PPC Essentials Part 3: Mistakes To Avoid When Maximizing Your Landing Page

[Music] welcome back to another episode of the collective clicks podcast. Today, I will be joined by Garrett craigan from our paid media team, and we're going to talk all about landing pages. Five things that people are doing wrong and how they can do them right, and then four things that you can do to be exceptional with your landing pages. I think there's a ton of value in this episode, especially at the end, so enjoy and let us know if there's anything that you want us to cover in future episodes. How you doing today, Garrett?

Doing good. How are you doing?

Awesome, excited for the topic today to dig into everything. So, for everybody's information, today we have F, we're talking about landing pages. This is part of our, who knows how many parts exactly? Probably seven or eight part series on all the pillars of PPC, all the things that you have to get right in to do well. And the topic for today is landing pages. Landing pages are one of the biggest places where I see issues when I'm doing audits on accounts of people that are coming to me and basically saying they're not getting the success that they're looking for with PPC. So, as for the topic today, we do have Garrett, our research and development lead, product lead, manager of most people in the company, like, whatever, whatever we want to call him. Superhero. Yeah. So, we're going to talk over five things, five specific things that we keep on seeing in these audits that people are getting wrong and how you could fix those. And then to end, we're going to talk about four things that you can do that even your competitors aren't. So, the beginning is just like, how do you like, get on par? And the end's about, have you actually accelerate ahead of what your compers are doing? So, you exceptional results by doing things exceptionally. So, let's get, let's get started.

So, number one on most common things that we're seeing that people are doing wrong. Page speed. Still a huge issue for landing pages. You want to elaborate on that?

Yeah, people are very impatient and they expect a quick load speed, especially on mobile. And we see consistently that businesses don't do a great job of keeping their pages lean and quick. And that has a huge impact how that page performs.

Yeah, absolutely. And we do see, for the most part, desktop pages seem to be okay. It's mobile that's just getting destroyed for some reason. Why do you think that is? That it's so much harder for mobile?

I think people still build out their designs on desktop and so they optimize it for how they're designing it, and they just forget that most of their traffic is going to be mobile. And so I think that with the power difference of a phone versus a desktop, it just needs a lot more refinement and attention to have that page perform well, whereas on a desktop, it can load faster because it has a bit more processing speed.

Yeah, that totally makes sense. And and it's definitely really interesting. I think a lot of people would put pay a lot more attention to this if there was a metric. Measure I measure this, but this is pay-per-click advertising, right? For each individual click. And so many times, I don't think people realize how many of those clicks you buy and then people bail before your page loads. So you still paid for the click, and then they didn't actually get to see everything else. So I actually built out a metric like that for one of our clients. I called it the cost per non-bounced visitor. So you can import bounce rate from like other sources and then your cost, and then you can estimate like our cost per non-bounce visit. And if your page that doesn't do well, it'll have a high bounce rate. And that that kind of gives you that metric. And just to define bounce rate for people, it's when a visitor comes on on the page, spends under, what is it? Like, 1 second? I thought sessions is it under one session? Yeah, I think I forget this this metric. Yeah, bounce rate. It's one of those weird ones. I actually think it's a really common misconception in this industry actually, too. We've had some clients like judge our pages too much on bounce rate. But let's just say you were running traffic to your home and now you run it to an action, like a single action landing page. Bounce rate is measured on the number of sessions that only have one page load post to multiple page loads. Then if you have a single action landing page, your bounce rate is the inverse of your conversion because someone either bounces or they convert. No other option. Yeah. And if you're running to your main website, then it's not because maybe they're going to click on all these other links, they're going to go to all these other places. That's where people are seeing these like 50, 60% bounce rates on on main websites. And then on our landing pages, they're seeing an 80% bounce rate. But really, what that means is a 20% conversion. Actually, really. Yeah, it's just in the main website might have been a 10 or 12% conversion rate. It's just there's less people like going around to all these different places on the website. Correct. There are ways to do time on site, but I guess the header code would load before the rest of it. Yes, that's a little bit harder to implement on a landing page. Like a 10, 10 seconds on site might mean 10 seconds waiting for site to load after the header loaded, but it's loaded. So anyways, it's a, it's just a sad thing to pay for that traffic. And the other thing that I think a lot of people don't realize is if you have that poor load speed and people are clicking and then it's not loading, then they're clicking back, it also can affect your cost per click. Yeah, yeah, because if they are waiting and getting impatient, go back and re-click again, you're getting charged twice for that click, but that's not a different user. Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is that it would affect the quality score too. It's a, so Google has this mysterious landing page experience score. I don't know how much you know about the things that go into that. I know it's a lot of behavioral metrics that they measure. And I think one of those is time on site before or bouncing back, if I'm not mistaken. I think you're right. So if people are coming on your page and then they're clicking back immediately, then that's a signal to Google that people don't have as good of an experience clicking on ads when they click on your ad compared to maybe your competitor where the page loads more quickly. And then in Google's eyes, you have to pay a premium experience. Yeah, yeah, which is annoying. A lot of people don't realize that everybody pays the same cost per click. Google favors people who provide a better experience to users. So, yeah, that's number one, page speed. What are some things that people can do about it? Like, why is it common for page speed to be so bad in general?

What I've seen is it's due to the images that are on the page being too big. So it's very easy to just reduce the size of those images or or even taking off videos if they're not essential for the experience because those take up a lot of space and they load pretty slow. So that's where I see the biggest impact is in reducing the size of those image and video files.

Yes, absolutely. And I think that's definitely a big area for improvement. We've seen other things like we used to use a form software for example, that would slow things down with an embedded form. This is really common with CRM forms. If you're just like throwing your Podio code on that site, it can be really slow sometimes from a page load speed standpoint. Salesforce, same deal. There's also, for anybody who's interested in improving their page speed, there's a tool called Google Page Speed Insights that basically breaks down everything that could be wrong with your page speed. So, yep, it's, it's cool. Although there's, there's specialized developers that work on on this stuff and definitely know all the ins and outs of optimizing a specific page. One other technique I would share is lazy loading on our pages, where if you do have things that load more slowly, you can decide the order in which you want them to load. So you don't just load everything all at once. And where you'd be better off maybe loading everything and then loading the video after, especially if it's like, you have to scroll down to find it or something like that, just so people have a functioning top of the page before the bottom of the page loads or something like that. Correct. Yeah, that's huge. Absolutely.

What would you say people want to shoot for on their page load speed? How do they know if they're doing well or not?

I think the best benchmark is that Page Speed Insights that you mentioned, that gives the score out of 100. And on mobile, I think a good target is probably 80, just because the average of that device. 80 is going to be pretty strong. On a desktop, I think it's very doable being over 95 is probably very doable.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. The only caution I would give to this is I've seen some people who are completely obsessed with page speed to the extent that their landing page doesn't have anything good on it either. Correct. Huge. If you want the fastest page speed, you would just have HTML thing that says like, please send me your information, like, we buy houses, lead form, and that's it. Be fast. But no, not even a lead form. You just put like an email or a phone number. Contact you. Yeah, so that could work because a form would be slow. But yeah, anyways, it's not all about page speed. There are people in this industry that preach like page speed is like the most important thing. And it's like, important. I would definitely say it's important. If you're going so far that you're hurting your page in other ways because of page speed. Another example of this is like analytics and tracking codes and things like that. By the time you put like conversion tracking in and you Google analytics, and you might have even some additional tools that track keystrokes or whatever the case is, we'll talk about some of that stuff later. That stuff all has a negative impact on page speed. Yep. But it also has a positive impact. So it's kind of balancing those things, I think, too.

Totally. So that was number one. Number two here is optimization for mobile. I want to jump right into this one just because it branches off from the page speed. Like a lot of people, because they build it on desktop and then it's adapted to work for mobile, it's not efficient or used for mobile. That's where a lot of people say mobile first is the way to design today. And where I think it's close to 80% of our traffic. Does that sound right to you?

Probably last time, 75 to 80 is mobile. Yeah, like a lot of our traffic did mobile. I think that makes a ton of sense. Just people work on computers and people always forget that. But what else in terms of mobile are people getting wrong?

I think a big best practice in how your page performs is having things, the most important parts of the page be visible above the fold. And that that fold is like where people's screen ends. And on mobile, that looks different than on desktop. And so it's important to have your form be higher up on the page on mobile because it might not be if you're doing the design on desktop. It's just a much smaller screen. And so having the important stuff packed up on the top is very important on mobile, and people always forget that.

Yeah, the simple test for this, just to make this like black and white, if you pull up your website on your phone and you can't see the form and the button to submit the form on your screen without scrolling, then it's probably a problem. That's bad. Yep. I know it's like the default with Carrot sites because they have all that text beneath the headlines and everything on desktop. It works because the text is on the left hand side and the forms on the right hand side. But then you pull it up on a phone and all that text is the entire first screen there, not even a form. So that's, yeah, that's a good example. And actually, that's, that's number three here is the form above the fold, which which is true for desktop and mobile. Although you, I think you'd be surprised how often I find this in audits that people have like the forms at the bottom of their page. Yeah, or something like that, which is just not standard. Because you'd be surprised, I think everybody when they design a landing page, they just picture someone just going through and reading all their landing page. They're not going to read. They don't, the vast majority of form submissions are people who just clicked and then they don't even scroll, they just submit a form right then. Do you have a good call to action? And I think having some additional content if they do scroll to help towards conversion for those people that need more convincing, I think it's good. But but you do lose conversions if you don't have a call to action immediately available. Even if they are going to load everything, at least they understand from the very beginning, this is the purpose of the page, I'm supposed to do this. Yep. And then they're thinking about that the whole time, am I going to do that?

Yeah, anything else about the form being above the fold?

No, I think that that's a good summary of that best practice.

Cool. Let's talk about calls to action. Should somebody have a phone number on their landing page? Should they have a form? Should they have both?

I think it's probably best to have both. In all of these things, I would say test it, but I would start with having both because people have different preferences. Some people don't like talking on the phone, and some people want to like explain their whole situation, talk to a human, and not wait for like an appointment. So I think having both is beneficial to maximize the audience's response by having like a method of contact that they prefer.

Absolutely. And I've seen probably the biggest one I don't like is when someone just has like a form only and they don't have a phone number. Because some of our clients that, like when we do track the quality of phone calls versus form submissions, the phone calls are better quality than average. You just picture this, you have a motivated seller, they're looking at the form, they're looking at the phone number, and they're choosing, I want to call someone. Yeah. Um, probably that they will, they like want an answer now. This is important. They have more urgency, more motivation. Also, all you have to do is answer your phone. Yep. And you made contact. So just automatically through that, if they did a form, then there's some chance that you're not going to get a hold of them. Decent chance, really. Yeah. Got to answer your phone. That's another issue and it of itself that some of our clients have. But I think, yeah, I think that's really valuable. But where I've seen some people go wrong is they notice this and they see, I'm getting really high quality phone calls. So they think, if I can make all my leads phone calls, then I'll have higher quality leads. And it's, I don't think it's exactly true because I think it's the selection of someone who was looking at the form and they decided to call that makes them higher quality. Whereas if you just make it call only, it's the same audience either way. Yeah, it's the same people, they're just being forced, and you have a lot of drop off that way, whereas they'd be willing to submit the form. Yeah. So anyways, that's like with just a phone call call to action, you definitely have less. But I think you miss out on some leads that you can guarantee contact with if you just do all right.

And then the last item, the form length. Any comments on that?

I think we tend to get a little bit greedy as marketers where we want everything upfront, even if that ask is not necessary for that lead to be qualified and contacted. It's important to only ask for what you actually need and not ask for things that you want. Because the longer a form gets, the less likely it is that form gets completed and submitted. And there's so much research that's, we've even seen this for our own clients where we have longer forms versus shorter forms. I think that it's far too rare that someone considers what is the experience of someone going through this form. And it's always easier to think, I want this additional information. It's not actually the best for them. But there are some tradeoffs here. Can I say like, some optimal solutions where you can get a lot of information, but also the most important information through multi-step forms? How do those work?

So what we do is we ask for the essential information that makes a lead a lead. So for us, that's the address of the property and the lead's phone number. So our first step of the form, the lead only sees a request for those two things. And then that gets fired off to the client. And then once that step is completed, then they're sent over to a different page where we ask for the nice-to-know information, like their timeline, the house's condition, what they are wanting as an offer, what they would take as an offer, those kinds of things. But that first, first step, we ask for the bare essentials. And then once that's captured, then we ask for things that we're okay if they don't give us, but they're nice to have.

Yeah, and how many people end up filling out the whole thing?

I think what we see, it is our first step is probably about 15%, 20%. Yeah. When I ran the numbers the other day, it was about 17.5 on average. So you're just, yeah, dead center of the range that you just said. Although worth noting that, because people ask all the time, what is, what is a good pitch conversion rate? I think it really depends on the quality of traffic you're driving to and the device as well. Yeah, varies a lot on mobile and desktop. Yeah, absolutely. So that's the, I guess one word of caution is it's hard to say my landing page is good because it converts at this rate or that rate. And also, our clients that go wider geographically, they get a lot of their cheaper lead costs through better conversion rates. So it's not uncommon that we see conversion rates in the 30s or 40s, even in those circumstances. And then some markets are a little bit lower. But anyways, that's a little bit tangential. But just always information. But so you're saying 17 and a half percent people on average will fill out with the kind of quality traffic we drive and blah, blah, blah. That's kind of the benchmark. And then what we saw, we actually used to do it where it was just two fields in the first form, and then it was all these rest of these fields, which for anybody that's familiar with this methodology of the four pillars of motivation, that's kind of what those questions are based around. Garrett mentioned some of those, like the condition, why are you selling, like all that kind of stuff. But but recently, it's been closer to 80% because we actually made it instead of a two-step form, like a seven-step form or something where it's just like one question at a time with a progress bar. Yep. And so people can see how far they're getting. And that actually increased the rate of them filling the whole thing. Huge. Yeah, yeah, that's a, that's another little trick. Although I'd say anything after you've already gotten the lead is like slightly less important because that's the most thing, the most important thing is just get the lead at the beginning. One other benefit that I think is overlooked for that strategy compared to if you were to do it the other way, ask all the stuff and then get the lead after is now, let's just picture a motivated seller's journey, right? They're going online, they're searching. People search until they find an answer to their problem. But reaching out to a company is not an answer to their problem, usually, right? So they'll reach out to multiple companies until they can actually talk to someone and think, this is the person I'm going to sell my house to. Then they stop searching. So that's where I, we talked about like speed to lead and all that stuff being extremely important to stop that search. One thing that really helps that though, if they just submitted the form, that's just the end of their journey. And then we just tell them like, okay, bye. They can go find a competitor. But if we just got their information immediately right now because they submitted their phone number and their address, and then now we know that they're going to spend another minute going through the rest of the form, filling out all that information, then it basically buys us time. We have time to call them before before they go find someone else. Which I think is really relevant. Anything you can do to buy time in that situation? Keep them busy. Exactly. Because hopefully they're just, they're on your website. So that's where we actually, for some of our clients, we just hope that their step two conversion actually gets lower. Yeah, because I hope that they're talking to the person before they're done filling out the form. It's actually disappointing to me how often they can finish the whole thing before they get interrupted. Because in some ways, it's just to keep them busy. That's like half the purpose. Yeah.

Okay, so that's all the stuff to to get up to best practice. That's like, can you think of anything else that's just standard best practice? If you don't do this, then every book that you find online about marketing is probably going to tell you that you're dumb because you didn't do this thing.

I think the only best practice I would say that wasn't covered is to ensure that the headline of your page speaks to like benefits of your offering and the emotions visitor having. That be too vague or too um, too irrelevant to the user. It is only going to hurt performance. And so being sure to like to tie it back to why they're there, what they're looking for, and answering their big question off the jump is going to help them to feel like that they're in the right place.

Yeah, that's a great point. We haven't talked at all about copywriting, and that could be like seven podcast episodes there. Copywriting theory goes pretty deep, but there's a good heuristic for this. I'm trying to remember it. There's some people say there's three things someone should know when they visit your website. The first one is like, what, what is it that you can do for them? Is also, why should they trust you? And wasn't there a third one?

I think I know what you're saying. I think it's who you are, what you do, and why you're different. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely. That's exactly what I was thinking of. And so that's just, if we're talking about super quick and easy, simple ways to make sure that your copywriting is good, like people should at least be able to figure that out, hopefully without scrolling down, right? That that first section above the fold, like we talked about.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's talk about great. Let's talk about the things that can make you so much better than your competition. Honestly, all the stuff we talked about so far is a little bit more boring. This stuff is the exciting stuff. Stuff that that we work on because we were doing all this good stuff for years, right? We've made some big strides in getting great over the past year or so. So the first one that I have here is personalization via UTM. You want to talk about that and how that works?

Yeah, let's first define UTM. So those are pieces of text that we can append to the end of a link that that that tells us and our tracking where that user came from, the campaign, the ad group, the keyword, all those things. And what we can do on a landing page is have the page change the information it presents based on the information. So if a user came from our buy my house fast ad group, then we can have our copy change to speak to speed as a big offering because that individual has shown us in their searches that speed is a big thing for them. And the better the page matches their intent, the better it'll perform. And having things changed dynamically lets us not have to make 15 pages for 15 different searches. We can have one and have it change based on that search and keep things a lot more consistent and consolidated, but also still have that level of detail to match the user's intent.

Yeah, that's fantastic. A good example of this, some strides that a lot of people have made in their businesses is, I think of it like direct mail. Like you might have a foreclosure list and you have a probate list. And people used to just send the same card to both lists. Yeah. And then you realize people in foreclosure have different pain points, they have different needs than someone in probate. So you want to make it more specific to them. How many times, just think like, how many, how often have you clicked on something and then gone back because what you found on the page was not what you expected or not what you wanted? I think like a hugely overlooked thing is congruency between your ad and your landing page. I even tested this once where we did, we tested should we say it with the exact same words that the ad says it with, or should we say the same thing but with different words? And we found a big lift in conversion rate just by saying the same thing with the exact same words. Because even people with very low cognitive resources that are just browsing through things and not thinking too much, that's how most people are when they're going to the internet. Yeah, they can still know that it's relevant to them. Yep. Absolutely. Also, I think a really nice thing to think about is someone searches on Google and they click on your ad. There's really only two things that you can know about them at that point. Number one, you know that they're interested in whatever they searched into Google. And number two, you know that something about your ad was more interesting to them than the other ads that they saw. Correct. So it only makes sense in your landing page, it should be relevant to whatever they searched on Google, and it should be relevant to whatever they saw in your ad. Because those are things that you're guaranteed that are going to impact that person. So anyways, off my soapbox. Makes a big difference. So super bullish on that. If we just took that one step deeper, I have seen people do this before. What I've never seen before is people actually test those. Usually it's, I've decided that for this ad, this is the right headline because you know as well as I do. And I don't want to get super deep in the weeds, but it's really complicated to actually split test dynamic headlines. Yeah, we don't have to talk about all the reasons, but I've never heard of anyone ever doing that. Yet, we have some pretty great tests going on in that way. Because just doing dynamic headlines, like you could make your postcard for your foreclosure list and your probate list. It's so much better to have two postcards for your foreclosure list and two for your probate list and see how those perform compared to each other. But it's just like the way Google's built, it's really complicated to pull it off.

So another thing that's, I think really important, and a lot of people don't even know it exists, it's like a specialty. This is people's jobs, livelihood, is something called CRO. It stands for conversion rate optimization. And this is really popular when you get into enterprise companies, big volume e-commerce, like any situation where you have lots of traffic. CRO is a huge piece of the marketing puzzle. Yeah, don't hear about it ever in the real estate investment industry. So I'm curious, what pieces of CRO would you say are important? Why do you think it's not really talked about in this industry? And what do you think needs to be done there to get better results?

I think people under, I think people underestimate the impact of the very small aspects of a page. The color of your button, the text on the button, the order of the sections on your page, how long it is, if there are or are not images in your header, the kinds of words you use, the overall messaging of your page. And so this like discipline of marketing focuses on like those those tests, gathering data around each of those things, and how they each contribute to the overall page's performance. And by doing those A/B tests where there's an A and a B version of the page, and they're each given half the traffic, you can learn, does this button or this button do better? And that can have a huge lift on performance. Like, for instance, one test that we did was we have text just under our page's headline, and it was probably, I don't know, four or five sentences long. And we did a test where we took out any adjectives and any extra words, and it lifted our page's performance by 18% just like taking out some words, like changing the message, just making it shorter and easier to read. And so those kinds of tests can have a huge impact on how the page performs. And what we do is we've run those tests in bulk across all of our clients. And so we can gather that data in one or two days, what would take one investor weeks or months to have the same learnings and, and improvements.

Yeah, I actually calculated it the other day, just for fun. So you know, it's 9 to 12 months, yeah, is what it would take our average client to do a split test. Which makes sense because if you take 150 times that volume and it was 365 days, and we could pull it off in two days, makes sense. But that's insane. You just have to decide, this is the test that I'm going to do for the next 12 months. Yeah. Is this worth it? And is the way that I chose to do it, even the right way? You're just wasting all that time with possibly a two-losing test. Yeah, yeah. So that's, it speaks to the value of aggregation. I think that's why I think that's why CRO isn't really popular at all in this industry. There's just a volume. I've seen people talk about doing it. I swear to this day, I've dug into a lot of the situations and I have never seen anybody take a test through statistical significance. It's always just, I started with this page and after a month, I felt like it was better, so I went all in on it or something like that. Because getting all the data is so hard. The other thing that's so tricky is getting data for lead quality. The things that you say on your page really affect the quality of the leads. This is like a classic example for this. There's a lot of pages out there that say, like, for example, the headlines like, get a cash offer and click of a button. Really common CRO mistake that you would run that and you'd run that compared to something more conservative, and you'd find that is converting better. And you double down there, but it doesn't actually transfer all the way to lead quality. Because those people are expecting that they click this button and they have an offer pop up on their page. It doesn't happen. Yeah. Or things like, best offer guaranteed. Like people going to that are going to want a higher offer than people with the offer being like, speed of an offer or a fair offer. That's going to bring in possibly fewer people because it's a bit more qualifying. But the ones who do come through are going to be strong. And so that's a theme that people, like you said, often miss is just the confusion of volume and quality. And your page is going to have a huge impact on that. Yeah, absolutely. The last podcast episode we did with Sean, we talked about this concept of anytime you write creative, it has two purposes. The first one is to convert. The second is to qualify. The real thing that you want to measure is basically like the qualified conversion rate. Like, how many of the right people does it get across the finish line? Not how many people does it get across the finish line. Yeah. Same thing happens in ads, right? Dollar, all that stuff in ads, it gets more people to click, but it's not actually good for the right group. Yeah. So you have to be really careful what you're measuring, what you're optimizing towards with CRO. I've seen like some of the agencies that do branch into this stuff like with their ads, they do more ad testing and stuff like that. I've seen a huge bias towards whatever converts better, but not qualifying. Because I think it's just, I think it's just what marketers do. Like, it's a standard. There's always this friction between marketing and sales. And I think it's just because they care about different metrics. You know, the only way we've been able to solve that is by measuring our marketers based on sales. Y. It helps. All right, so that's it for CRO. Up next is address and phone verification. Um, when we talk about lead quality, there's multiple aspects. There's, is there the right person behind this lead? Which is an important aspect of lead quality. But then there's also, are we even getting the right information? That's an important aspect of lead quality. Is this address a real address? Is that phone number a real phone number? What can be done to help improve the rate of getting quality leads through the form?

So we use a couple of tools to ensure that we get the correct address. So our form is integrated with the Google Maps API. So if ever you're like going into, let's say buying things on an e-commerce site and you type in your address and it autofills to find the right one that you're typing in, that's what we use as well on our forms. And so it helps to verify that it's the correct address and it also gives us the address in the right format that fits into people's systems as well. That's a very helpful thing. And then we also use a script on our form that validates that phone number that they enter is the right length, is an actual number, and then that it's an actually working number. So that helps us to avoid people that give a fake number because they don't want calls or they're just looking for like just as a quote and not taking actual action on it. So it helps us to give actionable data and it also helps weed out like bot or spam that are just entering in just a bunch of just keystrokes to waste your ad spend.

Yeah, absolutely. And if we're going to be really honest about what do we do uniquely and what's pretty normal, I think the address validation is pretty popular in the industry. I think it's a good thing that it is. I think it's because like a lot of the stuff that matters most in PPC is not super visible, but this is one thing that's really visible to the client. So everybody fixes that problem because their clients care about it, they're asking to have the problem fixed. Yeah. But the phone number validation, I think there's a lot of phone number validation in this industry, and it's really common to have some level of validation there. But it's just not on the level that you're talking about. How exactly do we pull off not just checking that it's an area code that exists and it's the right number of letters and it's right number of numbers and it's in the right format and stuff like that, like all these deeper checks? So even if it looks like a good phone number, we verify that it's not actually a working phone number.

Yeah, so our form is integrated with a service that matches that number with a list of of working active numbers. And if it doesn't match that list, then it's given like an error message of, this isn't a valid number. Please make sure there aren't any typos in in in your number. So that's how we do that. Yeah. And for anybody interested, I think it's called PhoneSoap. It's called DataSoap. Oh, DataSoap. Okay, cool. So if you're interested in in that, I don't know why you'd ever want to do that yourself. But if anybody wants to, I mean, take the information, run with it. We tested quite a few ways to do phone number validation. We have the most success during DataSoap.

All right, so the last thing here, this is like always saving the best for last. This is like personally what I think is the biggest thing that has changed the game recently landing pages for us. We recently tracked a 27% increase in lead quality to just changing this one thing on the landing page. So there's your whole drum roll and everything. Do you want to talk about lead sculpting, what that is, and how you do it?

Yeah, so this like, I, you mentioned, has been a huge win for us by being able to build out our form in a way that it does the qualifying for us. So we don't have to have our clients do as much of the work of asking those questions to qualify the lead. The form is it for us. And what's cool about it is we can dictate what kinds of form submissions count as a conversion in the ad platforms. So it doesn't learn that like anyone that goes through this form is a good lead. It's people that answer these questions in this way that's a good lead. And so we've seen that by sculpting out our responses to route the users to the right questions, it or the right answers to the questions, it's really helped us to improve how our page performs from a quality perspective. An example of how we use this is we ask people very early on in the form if their property is already listed or not. And and we have seen that that in general, our clients much prefer those that aren't listed. And so people that answer, "is listed," we still pass on that info to the client, obviously, but we don't pass that on back to Google as a lead. And so that really helps our pages to perform a lot better because they're optimizing for for better quality.

Yeah, absolutely. And to really understand how powerful this is, I think you have to understand like conversion tracking and how Google works. And we've had previous podcast episodes about this where we talk about the game of PPC right now, and how a lot of it is really just figuring out how you give the algorithm more data and better quality data. This definitely falls in that better quality data category. And it's great because what I love about is we don't have to rely on our clients' feedback. Yeah, we love tracking things close loop, like all the way to they become deals and stuff like that. But we rely on people telling us that information and the quality of that information and everything. If you just do it in the form, then you can give Google immediate feedback. And it can be, it can be quality, no matter what operational issues you run into or whatever the case is. So I think that is, I think that is super neat and something that people overlook. Now, this is like, in terms of the experience for the person, we have to be clear here. This is one of those things in PPC that's not visible to just someone going through the form. It's the exact same experience they would have had otherwise. However, where it changes is where we measure things. And I think what a lot of people don't realize is how much measurement affects results. Because when it comes to ad platforms these days, it really is what you measure and what you report to them that dictates the results you get in the future. So that's, I think that's super powerful. So it's not just about us like getting a better number for understanding where our cost per lead is or something like that. It's about giving Google the feedback it needs immediately for it to understand how good of a job it's doing so that it can do better. Same thing happens with leadership in your company or whatever the case is. If you give people bad metrics to optimize towards, then you, they'll hit them. They'll hit them. Exactly. Google will do whatever you ask it to do. And so many times people point their finger at Google, Google gave me this bad lead, it's Google's fault, they charged me money for this, and it still wasn't a good lead. When the problem is that you just told Google that was a good lead. And Google doesn't know anything other than what you tell it. And it's just going to keep on getting more and more of what you tell it is good. And the last thing we want to do is give it a good high five every time it gives us something we don't like. And so many people, that's for that trash Google high five. Exactly. Keep bringing more of that. Exactly. So anyways, super passionate about that one. I think that whole like, the whole realm that fits under is, if we look at my personal opinion of 2023, 2024 and beyond, the companies do really well with PPC, what is it that they're going to be doing better than other companies? It all has to do with the quality of data that we're giving Google and the amount of data that we're giving Google. And that's definitely a good step in that direction.

Anything else you'd share for being great with landing pages?

I think just as like a parting thought, there's a lot that goes into a winning campaign on Google. But I think we look a lot at the keywords and the ad copy and the different settings in your account. But if your page doesn't perform well, it's for naught. And on the other hand, like if your page is effective, it can have a major impact on your success because that is going to touch every user. And a very slight improvement in how your page does has a huge impact on everything else because that's where everyone ends up.

Yeah, that's a great point. It's a bottleneck because no matter what, somebody goes through your page. Yep. And this is where we preach to people all the time in sales conversations. We're basically talking about, I don't think a lot of people realize how much difference a small improvement can make. Like, you could take your landing page conversion rate from 10% to 10.2%. Yeah. And for our average client, that's literally all it takes to completely cover our fee from the extra revenue that they would generate. Because you just get, get 2% more leads, and that amounts to 2% more revenue. And you have that leverage on all this ad spend. And you add everything together and you do the math and you realize it's worth it for me to spend what feels like an enormous amount of money improving this page so it can convert just a little bit better. Because financially, the numbers just make sense. So it's, I'm, I'm 100% with you there. I think I think there's few places where you have as much leverage as you do in the landing page, where small changes can make big improvements. And those big improvements make even larger outcome changes, even when you extrapolate it out. What if just that little bit of extra revenue increases the scalability? And now you can afford to pay more per lead? And now you can potentially scale to 10x the ad spend that you would have been able to before? Now you have this business that's doing $5 million a year when you would have been doing $500,000 because of a landing page change. Like, it's not insane to talk about that actually being a potential impact of these types of changes. Super significant. So with that, I think that's it for this episode of the podcast. We will be digging into a ton of other PPC stuff in the future, other things that we're seeing make big differences in campaigns. So definitely stay tuned for that. Thank you for joining us.

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Thanks.