"Hello and welcome back to another episode of the Collective Clicks podcast. This is your host, Brandon Baitman, and today I'm joined by Garrett Craigan from my team. We're going to talk about all kinds of fun stuff, but before we get too deep into it, we're going to start with a kind of fun technical nugget. Garrett, do you want to share that?"

"Yep. Okay, so before I get into this, this is a little bit on the higher end, but I'm going to be putting a Loom clip in the notes for this episode so you can go and watch me do it in account. One of the big tactics we use with our clients is called portfolio bidding. Basically, how that works is it lets you combine the data from different campaigns to pull the learnings of each of those campaigns into one bidding model. The way we do it is we have that shared amongst all of our clients' campaigns, so the impact is a lot greater. But what I would recommend doing is, if you are running your own PPC, I would still do portfolio bidding in your own account across all of your different campaigns you're running and get a fraction of the benefit of that tactic that we use in your account. Because, as with even just one account, having those learnings pulled only benefits your performance, and it's a very easy way to use AI just that much more in your PPC. And like I mentioned, I'll do a quick walkthrough of that process and put that in the notes for the episode."

"Fantastic. Thank you, Garrett. It's a huge, huge value add and something that I've literally never seen done by anybody else in this industry. So there's a lot of value here. Let's talk about our topic for today. Our topic is shady or predatory things that agencies do in sales or in general working with Real Estate Investors and those kinds of things. I want to give people that are listening a little bit of an idea of what to look out for, you know, what's a good sign, what's a bad sign. Some of these things are honest mistakes, some of these things are malicious. We're just going to go through all the stuff that you should look for that you probably would end up knowing if you were to work with agency after agency. After 10 years, just think like, what did I learn about how to choose the right partner to work with and how not to choose the right partner? You'd probably end up with this list."

"We're going to talk about ownership of your account, different parts of the sales process and how they act in sales, different ways of problem-solving throughout the whole process, and even some different campaign segmentations and little technical things like that that can completely change your perspective of the results that you're getting. And how basically all of these things can be twisted so that it looks really good or twisted so it looks really bad, right? So we'll talk about it kind of without the spin, what is the whole world of how this works. I'm excited to get into it. How you doing today, Garrett?"

"Doing good. How are you?"

"Hey, fantastic. I'm happy you're back after what appears to be a really bad stomach flu. Was it?"

"Yeah, yeah. I've been sick for about two weeks with a crazy bug that got me, my wife, my kids, but I think we're just about out of the woods on it."

"Yeah, the wonderful world of school starting up again and all the germs going around and the colder weather and all that fun stuff. So yeah, super grateful to have you back though and be back at it."

"So anyway, our topic today is shady and predatory things that marketing agencies do. I think it's an interesting topic because there's a lot to potentially unpack here, and it just comes down to the more you know, the more you know who to partner with, the more you know how to make those decisions that are going to help grow your business and you know what to look out for. These are the kind of things that people learn with experience, but companies do these things for a reason, right? And you kind of have to sometimes go through the process in order to figure this stuff out."

"So we've got three separate things. I'm going to start off with the first one, and this comes down to who owns the ad account, which is something that honestly a lot of people their first time working with an agency don't even think about. But this has a massive, massive impact on your future as a company. Could you share a little bit, Garrett, about like account ownership, what's normal, what some people do, what you want to look out for?"

"Yeah, so I think there's a red flag and a green flag with this, you know, like how this is handled by an agency. The normal, good, honest practice is the client makes the account. That way they own the data, and if things don't work out, if things change, when we part ways, the client still owns all that data, they own the account still. What happens sometimes is agencies will try to strongarm clients into staying around by requiring that they, the agency, make and own the account. They couch that as like, 'You know, our way of doing it is very proprietary and secret, and if you own it, then other agencies could steal our secret sauce.' But really what they're doing is they're giving themselves some added leverage to keep you as a client longer because they own the data, and if you leave, your account will likely see a dip in performance."

"Yeah, I think we have to think really hard, right? Because do advertising companies want to keep their clients? Yes. Should they do everything that they can to do that? Yes. But I think you have to think really, really hard anytime what you're starting to do to keep your clients is something that's not in their best interest. We want to retain business not because people are forced or strongarmed into it, but because they're getting value through that."

"And this is just one of those things where I consider it a dirty trick. And I'm sure someone's going to hate me for saying this, but not that many people honestly because it's not crazy common, although it's more common in this industry than it is in other industries. But I think it's a dirty trick because most people, when they sign that paper, they don't know what they're getting into, and they end up at some future date being in a hurtful place because they essentially had this other company doing all this marketing for them, but they don't own any of the marketing that that company produced."

"I think not allowing your clients to access their own accounts is a really good way to make it so they can also never find out that you made a mistake or that the amount of spend that you say you had was actually different. So maybe they're overpaying for their spend. Or not be able to hold you accountable to the fact that most of their bad quality leads were because of these search terms that they're not able to review because you call them proprietary, which proprietary just means 'I don't want you to see it.'"

"And because like all the best marketers, they don't have anything proprietary because they're just moving so fast forward that like we, I mean in this podcast, we publish all the stuff we do for anybody including our competitors to look at and try to execute. But that's okay because we're always moving forward so fast that we'll always have an edge. I think once you start thinking scarcely like this is all we have and if someone were to get this, like if your secret sauce is that simple, then it's not a secret sauce."

"And I mean, I would just say that if they claim that they have a secret sauce and they have to hide it, it probably isn't that good of a secret sauce. And frankly, like you said, there isn't a secret sauce as far as how you build an account. There's just not. And if that's their claim, to me that's a major red flag that gives you an insight into how they're going to behave throughout your partnership. So like of everything that we discuss here, that to me is like the biggest red flag, is them not giving access to the account. Because it's just a lack of trust, a lack of equality in the partnership, and it's not because they have this crazy amazing formula that works every time because it doesn't."

"Yeah, I think there's something to that and just thinking does this behavior in this one way reflect what you might be doing in other things? Because as soon as a company starts branching into doing things that aren't in your best client's interest so that you can make more money from them, how far are you willing to go down that path? There might be a lot of other things."

"And it's really easy for like company leaders to be incentivized. One example I'm thinking of this is Facebook. So Facebook, the way it works, if you create the account, then it's impossible to transfer permanent ownership to someone else. Like there's a weird thing of how it works. And so many companies, even because it's like it's easier to do it on behalf of the client, right? So then we're taking clients through onboarding process with Facebook ads, it's actually a little bit more complicated and they're like, 'This is more cumbersome. Why am I doing this in a way that's harder than our previous agency?' It's because I firmly believe that everybody needs to own their own IP. If you're not going to own your own IP, you might as well just go do paper lead, right? Buy someone else's leads."

"There's maybe if they ran ads for you, it would be on your brand or something, but the IP is like the single most valuable thing in all of digital marketing for Real Estate Investors, if you ask me. So that's why we feel so firmly about that, that even when our clients are saying, 'No, I don't want that, it's a little bit harder to go down that path,' we take them down that path anyway because that's what's better for them. I think that's the mindset that you have to have as a company. At the end of the day, we retain clients through doing what's best for them, not through strongarming them, and that's not actually good for them. And it's like, like you said, a super slippery slope. Any other comments on this before we go to number two?"

"No."

"All right, let's talk about how they act in sales, what they do in sales for different companies because everybody kind of has their own style, right? I'm curious to hear from you, Garrett, any like red flags in the sales process in terms of how they're marketing themselves, how they're selling themselves that shows you that this could be a shady company?"

"I mean, I think an agency salesperson's favorite tool is the audit, right? Because audits are a great way to look like you're a freaking marketing genius, show every small thing going wrong as a major red flag that's gonna tank your business, and give the impression to in general a less educated audience than the agency how all of these things going wrong are bad and how they're going to do all these things better and it's going to be perfect."

"So what I would say is, if they do want to do an audit, I think that's great because then they're giving you more personalized context, but I would watch to see where they... if everything they find is bad and if they don't show things going well, then they're being disingenuous. So I would say that in the audit, look for overpromising, exaggerating problems, and focusing solely on problems. And then I would even say, have that audit cross-checked by someone else and see if what they're saying is even valid, because often those audits are done by a sales rep that isn't going to be in the platform with you, and they're just trained on like things to look at and things to say, and it might not even be true."

"Yeah, you're totally right, and I've heard so many audits because this happens to our clients sometimes, right? And this comes as virtue of our clients having access to their accounts and data. They can also take a third party and they can choose to audit our work, which I think is a right that they should have."

‍