Episode #111 – Apples To Apples In Real Estate Investing

You're listening to the “REI Marketing Nerds” podcast, the leading resource for real estate investors who want to dominate their market online. Dan Barrett is the founder of AdWords Nerds, a high-tech digital agency, focusing exclusively on helping real estate investors like you get more leads and deals online, outsmart your competition, and live a freer, more awesome life. And, now, your host, Dan Barrett.

Dan: All right, hello and welcome to this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds podcast. As always, this is Daniel Barrett here from AdWordsNerds.com and, as always, REIMarketingNerds.com, where you can go to find all the past episodes of this podcast and everything I've ever put out pretty much, which has a lot of stuff. [01:01.0]

Thank you so much for being here. This is your first episode, welcome. If you have been here since the beginning, welcome back. Hey, this is going to be a relatively short one this week. I’m going to be honest because I’m running from thing to thing to thing as often happens, and I've got a lot of stuff going on, a lot of exciting projects, and, specifically, I am really diving deep, even deeper than I typically am diving into the world of data and we are building over in AdWords Nerds a really amazing fun, cool project.

I cannot really tell you what it is yet. It is this kind of like a backend tool we're going to be using to answer all sorts of really interesting questions about where motivated sellers are online. I can't tell you any more than that. It's not a product. It's not something I'm trying to sell you or anything. This is a tool that we are building for ourselves and I'm very, very excited about it, but in the process of doing that, I'm working with kind of outside folks, contractors that work with all sorts of really big data systems and coders and programmers and all sorts of stuff. [02:06.8]

I've thought a lot about data. I've had to talk a lot about data in the process and, look, I use data every day. Obviously I believe in it very much. At AdWords Nerds, we have always been the agency that's most focused on real estate investors, most focused on just motivated sellers and really have hung our collective hats on the idea that we just have a lot of experience, have a lot of data in this industry, right?

That's worked really well for us, but even for us, even for me, there is always something new to learn, and even the stuff that you think you know, the stuff that you kind of think you have down, you always have to reinforce.

One of the things that has constantly come up over and over and over, and this is something I really have to work on myself and recommending to myself, and is directly applicable to your marketing in your real estate investing business is the idea of comparing apples to apples. [03:03.0]

This manifests in this really, really common question I get. I get this all the time from investors big and small, where they say, Hey, they want to talk about online marketing and we're talking about SEO or we're talking about PPC, or we're talking about Facebook ads or whatever, and let's say we're talking about conversion rate. Okay, so they want to know, Hey, my page converts at 5 percent. Is that good? Is that bad? And the question is like, How do I compare to other investors? The problem is that's really kind of a meaningless question.

Let me back up and let me give you maybe an easier example to understand. Let's say you have an AdWords campaign, Google Ads campaigns running. You've got 1,000 impressions, which are views on your ad. You've got 1,000 of those people this month. Is that good or bad? Well, the answer is it depends. How many keywords are you running? What match type are they? How big is your market? How dense is the population? How big is your budget? These are all things that affect impression volume. [04:12.5]

Investors all over the world run into a very real problem when they want to compare their numbers against, let's say, a competitor or someone in a different market or someone that they saw online, and they are not comparing apples to apples.

I remember this very vividly. We had a client who left. It does happen, right? So, we had a client who left, an investor. We were running their ads. They decided they wanted to go somewhere else and they went to a different company, no harm, no foul. It happens. If I can't get you the best results, I want you to go somewhere else. That's fine.

They went to this different company. I ended up running into that investor at a networking event about a year later and we were catching up because we were on really good terms and I was like, Hey, how did it go with this other company? and they said, “Oh, great, we got twice as many leads.” [05:01.1]

I said, “Twice as many leads! First of all, it's amazing. Congratulations. Second of all, how did they do that? Because we really busted our butts and we were kind of hitting this ceiling where we felt we couldn't up your lead generation anymore. What did they do? I'm so curious.”

And he said, “Oh, well, we doubled our budget,” and I said… It's still… I mean, if you can picture my face in this conversation and I said, “You doubled your budget. So, I want to get this straight. You spent twice as much and you got twice as many leads. Oh my gosh, what kind of black magic is this? Right? Of course, you got twice as much, many leads.”

The problem was in his head. He didn't realize when he was comparing our performance to this other company’s, he wasn’t comparing apples to apples. He was comparing one apple to two apples. [06:02.0]

I mean, this happens all the time, right? He will say, My friend is 100 leads a month and I'm only getting 50, and I'm like, Okay, cool. The reason is you are investing, let's say, in your town in New Jersey and they are investing in all of Southern California. It's totally different. It's not apples to apples, and this may seem kind of a funny problem or a funny thing and it is. It's a bit of a rant on my part, I admit, but here's where it directly affects you.

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Based off a comparison that doesn't make sense, based off a comparison that is not apples to apples, you will make irrational decisions. They will seem rational to you based on the information, but they will be the wrong move. [07:20.5]

If our friend said, Hey, my friend is getting double the leads by investing in Southern California than I am in my town in New Jersey. I'm going to quit doing ads or I'm going to cut my budget, or I'm going to double my budget. I'm going to go to a different company or whatever, any decision they make purely because that comparison makes them look bad is not going to work out for them, because they are operating on an understanding of someone else's situation.

If you compare apples to oranges, you are always going to be upset and disappointed. If you compare apples to apples, you can at least make a rational decision. [08:04.7]

Now, what this ends up doing is forcing you into situations where you underperform. You don't get the ROI you should and you don't get the deals you should simply because you compared what was happening in your market at that moment, with your budget, with your setup to something completely different, and I'm telling you right now, it is the source of a lot of frustration, sure, on my part, but it's the source of a lot of pain and lost cash on the part of investors everywhere.

So, just remember, whenever you're looking at a dataset, whenever you're looking at two numbers and you're lining them up, and you're juxtaposing them and you're trying to figure out what to do, remember, just remember it to yourself—make sure you are comparing apples to apples.

Okay, look, that's it for this week's episode of the REI Marketing Nerds. It was a bit of a quick one, but I had a lot of fun here and I hope you did as well. [08:58.1]

Hey, if you are not in our Facebook group, I want you there. I want you there. Why aren't you there? It's really, really fun. There's a bunch of awesome investors in there sharing tips. I'm posting content in there literally every single day, trainings, blog posts, podcasts. You can keep up with what I'm working on. Again, we would love to have you. Just go to Facebook and type in “REI Marketing Nerds.” You will find it, or go to REIMarketingNerds.com to catch up on all these past podcast episodes.

Thank you so much for listening. I will see you next week, and have a wonderful rest of your day. Cheers.

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