The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online.
Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of LLM Visibility™ and the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability.
Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve.
Whether you’re a C-suite leader, marketing professional, or founder building your brand, this podcast is your guide to understanding the evolution of SEO into LLM Visibility™ — because if you’re not visible to the models, you won’t be visible to the market.
The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
How To Set Better Conversion Goals In Google Ads With Jeff Coleman
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We get back to paid ads fundamentals and why AI automation only works when we set clear, revenue-connected conversion goals. We share practical ways to define personas, protect lead quality, and build landing pages that help Google Ads learn what “good” actually looks like.
• goal-first thinking for Google Ads and paid social automation
• common conversion tracking mistakes that burn budget
• building multiple personas and matching each to the right channel
• avoiding spam traffic on Display and filtering low-quality leads
• why gradual budget changes beat turning campaigns on and off
• budget planning using CPC estimates and minimum lead volume
• lead scoring methods that feed better data back to ad platforms
• landing pages as single-purpose conversion tools with cleaner tracking
• funnel strategy beyond one-shot high-intent clicks
Guest Contact Information:
Website: factorfour.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/jeffcoleman
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Free SEO Consultation: www.ewrdigital.com/discovery-call
With over 5 million downloads, The Best SEO Podcast has been the go-to show for digital marketers, business owners, and entrepreneurs wanting real-world strategies to grow online.
Now, host Matthew Bertram — creator of the LLM Visibility Stack™, and Lead Strategist at EWR Digital — takes the conversation beyond traditional SEO into the AI era of discoverability.
Each week, Matthew dives into the tactics, frameworks, and insights that matter most in a world where search engines, large language models, and answer engines are reshaping how people find, trust, and choose businesses. From SEO and AI-driven marketing to executive-level growth strategy, you’ll hear expert interviews, deep-dive discussions, and actionable strategies to help you stay ahead of the curve.
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What The Show Promises
SPEAKER_00This is the unknown secrets of internet marketing. Your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential. Let's get started.
Why Paid Ads Still Matter
SPEAKER_02Howdy, welcome back to another fun-filled episode of The Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I'm your host, Matt Bertram. Hopefully, you had a great summer and you're getting back into things. And I think uh as we get back into things, it's important to focus on the fundamentals of how to build a great funnel. So uh bringing on today Jeff Coleman. Welcome to the show.
SPEAKER_01Hi, Matt. Thanks for having me today.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, well, you know, I think that uh we talk a lot about uh SEO, we've talked a lot about AI on the show. And I think sometimes people forget um the importance of paid ads, and also a lot of well, paid ads is is making leaps and bounds with AI as well. And so, you know, even like with like like a Facebook ad, you're just like saying, This is my goal, right? And then it just starts to like do all the work for you. You're not having to do it anymore. But you gotta still understand what that goal is and kind of what those fundamentals are, and keeping a human in the loop and understanding what good looks like. And so I thought it would be good that we could maybe go into like the fundamentals of building a good persona and how to um you know build that target strategy differentiated from your competitors, and then like leveraging on the paid ads, because you know, I think people sometimes think SEO is going to do it all for them, or they think paid ads are gonna do it all for them. Yeah, and and it it's a very it's a combination and it it's something that they work together really well. And and so I would love to kind of just have you kind of set the table for this discussion.
Set The Right Conversion Goal
SPEAKER_01Sure. Well, you brought up something that I really want to make sure we we make is a super clear point on, and that is the goal. So the algorithms, uh Google's algorithms, broadly speaking, are very goal-oriented. And in advertising, when you do Google Ads, they are trying to drive you to the goal that you define. The biggest mistake we see a lot of advertisers doing is they're not very, very deliberate about the goal that they set for their campaign. So um, we took over an account um about two years ago uh for a local credit union, and they were using driving directions as one of their goals. And Google sent them like 60, 70 leads a month, and this is they're they only serve like a 25 mile radius of driving directions, and they're paying $30 to get someone who's probably already a customer to get the directions to their place. So, you know, those are that's a complete waste of dollars, but also like how long a phone call is or making sure you're asking for the right information on your form, you want to make sure those conversions really matter to your business before you do anything else. Because much like Facebook, Google is moving more towards doing a lot of it for you. So if you don't have the goals defined properly, you're playing the wrong game.
SPEAKER_02So one campaign, well, actually, I've seen this on a number of campaigns. So, like, you know, you you set a goal of like engagement, right? And you you're you're letting it run and you're not managing it, and so people start spamming it, like depending on like if you're trying to do something outside the box or whatever, people start spamming it in that engagement, and then if you don't like correct it, right, it starts optimizing for that. And so I've seen some campaigns that like have been optimized for like spam comments and and you're like spending money on this, and and so I I think that what what I've seen more than anything else is a lot of these things are built by engineers, okay. And and and they've done a lot better with the the the UXUI and like kind of understanding, but if you're a business owner, you're not necessarily an engineer, or if you're if you're managing this and you don't understand how these things work, um it's not always as intuitive. Like, I think they've come a long way, but but understanding the fundamentals and like the foundation of like how these things work, and and I I've seen that um uh with LLM training, and like people know, you know, it's funny, like you always like, oh, I just need to know how to drive the car, I don't need to know how like the car's working, but I almost feel like in the age of AI, like you want to get those good fundamentals of like what it's doing and and how it's thinking and kind of how it puts things together, because that bases your understanding of okay, I need to consider these things when I'm setting this goal, or these are the things I need to look for. And and someone can't just give you like best practices punch list always. And if you just go down the checklist, you're in good shape. Like, I think that there's all these nuances now marketing, yeah.
SPEAKER_01And and you know, the car lasts a lot longer if you know why it does what it does, and you put oil in it when it needs it, and all of those things. So um, I think your analogy is is spot on. But one of the things we find is as you said, uh uh, you know, Google Ads was built by engineers. A lot of the people who were drawn to running Google Ads, particularly in the early years, were much more of an engineering mindset. Yes. And um, my background's marketing. I did marketing before there was online marketing, you did offline, you know. Um, and so one of the
Personas That Change Channel Choice
SPEAKER_01things we've learned, and I found I did it somewhat intuitively at first, and we've become much more explicit, is we help clients identify their ideal customer profile, they're the personas of the people who they are trying to reach. And that helps just get so much clearer on what your ad in your landing page should say. And then we work with them to identify what makes them different. And it is still shocking to me after doing this for 17 years that a lot of business owners can't explain to you, and even marketing people at a larger organization can't re-explain to you why people actually choose to do business with you.
SPEAKER_02I oh so oh, so just when we talk about personas, like I think people try to make one persona do too much, too. And and I and you you gotta you gotta have maybe different slices or different campaigns for different buyers, and you know, depending on who you're targeting or what part of the organization you're targeting, it's not one size fits all.
SPEAKER_01Well, uh it's actually back to that credit union example I mentioned. When they were trying to push their high-yield um checking accounts, we real we did a couple personas for them and realized there was actually two distinct markets we were trying to reach. One was the person who was actually out searching for the best rate, and those were easy, you know, like just dial in, their rates are great, all of that. And then there's the person who thinks they should be doing something else with their money. It's sitting in a checking account, but they're not out looking. We're never going to find them on search. So we use the display network and um the the uh performance max campaigns and the discover page and things like that to find those people because you could have the best ads going, you're never gonna reach that whole segment that you know is very busy, high-income earners, but they're they have a hundred thousand dollars sitting in their checking account, which isn't doing anything for them, um, other than you know, just having the money there. But um, they could be earning four and a half percent on that, and they just need to be told that you know there's an easy way to do it. It's it's you know, and so dividing those personas, as you mentioned, is super important, and you have to assign you know the right keywords to them of the your whole campaign, and and or decide that search isn't the right place, that it has to be um somewhere else that you're reaching them. And so that that's so critical to the success of the campaign.
SPEAKER_02The the display the the display used to be a jungle uh to to navigate all that, and now you got AI helping you by setting that goal, and it can kind of figure it out, and then maybe you yeah, there's still a lot of spam in the display network.
SPEAKER_01Um, so you have to be super careful. We often turn off all the mobile apps. Um, we don't run any of the ads on mobile apps because we just find you know, you have a 200% conversion rate um because those people are getting paid when someone converts. Yeah, yeah. Um, and so yeah, you still have to be careful there, but it's it's still just reaching people in a different way. And maybe it's not even Google Ads that you're gonna use in the end to reach certain personas, but by defining the personas, you know what where to reach them, what messaging is gonna make sense to them, and then you have to match them with what your business offers and see where there's the overlap. Because you know, if you're not the low-cost uh home service provider and you're running ads about low cost, that's a complete waste of advertising. You need to talk about uh, you know, one of our clients, we talk a lot about convenience because they have online um booking, and you, you know, you actually know when the technician's gonna be coming out, and their competitors don't have that. So it's really important to overlap what who you're trying to reach with what you offer that is different than your competitors, and then really talk to that so that your ads are doing as much work as possible before anyone even clicks on them because they're very expensive per click.
SPEAKER_02Um they used to be just a couple cents, and now some of these markets have been bit up where like the whole strategy has to be scrapped because it the it it it's just so saturated. And you know, I I think that um there's been there's been kind of this fan out of uh where ads get spent, and I think people forgot about the fundamentals to to a certain degree, or they're just kind of like what what's the what the thing I've seen the most is right, like so the AI's running the campaign, and it's been running like maybe there's a goal, or there, you know, there there's something in there that that over time you've spent this massive amount of money and it's kind of figured it out the conversions, and it's like you can't stop that campaign, like that campaign
Avoid Display Spam And Bad Traffic
SPEAKER_02knows too much, or it's gonna reset all that. And like, so so sometimes these campaigns come in and my team like looks at it, and we're like talking and we're like, we can't touch that one, like that that one has to stay there as as cringe as it is, because who knows what it's learned, and like it would be nice if you could export some of that stuff at some point, but they don't want to share that, you know.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, it uh there definitely are campaigns you don't want to touch or you want to tweak only at the very margins um because it's working. Um, but yeah, that that gets into a whole nother problem of not knowing how the campaign was built and trying to manage it overline in the most effective way. Um, does get a little messy, but
Campaign Budget Changes Without Breaking Learning
SPEAKER_01so so yeah.
SPEAKER_02So I mean, like I've always one of the tips that I would recommend to everyone listening is like, I don't like working campaigns like a light switch. I don't like here's the campaigns that came in, let's shut these off and let's turn these on. And if a campaign's working, like it needs to be like a gradual kind of transition and also like testing stuff or building around stuff, but like I just see it so much. Um, I've heard some horror stories of clients that left us, and then they're like, Oh, we're redoing the website, we're redoing the ad campaign. Uh, and so like all the SEO is gone, uh, new ad campaign starting fresh, and you know, the the AI has got to relearn, and it just tanks rankings, and and they call back and they're like, Um, we we we didn't take we we we we took for granted like how how smooth everything was running for so long.
SPEAKER_01We thought, you know, that's just the way it was, right? Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah, we've run into that, or someone wants to turn off a campaign for you know reasons that might make business sense, but you know, and then they want to turn it back on in six months, and you're like it doesn't remember, or or the enough has changed that it's starting from scratch, and the CPLs that were the cost per leads that were you know $22 have suddenly jumped to 40. Yeah, and they're like, Well, why'd that happen? I'm like, Well, because you turned it off. And um, so that I mean, there's always business reasons to turn things off because you know, it sometimes that's really important to the business, not the you can't let the campaigns run it, but we do try and advise clients to take the gradual approach, turn things down rather than off if they you know think they're going to use it again in the near future.
SPEAKER_02So, so like I've been trying like when when I when I get involved and like talking to the clients, and you know, it you you bleed into like marketing advice, right? And then like business advice, depending on who you're talking to and and and who the stakeholders are. But I I sometimes like to say, like, okay, this is your like capital expenditure budget, or like these are your operation budget, and like these should almost be on all the time, considered as like branding that you're just always doing. And then, like, if you have like a targeted campaign or seasonal or whatever, and you want to throw extra money at something because you're trying to like get an event or an action, like do that. But you know, I I I feel like with with at least with smaller business owners or kind of people in the professional services space, they want to go zero to a hundred, turn it off, zero to the hundred. Like it just does like it's more about the compounding value, like and people are like, Oh, well, I want to run these ads. And I'm like, you can't create demand and then harvest the demand at the same time in like a two-month window. Like, you know, it's like like I don't I you know, there's there's a lot of kind of discussions about how to to think about this over the long term, and then that gets into a lot of like how to run your business advice to to a certain degree. I don't know if you've uh bumped up against that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so most of our clients are business owners, like the people we work directly with. And so they want to do things their way or what they think is the you know most straightforward way. We've definitely bumped into that. Um, we don't tend to do for our smaller clients much any branding work, you know, what I would define as the branding. Um, but it does matter to just keep things going and not, you know, even turning it down to 10% of what it was is better than turning it off 100% when they're they so so so.
SPEAKER_02Let me ask you this like because I I've gotten like different opinions on it. I'm just curious, like your your experience. So if you have a campaign that's performing really well and the business owner wants to turn it down, right? Like turning it up seems to never be a problem. But turning it down, if you turn it down by a factor of like or a percentage amount of sew amount, it tends to throw off the campaign. And so, like, like like so you said go to 10. Like, if you're running a campaign 100 and you go to 10, I feel like it's a whole different campaign on how it's like optimizing for it. And I don't feel like you can drop it down, like and again, I don't have like a best practice for everybody. That's what I want to hear from you on like if you're gonna turn it down, turn it down by this amount, or and then like let it kind of uh rebalance, and then you can turn it down again. But again, the light switch analogy, I just feel like people like to jarringly change.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so there are business reasons that you have to turn it down. Um, and so what we found is that turning it down to about 10% of you know, if you're spending a hundred dollars a day on a campaign and turning it down to 10, it does reset the campaign to a certain degree, but not as dramatically as turning it off for a week or two. Um the yes, I think that incremental steps down are much better. And even incremental steps up, we found that doubling for a campaign often or doubling the budget often just doubles the spend. You don't get you know the same uh cost per lead out of it. Um, so stepping it up, it's just some businesses are just never gonna hear you when you tell them that. And um, so we've run into that, we run into that with some clients.
SPEAKER_02And do you have any kind of uh tips for if someone's starting a campaign
Budget Rules Of Thumb For New Campaigns
SPEAKER_02fresh, what's a what's a good budget amount? Because I I it tend there there tends to be different considerations when you're running the campaign. Um and like also if we if we zoom out and go broader, a lot of times when you talk to the different reps from the different uh platforms, you know, there's a certain amount of spend you need to spend for the AI to be able to like test and learn over time, but they're they they're they're selling too, right? Like they're so so I'm just curious, kind of what are what are some good like rules of thumb for people listening to to have a framework?
SPEAKER_01Uh a starting place is how much is your click estimated to cost? And I'm I'm talking real ballpark here. Is it two dollars? Is it twenty dollars? Is it you know forty dollars? Because you need to get a certain number of leads. And you know, if you're getting less than 30 leads a month from a campaign, the AI does have a much harder time getting to uh you know optimization and to dial things in because it's just not getting enough data. So that's how we typically look at it is if we get an estimate of um what the cost per click is should be for that um that particular uh campaign, now we look at we do the math out, you know, if you get a 5% conversion rate, you might have to spend, you know, on a $10 click, you might be spending four to five thousand dollars a month to really get that going. Um but it still comes down to you know how much can you afford to and and we have run campaigns on smaller budgets, and we you can still make those work, they just are a little more um unpredictable.
Lead Quality Feedback Loops That Train AI
SPEAKER_02Okay, and so I I would love to to extend that conversation into kind of lead scoring. Okay, so like on e-commerce, it's very easy to to see everything that's happening, right? But with a service-based business, something like that, professional services, you know, they might be running it to a CRM. You hope that they're running it to a CRM. They don't, they're not always running it to a CRM, and they don't have like a good like feedback loop to know like is this lead good or not? And so, you know, if you're using like GA4 or like what what are you to a business owner that is is trying to measure, like is this a good lead, not lead, like you know, I mean you could thumbs up, like thumbs down, like, but how are you measuring that to feed it back to the AI to help it get better leads to get to the right answer faster?
SPEAKER_01That is uh a very important question. And with smaller clients who might be spending just a couple thousand dollars a month, it can get pretty um challenging to figure out the way to do it. So I'll give you a couple examples because they it's different for other for different clients. So we have one client who does CPR training and they come on site and they train like a whole team. They don't they have some classes, but that's not what they want to focus on. What we have ended up doing is on their landing page, you get a little, when you choose get a quote, you get a little pop up that says, Are you an individual looking For a class, or are you looking for on-site training? If they click the individual, that takes them to a completely different website that does have the few classes that they offer for individuals, and that's not counted as a conversion. If they actually fill in the form, that is considered a conversion, and that gets fed back into Google. That then tells Google that we are looking for people who want on-site training. They're probably in a business, you know, they might be a dentist's officer, that's where they do a lot of it. Um, and so over time, over a six-month period, we saw their conversions completely change from almost half being um individuals to um just on-site 95% are one on-site services. So that's one way that is a and they're spending maybe $8,000 a month on Google Ads in a in a fairly tight geographic area. Um, we have a home care um agency that sends people out, you know, into your parents' home or whatever to care for them. And that one's been a nightmare for us because there are so many caregivers who are looking for jobs that call and you end up spending money on those. What we just decided to do recently is they use call rail to track their calls and they're recorded. Is one of our team members listens to every single call, and it's not a high volume, they're not spending a lot, it's uh you know, a half dozen a week or or so, but then tags them as a conversion or not a conversion because there's just no um, we've tried a hundred different ways to try and keep the uh job seekers from calling, but now we're hoping that by tagging just the ones that are real uh leads that that will feed the data, feed better data back into Google to get um results there. So it becomes a you know, that's one of the biggest things. And we work with a number of smaller businesses who we work with someone who does new market tax credits. This is like a tiny little market, um, but the leads are worth well, uh a customer's worth a hundred thousand dollars to them kind of thing. Um, so they're willing to do whatever, it's just you feed that data back in. And uh to be honest, we haven't nailed it for them yet. We've tried a whole bunch of different things.
SPEAKER_02I don't have a good story of how we've gotten that one down, but so so you do mention a good thing that I haven't put those two together. Um, I I'm a little bit outside the the sales process at this point, as well as um uh I'm not in the trenches as much anymore. Um providing like broader strategy, but man, like you made me think of something that's so good, and I'm gonna have to go back to my team. And
Landing Pages That Convert And Track
SPEAKER_02so if there's any other independents out there or agencies listening, one is we are hiring. Okay, so if you're listening, uh we're we're growing and we're going into busy season. So if if you're uh if you're really good and you're you're looking for work, um reach out to us at EWR Digital. Um, but yeah, what I wanted to say though is when you're selling uh landing pages for small businesses, and we we've kind of tended to not work with Jeff as many small businesses anymore because I feel like the consulting that we need to really be charging for uh uh eats into the operational budget of doing the work for the client. If you I I think anybody listening understands what I'm saying. And if you're a business owner out there, please understand explaining it to you and the time that that that operator spends doing that uh does eat into the time that they could be working on your account that they have allocated. And so we've actually started to break that out. Um, but landing pages have been somewhat a challenge depending on the industry or the business owner, and you're running ads to a quasi. No, well, it's not even quasi. You're just running it to whatever site that someone built for you, and like you're just like, I'm just gonna like this funnel is I'm just gonna drop more stuff on there and like hope that it like converts. And the intentionality of the website could have been design, it could have been SEO. Um, typically, conversions is like a lot less information. Like, I I'm a big fan for anyone listening of reverse uh or like I guess it's called reverse navigation where the navigation's at the bottom, so you kind of have like it's very clear. Uh, here's the button you click. Like, I almost want to go back to the days of like the arrows, you know, and HTML and like the red light flashing, like click here. Uh it's a little cringe, but I feel like it like directed you what to do. But you need you need a landing page to be able to tag the goals, to be able to train the AI to feed it. If you're running it to a website, and you know, you might not have as much ability to uh manipulate the tracking in the way that you want to do it, as well as like the user flow, the landing page it gets left off like so much. And sometimes like business owners, like, well, I have you know, I I have this site and it's fantastic. And like, why do I need a landing page? And then, you know, okay, are we gonna put it on a subdomain? Is it gonna be an independent URL? Like it gets into all these like questions that fall back into like business strategy, right? And so um, I don't know. Again, like I do a lot of consulting and and all and also tell me your thoughts on this, but this is what I I I've found to be true over the years. Uh people just don't like paying for strategy, which is crazy to me. It's like, oh, like let's just go build a house, like let's not even use a blueprint. They're like, Oh no, you you have a blueprint um uh to build a house, like let's just build that house that you have the blueprint to. And I'm like, but your house, like you said at the beginning of this conversation, is unique to you, so we should customize that strategy. And so they want that like bundled together, and then they want, you know, they usually they usually pull the trigger when the pain is so great that they're like, we got to go now. And I'm like, Well, like, we let's let's take some time so we don't blow a bunch of money. There's a there's a lot of like uh, I feel like things that need to happen, set up and consulting and even testing before you can really get into it. And so, for any business owners out there listening, like like plan some stuff out a little bit more and and give yourself some ramp up time and don't pull the trigger when it's so painful. Well, I know you're like, oh, I need to do this, but like in the emergency mode, it's hard to solve a problem if the business is looking at the first time. And then if you don't want to pay for the strategy, okay, like if you don't want to pay for the strategy, then you you you really like that's where I've seen the rise of like, well, uh, we do all of this industry, okay. We do all of this industry, but guess what? Again, so I'm not saying that that's the right way to go either, because these cookie cutter strategies I've seen the reverse feedback happen, right? Like, so if you're like, oh, I just want this company that just does this, and I'll tell you, I didn't intentionally ever do that. I did um like uh remodelers for for a long time, like uh home construction and cab. And at one point, and this was just like word of mouth, like referrals. This is like early on in my career, and I had like five or six, okay, all that knew each other because like one was complaining that I generated them too many leads and I didn't ask the right questions, and they weren't building enough ounces, and then the other ones like contacted me because we were kind of in the same network, and so I like just took them all on as clients, and then they're all on the first page. I was doing mainly SEO, we were doing some paid ads, yeah, but they were all on the first page of Google, and then they're like, Oh, like they're paying more and they're ahead of me, and like you got, you know, you're doing and I'm like, I'm doing the best I can based on the budget you gave me for each one of you, and each strategy is actually kind of independent because you all have different things. Um, but it it it was a big learning experience for me, and I was like, Oh, we only want to take like one one in like a certain geographic area because you know, you they want you to be their team. But there, if anybody's listening to me, I know I'm moving fast, but hopefully you understand, and maybe have had a different, uh a similar war story to to to this. But there are pluses and minuses, I guess, of what I'm saying when you're looking at like a specialty company that only does one set, so they have they have experience in that industry, but it becomes groupthink and it becomes templated to a certain degree, and it it is easier to scale business if you're listening. Um, but if you're the client and a bunch of people know and are using in that geographic area, you know, some sometimes it's it's not not as effective because everybody's running the same strategy. So there's all these considerations that that happen when you when you look at the market. I don't know if you want to speak to any of that. I just wanted to share uh something.
SPEAKER_01You seem a little passionate about it there, Matt.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um, so a couple things there. One is one of the reasons we got focused into doing Google Ads for small to mid-sized businesses was because it needs less time than SEO, it needs less strategy, broadly speaking. Um, and so yeah, it working with you know businesses making a few million dollars a year or whatever, and the business owner we found that you know, I used to do broader marketing um consulting to them, and I just got focused in. I love Google Ads, so you know that was part of it, but it was just an easy, you know, we can get this up and running for you in a few weeks. We do need some strategy, but it's fairly straightforward, and we can use your website and your Google reviews and all of that. Um, but um yeah, I companies don't want to pay for strategy, and so fitting it in as best we can, I think, is how we've approached it, and you learn as you go as well. Landing pages, I couldn't agree with you more that most campaigns need landing pages to make the economics work. Because when you send someone to the website, you know, we live in the uh the squirrel attention economy, like, oh squirrel, you know, I've uh there's something over here I want to read about or something. On a landing page, you keep them super focused on why they're there. You try to speak to them specifically based on what campaign
Funnel Thinking Beyond One Shot Sales
SPEAKER_01they came from, so you know what the ad said, and you can speak to that and continue that conversation and you make it dead simple for them to figure out what's the next step, which is usually filling in the form or making the phone call. And so if you are going to run Google Ads, I highly, highly recommend you run it to a landing page, not your main website, because main websites have multiple jobs. You want a landing page that has one job, and that is to get the person to convert, and you'll see much better results from that. And I've seen numbers, at least for service businesses, it's about three times the rate of conversion on a landing page, yeah, just across the whole market than it is on your website.
SPEAKER_02And with the landing page, put the same offer that's on the ad on the landing page, and and even if you get into like, I mean, I'm I'm I'm a little more artistic and elegant, I like to solve big problems, and that's why I have a whole team that like is executing. I I get brought in on the hardest problems, uh, Jeff, and and and so, but I I would tell you that algorithmically, right? At a very simplistic level, I mean the AIs have got smarter, they're looking for pattern recognition, they're looking for matching. And and I've seen this in like even social media um or even social media posts. If in your like headline you say you do something and you talk about what you do, there's a higher like like distribution rate. Okay. With ads, if you're saying what the offer is and it's on the landing page and they check it and they match it, because you gotta have that where the target page is, your cost per click's gonna go down. And and to your point, a home page or a website is trying to do multiple things, and the landing page is trying to do one thing. And if you want to like I I the analogy I use for everybody is uh like if you're going to a restaurant, you know those machines, and actually it's funny, anyways. Side note, squirrel, purple squirrel. Uh I know the person that invented it, but anyways, the the those machines that you go to and you fill you fill them up, right? You pet press what you want, like tea, water, different kinds of like sodas. Like not very many people at uh would do like a suicide. I used to call it a suicide, like you get a little bit of all of them, right? And then it gets really diluted, and then you take a sip of it and you're like, or when you drink water and you think it's Sprite, or vice versa, or something like that, like you're not getting what you want. With the landing page, you have a specific purpose, you have a specific persona, you have a specific campaign that's doing that, and it's laser focused. And and and you want to get all the noise and you want it to be all signal, and and you want to be able to measure how effective that message is to that audience set and try to get to the business number of what the customer acquisition cost is and and how many conversions to then start to optimize the offer, right? Because sometimes you have to change the whole offer. Maybe your offer just doesn't work for that that audience set. Um, or there's friction in the conversion. Like I've seen uh like how many forms, like I've I've even done personal tests. I've uh there's a lot of stuff online, but like you just get rid of one form. So like name, unless your CRM is like first name and last name, right? Like, don't don't create two forms that someone has to fill out. I think it's something like 10 like conversion rate if you just change that to form or and and now there's forms that kind of tell you how how how much you have if you're asking like a questionnaire, which I've actually found the questionnaires um for for like downloadables, which we haven't even got into that. I know we got a few more minutes here. Maybe you want to talk about the different components of the funnel. Some people are just like one shot, try to get the whole conversion. Um, I I like the middle of the funnel, I like just getting people to raise their hand or download something and get more information out of them because then that helps you better sell them. And it's not spam if you need it and it's relevant and the timing is right. But if like you're trying to sell something, something of to someone that doesn't want it or not in the market for it, something that might have been totally in the market. Now it's spam. Like you're trying to buy a car, right? You're trying to buy a car, you've already bought the car. Now no ads are like helpful at all. And so, so there's there's a lot of these considerations that that I think that uh business owners, at least in my experience, they just want to like say, here you go, fix it. I want to put money in, I want um X coming out of it. And there's so many steps to get to that compression. Um that takes time, it takes uh data, it takes a strategy that you you that just doesn't happen overnight. And so to even build a a funnel that is that that is break-even funnel, like I do I've done affiliate stuff or whatever, but like to break even funnel that to get to that is like kind of a golden ticket, like once you can you're you can keep running ads, right? You can keep running ads and it pays for itself, and then you need to tear it up, like see, we had we didn't even get into all this, right? But to tear it up, like those bigger sales or conversions, because you know, if you're selling a $20 item versus you know a couple thousand dollar item, you can spend more money to do different things, and you can't not every campaign's the same, I guess.
SPEAKER_01You know, yeah, oh, and that's so very true. I mean, the difference between home services, which someone needs now in most cases, versus retirement planning, yes, where someone thinks I should do this, but I'm not sure if I'm ready, all of those kind of things really changes the how you have where they you find your um prospects in the funnel. So it's really um it's important to understand what your sales process looks like so that you know where you're trying to capture the ideal customer, where they're gonna be in that process.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so as y'all can probably hear, I I bet Jeff's got dogs, and you know, Amazon, Amazon or something is has has sold uh something and no, just kidding. So uh keep going, Jeff.
SPEAKER_01Sorry about that.
SPEAKER_02No, no worries. So let's let's so I love this conversation. I think like like easily this can be broken out into a workshop or you know, uh a whiteboarding session, like take because this is this is fundamentals that people tend to skip over. Um, and I've even seen uh a lot of like people are launching AI, and you know AI sometimes goes off the rails, man. Like you got so so you gotta you gotta build the guardrails, you gotta know what good looks like, you want to break it into small components of what you're doing, and to have someone that has this kind of institutional knowledge of how to convert somebody, AI doesn't replace that, it enhances it, it helps with like crunching data, it comes with like trends, it comes with really on the paid ad side. Uh, people don't give these platforms as much credit. I think, you know, I know we're talking about paid ads here, but man, uh what is it? Facebook just launched like a new AI where from a privacy standpoint, like they got crushed from like, oh, we well, we can't just look at like like tracking the people, we actually have to do intent-based targeting and they rebuilt their whole ad platform from the bottom up. And Facebook is just like doing exactly what you're saying on the fundamental side. And if you know how to leverage that automation or to leverage that uh like a gentic ability, um, you could just absolutely crush it.
Factor4 Marketing And Closing Takeaway
SPEAKER_02Um, but tell me a little bit about uh factor four marketing, factor four.com, kind of what y'all are doing and kind of how to how to better get in touch with you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, so we focus on service businesses, um, typically people with little higher ticket items. And um we're a team of five. Well, I'm sorry, I have five employees, team of six total. And um, yeah, we love helping clients figure out these kind of sticky problems with Google Ads. Um, that's where I have the most fun, is if you can't figure out what conversions to be focused on, how can we fine-tune that so that you actually are getting what you want, you're feeding the right information back into uh the um Google Ads or Microsoft ads so that you can get the results that you're really looking for. Um, you can find us at factor4.com. As I mentioned, we're small, you fill in the contact form, it actually comes to me. I'm happy to set up a conversation um to talk about what you're you know struggling with, what you're trying to achieve. And um, you know, we work with small to mid-sized businesses. Um, we do have some larger clients, but really my sweet spot is helping business owners who are in that mid-size um uh type of business that really want to figure out how to get a consistent flow of new leads coming in every month.
SPEAKER_02So, guys, Jeff Coleman is somebody you should have in your back pocket or someone like him. If you're a business owner out there, you might not need paid ads right now, or you might be in between agencies, or you might want to get an audit on your existing kind of ads that are running. Like that is one thing I recommend, like a health check every year, and also go to different doctors. Like, I think that you know, different prescriptions um and uh are are are important to look at because people are gonna look at it from a different angle. So, like a health check. But having somebody, if you're a business owner like Jeff, that you can that you can reach out to, that you could call, that you can talk to his team, and they're they're really gonna put the focus and attention on your business, um, I think is incredibly important. So, you know, save his information um and and go check out uh factor4.com. Um, thank you so much for listening. Um, Jeff, I want to ask you one question. All right, what is like the one biggest last question? What is one of the biggest like unknown secrets of internet marketing that you feel like people have forgotten or left out, or you they come in and you tend to see the same thing over and over and over again?
SPEAKER_01Uh it was actually what we started with was the conversions. They're just not thinking about what is the real goal of my campaign. And if you can nail that, everything else gets a little easier and you're really focused on what matters most.
SPEAKER_02I love that. So, guys, if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful tool on the planet, the internet, and now like with a function of AI and agentique, um, you know, keep listening to this podcast for more great tips. Um, you know, like I said, we are hiring ewrdigital.com. You can check out what we do, doing a lot of reputation management stuff. Uh, we're doing a lot of like showing up in AI. Um, we're full service, but uh they sponsor this podcast, they keep it going. Uh, we've been we've been doing this for 15 plus years consistently. So um thank you so much for your support. Uh leave comments, leave reviews. We really appreciate it. Until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.
