality. And to me 15 miles seems excessive. I agree. You guys agree.

Becca Thomas 22:30

That’s, I would agree, especially in an urban environment. Yeah. It’s huge. Like imagine New York, New York City

Andrew Peek 22:35

like one mile.

Becca Thomas 22:36

Yeah. Great. Yeah.

Kevin Oakley 22:38

So that’s where I just picture this kind of back and forth negotiation of like, how did this all go down? Because obviously, they were being asked to probably take away a lot more than they did. But you could imagine something be like, we’ll just make them target the entire Tampa DMA. Yeah, and that’s not really not that different than saying 15 mile radius, but the 50 mile radius gives you just that little bit of extra flexibility to say, well, we’re More East and Central Tampa than North yeah whatever and I’m sure people listening are like there’s divisions by road or bridges or things like that or the school districts are like those people don’t gotcha yeah that’s like that’s three minutes that way but like now like it’s not how it works well just similar to how you describe your life down there in Florida and Pittsburgh, you know, is the city of three rivers and a 15 mile radius is going to encompass like four different places that people will not drive to unless you put a gun to their head or they have to for work like I’m not going over there. That’s that’s another planet. Like literally people live their entire lives and never have gone to the other part of their city. That’s

Andrew Peek 23:34

Yeah, that’s here. If you get on the bridge to go to Tampa, and that will say it was a mistake. You missed the exit. You’re like, Oh, I’m on the bridge. It’s at least half an hour like to make that correction and get over the bridge in the back of this way back to the the land side. If there’s no traffic, if there’s no traffic, no accident, all the stuff I say devil’s advocate on this is maybe the geography targeting, because it has to depend on the technology of like, Where can we track that person that they’re actually located. Maybe it is good to have Have it opened up or set open a little bit like we think we’re getting all the people in, say a three mile radius. But really we’re missing out because the people maybe they’re over this way their phone connect to this Wi Fi or that tower and they’re physically located in the circle but their phone and what it tells Facebook is actually, you know, five minutes that way or five miles that way. So maybe there’s

Kevin Oakley 24:17

positive maybe I’m being i don’t think so i think i mean, like five g let’s let’s get I love us so much fun. Just go everywhere we want to go. That’s right. You know, five, five G, which is going to be amazing requires a tower to be located every 250 yards, I think or feet insane from each

Becca Thomas 24:33

other. So literally,

Kevin Oakley 24:34

I was talking to this guy that I know who’s pretty high up with Verizon, and he’s like, yeah, so we are developing streetlights for neighborhoods that have our beacon like built into the top of it because we’re literally gonna have to go multiple points in every neighborhood or dense urban areas. No problem. You’ll get 5g pretty quickly because there’s lots of big buildings and places to put it but in a residential scenario, that’s how many towers are required. So I don’t even know why. I really went into that just to say, even a one mile radius, like 123 miles, there’s a lot of towers in a one a three mile radius for cell service. That’s generally, you know, so I think you’re covered. But I also would sarcastically say to you, then you must be Mr. moneybags, because if 10 mile radius or 15 like in the old way of doing things you would be forced then to be spending a lot more money or just randomly targeting who knows who and spending significantly more so it is good to hear that you know, if you were doing an event

Andrew Peek 25:28

like an open house well, I guess out loud I’m like, how do we say house without saying house like because that’s where the ad the ad triggers the flag that hey, this is about housing like I remember like a couple months ago, right? It’s a warning that like this is about public security national security or something. I think it’s because you said house Yeah. Susan was more economical. Right. And so the the text triggers what it is so they could categorize it. Are they counting housing? Yeah, Home Home houses townhome? Yeah, like they I’m sure it’s like Google, they have the different type of match types for keyword and they have the what is related Yeah, which is something we don’t normally talk about much. But there’s got to be like, I need to test it. If you say certain words in your ad, will it perform better with the same type of hobbies that make any sense? So if I’m saying homes for sale and external sites very, I’m sure there’s some really smart work that scientists don’t know what it is like making sure that Facebook’s system really knows about what this ad is about, just like everything SEO or Google, will it perform better compared to face minimal text and just say home for sale. But if I say homes for sale in Tampa next to this close to that and really give it more context, it will find the right folder. I’m going to try that and see if I could actually prove anything.

Kevin Oakley 26:32

All right, well, let’s take a quick break. And then when we come back, we’re going to dive into conversion campaigns, which are the solution to these changes, but also just the best thing to be doing anyway. And we know a lot of you aren’t so if you’re home builder, or because we know a lot of you are listening Hello ad agencies and folks doing this for other people. If you’re like crap, we’re worried about what we’re going to do join us right after the break and we’re going to

Andrew Peek 26:54

break it all down. Right back

Kevin Oakley 27:09

Okay, we’re back. Everyone’s got a refill on their coffee and tea and whatever else. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to break down exactly what conversion campaigns are. They’re not specific to Facebook and Instagram, but they are the solution for the problem of Holy cow. They just took away more targeting options for me. And now am I going to have to spend more money get lower quality traffic? What’s going to happen? They are the answer, but we kind of just want to break down specifically what they are, how they work what’s required and answer some common questions or confusing points that are likely to get you stuck. So let’s hop in and we kind of tried to break these down into three Kadett main categories, which is what’s in it for me like why bother doing this? What’s required? How do you make them happen? How do you how do you get conversion campaigns set up? And then very specifics, how do I do different pieces that like said answer common questions. So let’s start in with what’s in it for me why It sounds like work Andrew Why bother doing this? We’re gonna change stuff I know

Andrew Peek 28:04

what’s what’s in it. So get techie let’s get techie what we’ve seen across I don’t know, I was trying to think of how many 300 400 plus conversion campaigns Yeah, there’s a lot over the ad for a while now all pretty much always higher quality traffic, but the same or less money, which is super more conversions. So more leads, I think I get IVs to talk about one example or day like the next week, it was like two and a half times more leads from the same spend and all that change was the conversion switching to conversion campaigns. So that’s that’s pretty cool. Branding to the right audience, regardless of the clicks, which that one is fun.

Kevin Oakley 28:36

So it’s just targeting people so well, using this method that Yeah, even the ones who don’t click are the right ones to be exposed to it. So even though we just talked last week about branding, kind of in depth and our feelings on it, in this case, it’s it’s the free prize inside it’s the cherry on top of Wow, I’m still sending the creative that I want to the right people.

Andrew Peek 28:54

Right and then of course, but started this conversation was staying compliant with current and probably upcoming Rules, which I’m sure there will be, there’s always something up. So basically our friendly Facebook wants us to use.

Kevin Oakley 29:04

Yeah. So twice the amount of leads and or you know, twice the amount of traffic but still getting it for the same total spend that sounds like it’s probably worth a few hours, maybe even of your time to make these adjustments and get things set up.

Andrew Peek 29:19

With a month of time,

Kevin Oakley 29:20

you may or may not be able to do all this on your own. It depends on how much access you have to your own site and your back end, you might have to work partners, but generally speaking, a couple hours should should get you there if you’re generally already familiar with help business manager and every work. So Becca, give us a quick overview of kind of what’s required. And then we’ll dive into them a little bit more sharing need to get this stuff set up. So

Becca Thomas 29:42

first, we need the pixel to be installed on your website. Got

Kevin Oakley 29:48

it? And that’s Facebook specific, right? Yeah, it’s not everything’s going to necessarily use a pixel.

Becca Thomas 29:53

Yeah. So you have to grab your pixel from Facebook and send it over to your web developer if you don’t have access to it. Traffic code in the header yourself.

Kevin Oakley 30:02

And that’s gonna go on,

Becca Thomas 30:03

it’s gonna go in your website in the header. So that’s every page.

Andrew Peek 30:06

Yeah. So it’s, it’s just like the analytics tag it is it’s

Becca Thomas 30:10

Yeah. And it can either go above or below the analytics tag, it doesn’t matter.

Kevin Oakley 30:14

If you’re using Tag Manager, which was part of our question of the week last week, then this is one of those scenarios that we talked about if you have access to your tag manager account, you may be able to drop in this code without having to say excuse me, web developer can you please add this for me? So that

Andrew Peek 30:28

should take like a minute if you had Google Tag Manager access so take you know 30 seconds Yep. Though your maybe developer a couple minutes so don’t let them give you a hard time about

Kevin Oakley 30:36

it sounds sounds scary. sounds hard. It like Andrews are like 15 seconds of someone’s time, who knows what they’re doing to drop that? Alright, and then what other what else we need, then

Becca Thomas 30:45

you have to define the conversion goal within Facebook so they don’t just automatically pick them. You have to tell Facebook what you want to track define your custom conversion, and then the minimum number of conversions in order to build Allow the AI to optimize leads.

Andrew Peek 31:03

That’s like that was like, I feel like it changes depended does

Kevin Oakley 31:06

change. I mean, we’ve heard different numbers, but generally like 200 ish conversions has to occur in a month’s time. Yes

Andrew Peek 31:13

and a month. Yeah, ideal. So that’s there’s that ideal word. So it’s like, well, right? If it’s less, what if it’s more and

Kevin Oakley 31:19

more is better and gives more data for the AI to analyze. But when we think about leads, and when you talk about defining a conversion goal, the first thing everyone’s gonna think of is, oh, I want a lead. And that’s great if you have 200 form completions in a month form completions, right everyone? Well, not everyone. A lot of people are going to have 200 leads a month from larger builders, but they’re going to come from the phone from text message, chat from Zillow, Trulia from your home source or like all the different places are coming in. You need 200 form completions going to your online sales team in order for it to really have good data because we’ve Well, let’s let’s let’s go right into it. Andrew, we have folks so we’ve been able to say that conversion goal is a lead a form fill on the builders website. on social media traffic yeah and it’s worked out I would say splendidly. I mean you’re getting crazy low we’re not going to say the amount but crazy low cost per form completion on the builders site which is dramatically different than saying really cheap Facebook lead ad forms where they’re submitting information from Facebook right? Yes leads are spending like I think last week I looked at it about four minutes on the site on average before they before they convert right so now 10 seconds on pace totally different level of quality it’s not automatically being filled in right and so but that one works great and then you did another test small dollar amount with another builder who just just kind of see like Okay, do we really need 200 and it didn’t turn out so well

Andrew Peek 32:38

no, it was terrible. Like what like this is garbage what is happening here but part of that is because we so we use conversion campaigns all the time for everything for coming soon communities a landing page because the conversion rate is so high and leads start coming in quickly. It works well even though there’s not that many leads, because their success I think there’s nowhere

Kevin Oakley 32:58

else there’s nothing else for you to do.

Andrew Peek 33:00

Correct there’s so they’re like, my theory it is not like Facebook tells us this stuff if Facebook starts to get leads quickly the first day say for which comments in community that’s not that’s not too many, but there’s four, they could very quickly keep them going. But if they get for over a 72 hour period, Facebook has been guessing for 72 hours trying to by guessing but they got 100 people on the first day no one turned into leave feedback that Yeah, feedback. Yeah. So I think there’s this momentum thing that has to happen for the AI to understand the right people. So yeah, I was I was disappointed a little bit. Yeah, man. I’m not the doctor anymore. Am I I’ve changed my name. But the first thing I’m like, this thing is ridiculous. Like, this is like insane how well it was was working.

Kevin Oakley 33:38

Yeah, that’s pretty cool. So for those of you who don’t have 200 form completions in a month, when we go back up a step to define your conversion goal that can’t shouldn’t be a lead on a form completion. It needs to be something else,

Becca Thomas 33:50

something less specific targeting and you know, we’ve used in the past,

Kevin Oakley 33:54

it’s just you have to think back to yourself and say what activities defined But I think is a good unit of traffic, even if they don’t fill out a form. What are the Or another way? Maybe the things that lead up to? Yeah, exactly we can. So it’s not a secret, you can talk about

Becca Thomas 34:09

it, okay? So like if somebody’s searching on the page for a home or looking at an inventory home or a plan or things like that

Kevin Oakley 34:17

could be specific pages could be the amount of pages could be me the amount of time there’s lots of different things depending on the platform that you can choose as a as a different conversion. Those of you familiar with analytic conversions. It’s a similar idea, you can create anything you want to to be an analytic conversion or a goal. And in that world, we say pageviews, not a conversion. We want actual leads coming from the site via form completion, phone call, text, message, chat, etc. But when you’re talking about training, the artificial intelligence of these different platforms, it is good to start training on what are these behaviors that signal this person may If not now, at some point soon be likely to convert and then the last step that’s required is just a whole lot of trust, but verify, right? We can’t just set it up. Forget it, not the Ronco food dehydrator. And it is smart, but it’s smart based upon what we’re telling it to do. So we may not be telling it to do something very smart, because we want to just test something or try something. But we also might just be wrong in general. And so you have to especially early on, really watch it closely, because it can do some things that are a little bit questionable. But once you once you’re in the groove, and it’s working, it’s probably going to keep working and keep getting better for sure. So UTM would be a good like using Google UTM. And then check in analytics really to go before and after. Even though ideally tests are done at the same time, not week one, and then we two but week one versus week one, but Yeah, that’d be you definitely haven’t seen yams and aka look that whole day you gave me to do these conversion campaigns. Look at the result, you could then have the report showing how awesome you are because you switched everything and specifically in the UTM what you’re talking about is the campaign identifier, fraction of that so say

Andrew Peek 35:49

sources Facebook medium is paid social or whatever that you guys use, and then campaign would be like submarket conversion campaign or just conversion campaign.

Kevin Oakley 35:56

And that way you can you can track it all super quickly. So let’s get into a little bit more of the nitty gritty are the places that people are going to get stuck? So first, we’re going to say, Wait, how do I find my facebook pixel or the tracking code or whatever is I need to add? And the answer is different for different places, Facebook, Instagram, you’re going to find that in the business manager underneath the hamburger menu, and then pixels, which is under assets, I believe in LinkedIn. It’s as part of the campaign manager, Twitter, same Twitter and Pinterest, both. It’s in the same overall platform of where your ads are being run. And there’s going to be some type of analytic code, which hopefully you already have a lot of that stuff on there. Why? Because that’s how you do remarketing on all those platforms. It has to be able to know who’s been on the site in order to do remark. And then in Google for Google Ads paid search because this is also a thing for paid search now, do you need just analytic code Andrew or you need a specific thing for Google ads?

Andrew Peek 36:49

So this one I’ve never really talked about this but so the perfect scenario is using the a the ad the Google Ads tag. Yeah. Which is not common at all. Like that’s Really kind of old school, but you get quicker feedback. So Google can then optimize better. But the analytics tag does it works. I’m sure just as well it works. So you’re pretty much set up already. You better have analytics running. I’m sure everyone does. And you better have access, and you better have access. But yeah, so there are Yeah, you’re referencing like the conversion campaigns within Google, which are,

Kevin Oakley 37:18

yeah, they’re, they’re coming everywhere. Now. They’re not all gonna work the same. And they’re all not going to be as smart or as good depending on how much the platform knows about us users, depending upon privacy settings and rules and just how good they are at creating an AI tool. But I mean, I, when I logged into LinkedIn the other day, I was like, yep, we’re announcing conversion campaigns. They’re here. Yay, excited and get excited. Okay, you’re trying to jump on that bandwagon as fast as possible. Because once you do it, it is addictive. It’s like this is really good. Why can’t I

Andrew Peek 37:48

do this everywhere else and it’s so much quicker to get we haven’t got to like actual steps to it. But once you’re set up, it’s like, like, okay, we’re done. Yeah, we’re done. So it’s Mark

Kevin Oakley 37:56

that’s installing the code. Don’t let that be the thing that trips you up if any of this stuff because it’s Half of it’s on somebody else. But you have to either just tell them, they put it on there or find the code and send it to them. Let’s talk about defining a conversion goal. And we’ll stay just specifically on Facebook, Instagram on this one, just because of the complexity we go on for a lot longer. And we have time today for sure. Where do we go to set up the conversion goals if they’re good, you know, especially when they’re not going to be a form completion.

Becca Thomas 38:20

So if you’re in your ads manager account, click the hamburger menu and then go to custom conversions.

Kevin Oakley 38:27

Alright, so a long time ago, they had doctors shared with us that Facebook’s pixel was going to start creating some conversion or events, not conversions, but events on its own, it was going to just notice like Oh, that looks like a form completion or Oh, that looks like they’re doing something good. They’re adding to the cart, you could that’s why I say for lead forms use sometimes can get away with just using that automatic event and plugging that in and your custom conversion. But if you want to do something different, like number of pages visited or a specific page, you’re definitely going to go to that custom conversions option underneath events manager The business manager.

Andrew Peek 39:02

So many manage manager manager. Yeah, yeah, the. So they call that a standard event when it’s not one that is custom. So if it’s user defined by us, it’s a custom event. And then if it’s one that they pick up because they could read submit or contact us and they’ve realized that it’s form buzzers smart track everything, then they’ll just put that under its own category and make it part of that, you know, Facebook live version of that makes sense. When you mess around in there a bunch like, you’re like, Oh, yeah,

Kevin Oakley 39:25

yeah, you know, you’ll figure it out. You’ll figure it out. If not email andrew@doyouconvert.com and he’ll spend all of his free time getting back to you? That’s right. That’s right.

Andrew Peek 39:34

I’ll work for monsters send me a 24 pack of monster ultras.

Kevin Oakley 39:38

Alright, let’s talk about setting up the creative is that does that process different going in and actually building out the campaign so we’ve got the pixel installed, we’ve defined what we want the success marker or custom conversion to be last step is just make the ad as quickly go through the campaign ad set and creative and talk about anything that needs to be adjusted differently for this type of

Andrew Peek 39:56

I think we just knocked out the actual ad itself, because that does doesn’t change the ad. If you think campaign ad set and add those three levels, the ad can be exactly how it was before. You could even use if you I think we have some of these already. If you’ve used like an engagement based ad, and there’s like 1000 likes on there, and there’s a link in there, make sure there’s a link, he went crazy and ran an ad without a link. You could use that ad in the conversion campaign, which would be Oh, yeah, pretty fancy setup. Looks, it looks really cool. But yes, the ad set will be that’s where the magic is. So we’ll we’ll spend some time on the ad set right now.

Kevin Oakley 40:30

Yeah, well, we’ll just keep working backwards so that the ad creative exactly can can be exactly the same the ad set, we have to make a couple adjustments, which really just comes down to you have to select that custom conversion as your goal and it’s going to be near the top of your ad set window. When you do that. There’ll be what do you want to have happen here, that box you will click in and it’ll show you the custom conversions you’ve already defined and some basic stuff if you don’t have anything combined, but you have to select the custom conversions you already created. Put it in there and that window though, will only show show up if what do you what do you have to do in the campaign level? Becca,

Becca Thomas 41:02

you have to select conversions as your campaign objective. Exactly. So

Kevin Oakley 41:07

there you go soup to nuts. That’s it. Now you have something to do this weekend or whenever you’re listening to the podcasts that you’re done there’s there’s really no reason not to be doing this. It’s not overly complex, especially when you’ve got the podcast to reference and we’re going to work on some some blog articles and other things as well in the coming period of time for a period of time yet to be decided because it’s spring is busy, but we’re going to get some stuff out there for you. Is there any drawbacks that I’m missing guys to conversion campaigns? I

Andrew Peek 41:36

think people might be wondering like you kind of left something out and I felt that way but you really didn’t cut so you select the conversion mm hmm and then with Facebook’s new rules you can’t change age you cannot change gender oh

Kevin Oakley 41:47

yeah that’s we don’t know we did miss we did miss something well, I mean you did we did with it because really like there’s nothing else to other than the geography you don’t change anything else like yes, targeting wide open. So we I guess we did both. We didn’t like you. Just leave it there because you’re going to target 18 to 65 you’re going to target men and women and you’re going to add at least a 15 mile radius or larger and if you saw my talk at the builders show you’ll see that larger sometimes a lot of times is significantly better if because the AI is that smart to learn as long as enough traffic is coming through I would say that’s the only thing is if you’re running a conversion campaign and you’re trying to spend say 50 bucks a month on something that I don’t know I don’t think we’ve done that i i think but I know a lot of you boosters out there like to like to boost stuff. This may not work for you just thinking out loud. I don’t I don’t think it will and if anyone

Andrew Peek 42:37

has a I have to respect all budgets, but if you’re spending more at chick fil a or Starbucks than a Facebook campaign community I will have I will talk to you and find you.

Kevin Oakley 42:46

I’ve seen the pictures of people at a top 25 homebuilding company whose social budget for the entire month was like 250 or 300 bucks. It’s still still out there. They’re not so again, yeah, no additional targeting no likely to move on. No Zillow no no no nothing else that’s already The only thing you would still probably do and even this I’m a little less like you must do this than I used to be you still probably want to take out everything but the the news feeds for both Facebook and Instagram Okay, we still want to focus on the best quality location however it’s not as bad as it used to be if you leave it all in there the AI knows who it needs to show to

Andrew Peek 43:21

yeah and where and we’ve we test everything of course and we’ve tested well what if Facebook’s entirely in charge and they’ll send you so there’s like marketplace where I’m like I don’t really like marketplace ads because they’re looking at like I don’t know picnic picnic bench table and then they’re like Oh, look, here’s this half million dollar house our million dollar house doesn’t seem right but they don’t Yeah, and like put it in there but like one impression

Kevin Oakley 43:40

so you’re saying the AI knows what’s garbage? They know what’s good. Yeah, no, no one cares about the right hand no or marketplace or

Becca Thomas 43:48

I owe that under 30 for trash.

Andrew Peek 43:51

But imagine if you’re selling like like tools or DIY like a different maybe ecommerce. Right right but you and right marketplace all day long and it works really well. Yeah. But they know the context of the ad because they’re reading what’s in the ad. Yeah. And combining that with the actions of people. That’s very cool.

Kevin Oakley 44:06

This is it’s so blows my mind. All right, some crazy you have homework, there’s officially homework from an episode of Market Proof Marketing go make sure your conversion campaigns are set up and running as quickly as possible. You will thank us alright. And that’s, that’s it for this episode, we’re not going to do a question of the week or take another break because we just got Well, we meaning I just got the last episode outbound because the parasite dragged me down. So these are going to come back to back pretty close. Make sure if you haven’t heard the previous episode, because you’re just listening to the one at the top of the stack, make sure you go back and listen to our interview with Paul Cardis. A lot of good insights there about how to not get banned from Google My Business that he needs to know among other things. For published articles, blog posts, videos, and more. Check out Do You Convert.com and it’s also the best way to find out how to connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and anywhere else that we are on social media. Keep the questions coming. We’ve gotten quite a few and maybe we’ll have another q&a episode but coming up next time. We’ve got the one and only Jeff shore joining us on episode number 50. It will be you’ll feel like unicorns are singing directly into your ears.

Andrew Peek 45:08

Oh, that’s what my expectations now.

Kevin Oakley 45:11

Alright guys, have a good week. See you. I’ll see ya. See ya.