Google PPC Isn’t Dead — You’re Just Running It Wrong

Today we're talking Google Ads and PPC.

The thing about PPC is you can't be a noob.

How do I get this to work for me? Because it clearly is working for someone.

The goal is to find waste, remove waste, and keep putting budget behind keywords that are driving you new business. PPC is definitely one of those that I don't suggest someone doing themselves.

It's a contact sport.

It is. I mean, I think everyone should try it for their area.

You know, after all of that, that is when I will listen to you tell me if PPC is good Or bad. Welcome back to Owned and Operated. I am your host, John Wilson. I'm a plumber. I run a plumbing company, an HVAC company out of Northeast Ohio. We've got about 190 team members and we just went regional, so we're super excited about that. For fun, I run a podcast talking about what we do in our business and the industry in general. Today, I'm joined on the show by Sam Preston, the CEO of ServiceScalers, good friend of mine. And we have a continuing series called Clicks to Calls, where we dive into marketing for home service businesses, the dos, the don'ts, and how to think about it. So make sure you check out the previous episodes in the series. I think this is number 7 or 8 inside this series. So we've been creating some good stuff.

Yeah, we've already done PPC, we've done LSA, or no, excuse me, we've done Nextdoor, GBP, we've done, yeah, Nextdoor.

Yeah, GBP was good. Yeah.

Good stuff, but I'm really excited about today.

You know, I got feedback actually. It was kind of funny. Um, uh, Dustin Marks from Mother Plumbing.

Okay.

Uh, he, he came and visited back in, uh, December maybe. Time flies. And so he came up and visited, and, uh, it was kind of funny because he was like, dude, Nextdoor is one of our best channels. And I was like, I was like, what do you, what do you do? He's like, we do exactly what you What you said to do, which is, uh, which like I'm not even doing.

That's good.

Uh, which is like creating like a narrative on Nextdoor and posting photos and just like Nextdoor content creating. It's kind of interesting. So it, it, uh, worked. It was a really big win for him. So, uh, yeah, cool. Uh, good, good episode. Check it out. Um, today we're talking something, it's like love-hate, you know, some people love, some people hate it. There's not many people halfway in between. We're talking Google Ads, which is search and PPC. We're talking some OG Google spend, baby.

Let's do it. I have a special place in my heart for PPC because that's what got me started in the very beginning was a PPC agency. And so I built out my agency and everything from that. When we got into a relationship with you, we had already started, we started doing SEO, Um, and organic. Yeah. Um, but PPC was my first love.

Yeah, PPC's, uh, it's, it's OG. Um, you know, we've gone through, you know, back in like 2018, 2019, I mean, we were, we were spending some pretty real money.

Yeah.

On, uh, on PPC. Um, and PPC, it reminds me a little bit of like lead aggregators. So, uh, like, yeah, people are like, oh dude, that doesn't work, that doesn't whatever. And like, hey, maybe.

Yeah.

Sure, maybe. Uh, I also have friends spending like $100 grand a month on PPC and she's producing in big markets.

Yeah.

Like, uh, Jay Blanton, we've had him on the show, Isaac Zimmerman from Jay Blanton, a few times.

Nice.

Um, I don't know what his PPC spend now is, but like he was clipping $150 a month. Like it was real dollars.

Yeah.

Rich Jordan from Sanford, now High Ground, they just did their big rebrand. I want to say he was in the $80,000 to $90,000 a month range. And some people were doing it so productively that it was better than their local service ads. So which was Isaac's story. So back in 2023, local service ads went through a big kerfuffle and everybody lost a bunch of leads. And Isaac figured out how to replace LSA with pay-per-click, PPC, which was kind of astonishing, to be honest, because everyone has the same opinion of PPC that they have with angies or, ah, it doesn't work. Um, so just kind of interesting. So I think, uh, yeah, a lot of people love it, a lot of people hate it, but not many people in the middle.

Yeah, I would say the, the thing about PPC is you can't be a noob. And run PPC. Like LSA, if I ever—

And I think that's what makes it hard.

Yeah.

I think that's what makes it hard.

LSA, go look up some YouTube videos and try it out.

Yeah.

You know, even SEO, like just swipe up and throw it in.

Well, and it's easy 'cause it's a phone call.

Go ahead.

It's a phone call lead for $80 or whatever. It's just not complicated. Like put quarter in, get lead out, right? It's like a very straightforward, It's very straightforward. But, and I think that any time people look, you know, I'm going to like shift away from PPC for a second. I'll come back. We'll come back. Have you ever bought enterprise-level software and realized that managing it really just became a full-time job? Well, that's pretty much exactly why my restoration business switched over to FieldPulse. We were tired of software that promised efficiency but came with endless training sessions, onboarding, and frustrated techs, and using it began to feel like it was a job all on its own. FieldPulse was built for owner-operators who don't want more dashboards. They need scheduling, invoicing, and job tracking, and they need it all to live in one place without the chaos or the learning curve. FieldPulse is simple to roll out, it's easy for your team to actually use, and it was 75% cheaper than the other titans of software we were using. Right now, if you book a demo with FieldPulse, you'll get an exclusive partner offer. It's 20% off an eligible annual subscription and 50% off premium support for your first year. If your software upgrade has turned into a time suck, it might be time to make the move. Book a demo with FieldPulse and see if it's a better fit. Anytime people are like shitting on a lead source at all, like, hey, direct mail doesn't work for me, Angie's List doesn't work for me, Modernize doesn't work for me, LSA doesn't work for me, PPC doesn't— like, maybe.

Yeah.

I can also probably in my phone find like 50 people it works for. So I think the question that people should be asking themselves is, how do I get this to work for me?

Yeah.

Because it clearly is working for someone. Like, it's clearly working for someone. So like lead aggregators, like the obvious answer is like, hey, what's your callback? What's your speed-to-lead technology? Do you have a CRM? Like PPC, maybe it's landing pages, maybe it's keywords. I don't know. Like, we'll unpack that here. But lead sources are working for someone somewhere. They could work for you. So instead of like shitting on it, take a moment, take a breath, and start to try to unpack how are people winning at this game.

One of my favorite entrepreneur moments in my entire entrepreneur life is the The owned and operated event that we had here in Charleston where you had—

Oh yeah.

2 $30 million HVAC and plumbing companies, or one was just HVAC, but one was HVAC and plumbing. And they were competitors and then they were just like giving away their secrets. And both of them were talking about how one of them was like, direct mail to this location rocks for us. And the other guy was like, yeah, are you kidding me? I've—

we've done that in the same market. We can't do it. And it was, it was hilarious because the guy went out to his car and he got the mailer.

Yeah.

And he's just like, this is what we did. This is what worked. And it was, it was so funny because this guy was like, direct mail doesn't work. I, yeah, I remember that. It was, it was hilarious.

Yeah.

Direct mail doesn't work. What are you talking about? And like someone in his market was doing like a 14 times ROI with direct mail, which is crazy. Right. It's absolutely crazy. And it was a comical reminder of exactly this. Like someone is winning. with PPC in your market.

Yeah.

Somebody's doing it.

Yep.

How? Instead of shitting on it, how? Someone's winning with direct mail. Someone's doing it. So how are they doing it?

For those of you who don't know, PPC is pay-per-call. We've kind of talked about that.

Pay-per-click.

When you go search for your service in your area, the first thing that's going to show up is a sponsored LSA ad. The second thing that shows up is PPC, and then you get all your organic results. So PPC is, you know, you are paying for a keyword to show up. The thing that makes PPC amazing is you have so much control over it. LSA, you don't have a lot of control. It's like location and services, and you are managing the spend, making sure that that's happening in the cycle that goes through. With PPC, there are so many things that you can change. You can change the ad copy, you can change the search terms, you can change the landing page, you can change the offer, you can pull in data from your CRM and push it back into paid ads, uh, from revenue standpoint to show that like, hey, these keywords are actually driving revenue. Let's keep doing that. If you've got the right ServiceTitan, um, uh, uh, um, package, you can actually pull that in natively. Um, so there are so many things that you can do to control it, but that also means there's so many things that can go wrong. So PPC is definitely one of those that I don't suggest someone doing themselves. If you really Uh, wanna give it a try, go for it. Uh, just go low budget. Um, but there are a lot of things that can go wrong.

I mean, back in 2016, we had never marketed before, and I bought— I still have the book somewhere.

Might even be in here.

I'll look around for it. Might be in my office. But it's like a dummy's guide to Google AdWords, and, and I read it cover to cover. And, um, I'm, I'm pretty sure we got leads, but like, It's a lot.

Yeah.

It's, it's a lot. And so this, um, well, one of the topics in our conversation, I think we did this a couple weeks ago, is when do you hire a marketing manager and what do you look for that person to do? And obviously some people disagree. Uh, there's, you know, someone's on every side of the aisle. Uh, PPC is one of those things that I'm just, I have, I just don't see any reason to try to figure out how to bring it in-house. I think it changes a lot. I think it's really complicated. And yeah, I can internalize LSA or something, but there's a lot going on with PPC. So yeah, I agree. I tried to run it on my own. It was sort of stupid. Some people do successfully do it way better than we do, but that's always been like, let's externalize that.

Yeah. And PPC is definitely, it's just a game. And then you can win.

Yeah.

And you focus on the data and that's where you just continue to move budget around and try to continue to optimize the search terms that are coming in. The people that win at it are always testing out new copy, new ads, and are always adding negative keywords and adjusting the budget to where it goes. We were doing an audit of one of those $100,000 a month accounts.

Yeah.

And at first when the team sent it over to me to like look over, I was really excited 'cause we'd found like $15,000 of wasted budget. Like, oh look, like these keywords over the last 90 days have not turned into new clients. And so I was really excited. I was like, ah yes, I get to bring it to them. This might be the chance that we can come and manage their accounts. This is gonna be great.

Yeah.

The problem is, is they were all perfect keywords. Like every single one of them was their service and their area just over the 90 days had not turned in. Oh, that sucks. So I basically went to them, I was like, hey, this is actually technically wasted budget because these keywords have not turned into new clients or new customers.

Yeah.

Any kind of revenue. However, you're big enough that you just want to keep showing up on these keywords. So my suggestion is y'all are doing everything really well. Keep doing what you're doing. But yeah, like it is a, The goal is to find waste, remove waste, and keep putting budget behind keywords that are driving you new business.

You know, back to like LSA versus PPC, because I've gotten this comment a lot of like, hey, it doesn't work. So like, first off, how are you measuring? How are you measuring if it doesn't work? Like, do you have access to your CRM? Do you know, are they tracking phone numbers? Like, there's a lot to unpack. It, it's more complicated than LSA. To determine if it's working or not.

Yeah.

So I think start there. If you're like in an evaluation, like a vibe isn't enough. With LSA, a vibe's like kind of enough. Like, ah, I get 10 phone calls a month or whatever from LSA, like great, it's probably really easy to track. PPC, the way that it functions is, I don't, you can't, can you send it directly to a phone call? I think you can.

You can, the call-to-call link—

But like most people go to the website.

But they are ruling that out.

But yeah, so like the way that it usually works is it's kind of like Meta ads, where Meta ads and Google, there is a way to press over to a phone call, but for the most part, it's gonna send you to a landing page, and on that landing page, something is going to happen. You're gonna present someone with an offer, you're gonna present someone with a form fill, A click-to-call button. Um, you're gonna do something where you explain the business a little bit more. And I think this is where it gets really complicated because it's not like LSA where someone, hey, you show up, you're on the map pack, whatever, I'm gonna click the call button, boom. Someone's going to your website.

Yeah.

Probably to a landing page, and the landing page has to be good so that you convert that click to a call.

Yeah.

Clicks to Calls, I'm just saying. It's the name of our series. Uh, but it's the same thing with Meta ads. Like, if you're running Facebook ads or whatever, like, it's gonna send that click to your website or some website somewhere. Someone's gonna fill a form out, they're gonna click a call, they're gonna do something. Um, and you have to optimize that landing page to convert. And I think that this is where PPC gets such a bad rap, is There's there's a lot that goes into that. There's a lot that goes into creating a perfect landing page, not even just from like design and like thought process and like what's my offer and how do I get people to click on the buttons I want them to click on. But like even more importantly, when someone does what I want them to do, do I know if someone gives me a lead, if they call through my website? and they only got to that page from PPC, do I know that that's where it came from? Do I have a unique tracking number? Am I watching traffic for those landing pages? Like, there's just way more shit going on than LSA. And I think that's where it's like, hey, this is confusing. It's not that it doesn't work, it's just that it's complicated. More complicated than LSA.

Yeah, it's definitely way more complicated than LSA. And so there's definitely like, you also need to spend more than you can in LSA. We're starting to put limits on, we used to allow you to come in and say, hey, let's just try out a $2,500 budget and just see how this goes. And the problem is, is you need more data inside a month to be able to know whether this is going to work or not. So we're starting to limit it to where like, hey, if you're not spending at least $5,000 a month in ad spend, it's probably not even worth running just because you need enough data. A good example of that would be, let's say for easy numbers, you've got a $100 budget and your cost per click is $10. You're only gonna get 10 clicks that day and they're not all gonna come from the perfect keyword that you want.

Yeah.

There's gonna be variations of that. So now if that, you know, let's say it's $100 a day, it's going to take you, you know, another 10 days before you have enough information to make good decisions.

Yeah.

And that really is, More on the month. So I'd almost rather spend $10,000 in one month than, you know, $3,000 over 3 months trying to figure out whether this ad campaign is going to work, just 'cause you get enough data inside the account. You can make decisions faster and based on what's working and what's working faster and obviously try to get to that perfect number.

Yeah.

Which is revenue. Now with that being said, PPC is unique because it's one of the only campaigns out there that gets you a quick lead tomorrow or today. You can turn it on and sometimes get leads the next day. It doesn't always happen that way.

Yeah.

Well, I should say PPC is one of the few campaigns you can run within the next week, you can start getting new leads. And it's hard to do that in pretty much anything else. Organic's going to take you months. Of effort and work trying to get that. PPC though, you know, within 2 to 6 weeks, you should be able to have some good results inside your account.

If you're running a home service business and you're growing, but cash still somehow feels tight all the time, you are not alone. A lot of owners are doing more revenue, hiring more people, buying more trucks, but still making big decisions without really knowing what the numbers are telling them. And that's why I'm such a big fan of what Tyler Martin is doing at CFO made easy. He works with HVAC, plumbing, and electrical companies in that $4 to $12 million range, and it's real CFO-level support— not bookkeeping and not tax stuff. This is actual help around cash flow, pricing, margins, and planning ahead. One of the cool things is you get to work directly with Tyler, and Tyler has scaled and sold a $25 million service business, so he's been in it and he knows what works. To get started, Click the link below to book a free 20-minute strategy call to review your numbers, identify what's creating cash or margin pressure, and get clear next steps. And I think it's just, it's a lot to monitor. You know, we bought a business this week and I think they were spending $8,000 a month on Google. And I just say Google because they didn't know what section of Google. Right? Like, they didn't— well, I actually thought it was all LSA. And then, 'cause it just shows as Google on the credit card statements. Yeah, I started popping it open a little bit and I was like, oh, okay, like, actually $5,000 or $6,000 of this is PPC.

Yeah.

And $3,000 of it is LSA.

Interesting.

And like, my point is, they were spending like that for 6 months and they had no idea. They actually didn't even know that they were on PPC, 'cause they were just like managing it themselves and they set it up and forgot it. So like, We cut it because if no one's looking at this thing for 6 months, it is not performing. It's not converting. No one's looking at the landing pages. There's no way there's a win here for anybody. Yeah, it was kind of interesting. So more complicated, more landing pages.

Yeah, the big mistakes we're seeing in PPC right now is one, not spending enough. That's going to be a problem. It's just going to be hard to win if you're not spending enough, and that's going to be dictated on your market. You know, I just, I just mentioned a $5,000, like kind of a limit. If you go into Las Vegas right now and you're trying to bid on HVAC keywords, $5,000 is not going to get you anywhere. You need to be way closer to like $12,000, $15,000 a month and be prepared to invest that.

Second mistake. Alternatively, if you're in the middle of absolutely nowhere, maybe $1,000. There's— I'm telling you, dude, 2025, 2026, it's the year Of rural markets. It's the year of nobody services this place, let's just get all the leads. I think I told you, there's— I keep talking to these companies that are kind of in like more rural environments, and they're just, they're growing like a freaking weed. And you're like, dude, what are you doing? And they're like, yeah, we just turned on Google for the first time. It's like, what have you, what have you been doing for the last decade? Like, this is incredible that this is still an opportunity in these places.

Yeah.

Versus like a Vegas where like, yeah, you're— that is less of an opportunity.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. First mistake seems to be not spending enough. The second is not monitoring it. You do have to be monitoring. If you have—

Just like setting and forgetting it.

It's not one of those campaigns. You are just gonna burn cash. Don't do that to yourself.

Yeah, yeah.

The third mistake we're seeing, and this happens a lot when you have your agencies, multiple agencies, inside you running your marketing. If you have a website agency or an SEO agency that is making changes to your pages and they're not communicating that to your ad company, or you don't have a marketing manager whose job is to make sure that everybody's on the same page, you will change landing pages and not tell us about it. And suddenly we realize, oh, we're not sending them to a good landing page anymore. That's been changed.

So to get to, just to like give an example, So it'd be like your ad copy, which somebody searches plumber Akron or whatever, your ad copy might be like, hey, free inspection, free service call, whatever, 10% off the repair, family owned. I don't know. And then someone sends it to a landing page and it's like HVAC replacements, click here for financing, right? Like someone had a good intention, but like the ad copy does not match with what you just sent them to.

Yeah, yeah, that's actually—

Yeah, that makes sense. I can see that being like a normal problem.

That happens a lot, but that's not as big as a, hey, this is now redirecting to a completely different landing page, right?

Yeah, yeah.

That's when it's like, okay, we just lost a bunch of leads. Why? This campaign's been working for the last 3 months. Suddenly it's not working. What happened? Oh, it's the landing page.

Yes. I would assume the feedback loop is an important part, You have to know, and it's complicated. Well, I have comments on this, but it's complicated. It's complicated to understand where every lead comes from. And we've been pitched all the freaking softwares in the world to solve this. And dude, we just use like Google Sheets. Like it's, I don't know. It's, I just, I don't know. I'm kind of like software'd out. It's 2026. I'm software'd out. Tired. Yeah, so we just use like fucking Google Sheets to track like where everything comes in and the feedback. And then ideally we have it marked by tags inside our CRM to pull up like, hey, how do we know if PPC's working? Or how do we know if, was this an organic lead? Was this a Google Business Profile lead, LSA, whatever? So I think tracking and like showing the data is important.

Yeah.

It's really hard to, like hit something that you don't know where it is. And it's really hard to know if a campaign's working if you can't see if it's driving customers. And calls aren't even enough. Like, you need it to drive revenue.

Yeah.

Like, we've driven, uh, we— it was something, it was years ago, but someone, um, we did this campaign and I wanna say it was direct mail and we sent it out and all these people called us thinking that we were, the power company, like FirstEnergy, our local electrical supplier. And, um, so like on the surface we had a tracking phone number. It's like, dude, we got all these freaking phone calls. Yeah, hell yeah, this is amazing. We got 50 phone calls. Um, but we weren't tracking the next layer down, which is, hey, what's the, what's the revenue?

Yeah.

From those 50 phone calls? How do we know, how do we know who those 50 phone calls were? How do we trace that to the job? Uh, and again, there— I'm sure there's software out there to do it. Uh, we use Google Sheets, so you can just use Google Sheets and you can get there. Uh, you don't have to overcomplicate this. Um, but yeah, I think that's important, and giving that feedback to whoever's running your PPC. Like, if they're running the landing pages, like, yes, I'm getting conversions from that landing page, I'm getting form fills, I'm getting phone calls, I'm getting something from them. Uh, and also Those are turning into revenue. So it's not just something, it's here's the revenue that came from it. And then you can start figuring out, after all of that, that is when I will listen to you tell me if PPC is good or bad, because you have enough data to tell me.

Yeah, absolutely.

'Cause like, hey, if I got 100 phone calls and 50 of them booked into leads and you sold 10, maybe that's bad. Like how much were the 10 sold for?

Yeah.

Right? Like you need to know all the way down to revenue to determine like good or bad.

Yeah. Yeah. And to piggyback off that, I think that you should be working hand in hand with your PPC team engaged on lead quality. But the one that I'm not saying—

It's a sport. It's a contact sport.

It is. It is. The one thing that I'm really interested in, I just got off a phone call before this to talk to our head of PPC just to make sure like I was prepared for this, this interview, this podcast, and I asked the question of like, hey, are there any offers in the market that you feel like is just absolutely crushing it? Like when they offer this on their landing page, they see an increase in leads. And she said, no.

Free water heaters.

Yeah. She said no. BOGOs versus $100 off versus, you know, think, yeah, free water heaters probably go really well.

Well, see, I believe, I believe this because something that we learned when we first started outbound Was we kept thinking, oh, I need to change this and change that and change whatever. And what we found is almost the opposite. You need an offer that makes sense, that can drive action, and then you just need to run that motherfucker into the ground.

Yeah.

And so we have some promotions we haven't changed in 4 years because it continues to work. So why would we change it? It drives a lot of performance. And we're still experimenting with new ones, but when we first started running this type of promo, we were changing it every 30 days.

Yeah.

And then after a certain point, we're like, why? I haven't even called all of our customer list yet. The first promo that we had, I still haven't even told 90% of our customers that that promo existed. So why are we changing it? So yeah, it was kind of a big mental shift for us. So to me, that totally tracks. If you've got one that works, if it drives leads, just run it.

I'm glad that tracks for you because it did not track for me. My first thought was there's definitely going to be an offer out there that's going to absolutely crush across the other ones, which makes me think one of two things. One, if you're not testing and you are giving as much off as possible, you might be really just cutting yourself short. Maybe you just stick with the very basic offer of $100 off or Hey, just book a call.

Like, we'll come out and— Which that would drive, that's gonna drive leads. Like $100 off will drive.

Right.

So maybe just stay with those foundations. Like that's basically one of ours.

But if you don't test those, you don't know.

Yeah.

And so you need to be working with your team, internal, external, whatever it is, to make sure that you're testing offers to know that one, whatever you are offering is actually generating you more leads or a better cost per lead. Or two, being able to rip that out so you're just not undercutting your profit margins When you go to sell a new water heater.

Yeah, yeah, no, yeah, that makes sense. But that is, that is funny. But yeah, we've seen the same thing. Um, we had Jay Blanton, we had Isaac Zimmerman on, uh, and he's running a promo called Unclogs for Dogs right now. It's been the same promo for 6, 7 months, and like, he's not changing it, he's just running it harder and finding slightly different ways to word it. And, uh, but it's the same offer, same thing. It's like, uh, 9 big Basically like a $99 unclog drain promo, which like not a complicated promo, right? And what's kind of funny is all these people are like, dude, what's the promo? Like, what's the magic sauce? Like, how are you doing all these leads? And honestly, it has nothing to do— like, the promo is not that complicated. People have been running $93 or free drain cleanings for like 20 years. So there's nothing like that crazy about the promo. It's the follow-up, it's the frequency, it's the mediums, it's like all the different places he's running it. And that's the sales process after that makes it work, but not necessarily like the promo.

Yeah.

Which I think just like, again, I think it catches a lot of people by surprise, but it works. I talk to a lot of home service business owners, and if you are anything like the many shops that I know, You're getting flooded with AI pitches right now. Most of them sound great, but then they fall apart the second they hit the real world. The one that I've kept coming back to is Avoca. What impressed me is they actually get how contracting businesses run, and it's not just some AI answering service. Avoca is going to handle inbound calls, outbound follow-ups, texts, web leads, dispatching, and even coaching your CSRs inside of one system that's built for growing home service companies. And if you're on ServiceTitan, this matters. Their integrations go deep, so you're not duct taping 5 tools together and hoping nothing breaks during your busy season. I also like that they're honest about what AI should and shouldn't do. When a call needs a human, they have a 24/7 live transfer built in. No drop balls, no awkward customer experience. Owners using Avoca are seeing hold times basically disappear and booking rates jump, sometimes by more than 30%. And that is real revenue, not just a vanity metric. If you're looking for the one AI partner that actually helps you book more jobs without creating more chaos, this is worth taking a look. Book a demo at the link below. Any other closing thoughts on PPC? Like, what do we think?

I mean, I think everyone should try it for their area. I think you should use an expert. Don't do it yourself. I think that it can win. In every market, you just gotta make sure that you're doing it right, that you have the right—

Someone's winning in your market with it.

Somebody is.

Yeah, somebody is, yeah. My take is PPC is not LSA. And LSA, you don't need to be very sophisticated to run, which is good and bad. So if you are thinking about, hey, how do I find another lead source that works? PPC could be good, could be terrible, I have no idea. For you, most of the determination of that is how good is your process?

Yeah.

Do you have a clean CRM?

Yeah.

If you're running pen and paper, yeah, no, you should not be doing it. If you don't know how to book a call and you don't know your call— if you don't know your call booking rate, you should probably not be doing it.

Right.

So I think there's like, it's sort of like an upperclassman type of marketing where like you, you do need to have some fundamentals built into the business. You don't need to be as detailed as what we are where like, hey, I know every lead and I know where every lead came from and I know what it turned into, revenue or not. Like we know all of that. You don't need to be there, but you should be heading there.

Yeah.

Because if you don't have that information, it's— you just can't determine if it's working or not.

Yeah.

And if you can't determine if it's working or not, then it's hard to make decisions. Like you need data.

And you were asking earlier, does PPC still work? I can say that like I was just checking our numbers, 80% of our clients are what we call on track, which means they're hitting the lead volume for their budget that they need in order for that to work. And that number fluctuates. In December it was higher, January it's a little bit lower.

Yeah.

And so like that number, my guess is it'll stay pretty much that way in February and start going up in March. in March as well. So it works for 80% of our clients, which is a pretty decent number. That's pretty much on track on what you would expect across the board from marketing. It's a little lower from ours and our other services, but it's still a really good service and channel for you to drive good leads.

Awesome. Thanks for everybody. Thanks for joining us. If you like what you heard, make sure you hit that like button, hit the subscribe button, Give us five stars wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. I appreciate it. Join us next week. See ya.

Bye.