All Forum Posts by: Michael McKay

@Duane Alexander SEO took about 2 months to start getting leads and 2 months after that to get the first deal. I'm still working on it. Only got 5 leads to far, but 2 were very solid.

I don't have my SMS numbers in front of me, but you will needs to send thousands to get a deal. Definitely build a system for a VA to handle responses. Like any outbound marketing channel, some people will be upset and more people will be unrealistic when you talk to them vs someone who searched on Google to find you. I've found that the key is to disqualify them as fast as possible on a call, so you only work with people who it actually makes sense for to sell to an investor.

Lots of follow ups needed on all these. I'd have to go back to check exact stats, but I'd guess that my average deal has 15-20 touch points before a contract is signed.

@JT Rose thanks! Will do.

Just to be clear to everyone above, I do think there is potential in Facebook. I just didn't have success. It's still something I plan to try again later down the line.

@Allan Smith @Wasiu Adeyeye @Kelly Kinne @Tomas Satas I apologize for not updating this thread. Life got busy when I moved down to Florida.

The campaign did not work out. I decided to call it quits after spending about $2,000 on Facebook. Maybe there's something I did wrong, but I decided to invest my time and money into other marketing channels.

In better news, I've done 4 deals from SMS marketing and one from SEO in 2021. 

I did discover one awesome way to use Facebook ads though. I leave my retargeting campaign up at $1 a day, so it re-targets people who visit my website. Nothing revolutionary here, but after I speak to leads who come in through other channels, like SMS, I send them a link to my website. 

Facebook then shows them my ads for the next 60 days. 1 ad is of a video of me talking and the other is a screenshot of a review. After I started doing this I realized that sellers would remember me way more when I followed up and it seemed to give me a lot more credibility. Some even mentioned to me how they saw me all over Facebook. Hard to directly attribute to deals, but seems like $30/month well spent to me :)

Update #28

Over the weekend I spent about $110 on the traffic campaign. The click through rates are high at 2.93% for a link click through and 3.75% for all click throughs, which is good. I also took a look at the age breakdown and Facebook is spending most of the budget on the higher ages, which are more likely to be motivated sellers. No leads so far, but yesterday I set up a retargeting conversions campaign, so hopefully I can convert some of the people who clicked to leads.

I'll be reviewing Hotjar with my web designer later today to see if we need to change anything to optimize the site for conversions. 

Update #27

So far I've been retargeting using a lead generation campaign, since my website still has some finishing touches needed. No leads so far on that lead gen campaign or the video views campaign.

The site should be done by Friday, so I'm going to set up a conversions campaign for the retargeting audience to see if that converts better. I'm also going to start a traffic campaign to my website optimized for landing page views.

I installed Hotjar on my website, so that I can see where people click and watch recordings of how people interact with the site. My goal is to use this to optimize my website to increase conversions.

@Jerryll Noorden You have my number :) Let me know when is good for you.

Update #26

I realized after my post Thursday that Facebook was using another placement that was skewing my results, which was in stream videos. It was forcing people to watch this videos without being able to skip, making it a bad placement if I'm trying to use the videos to build an audience for retargeting.

I quickly removed this placement and my campaign has been running all weekend. My CPM decreased to just over $5 and my Thruplay cost is at 6 cents. Still a little high, but hopefully I can get that lower with some testing.

Today, I'll be making my retargeting campaign. I have 1,700 people in the 10 second video viewers retargeting audience and I'm going to test both a conversions campaign and lead generation campaign.

Update #25

The video views campaign has been been running at $15 a day and my cost per Thruplay is the same as CT at 4 cents. My CPM is still high at $12.46, but I'm going to let it run for a few more days before I make any adjustments.

This morning I launched a traffic campaign optimized for landing page views targeting the same audience at $15 a day. I used dynamic creative here as well and used the same videos plus one additional video I made using Facebook's tools. I'll post an update once it's run for a bit and there are more impressions.

Update #24

I got down to Florida late Sunday night and yesterday I launched the campaign here. I started with a video views campaign to build my audience, since that worked well in CT. I used dynamic creative with 6 videos and multiple variations of copy.

This morning, I noticed my I had 171 thruplays (15 second video views) from 190 impressions, which is crazy high. The CPM was also high at over $13, so I dove in deeper to see if something weird was going on.

I noticed Facebook added a new placement called "Rewarded video" and almost all my ads were going to that placement. Facebook defines this as "Rewarded video ads are a type of video placement available for gaming apps. Players can choose to watch a video in exchange for a reward, such as virtual currency or in-app items."

So it looks like people are bribed to watch a full video, which explains the high rate of thruplays. I decided to disable audience network. Since I'm using these videos to build my audience to retarget, I don't want to be building an audience of people who aren't actually interested in selling their home.

@Mark Sewell no problem! I'll keep posting updates here on which tactics work. I'm driving down to Jacksonville this weekend and should be launching the new campaign on Tues or Weds.

@Christian Nachtrieb You actually caught us in the middle of a total website redesign that we started a couple days ago :) A lot of the items are placeholders and everything should be updated by the time I re-launch the campaign next week.