Why Most Real Estate PPC Campaigns Fail Before They Even Start | Tim Oppelt, Wholesaling PPC

Tim Oppelt (00:00)
Typically it might take till month four or month five to really start to see the cash coming back. You might have contracts you’re signing, but actually getting your money back… like any type of process where you’re planning on spending all your reserves to run out by the end of month three was a bad plan to begin with. So he’ll cancel, he canceled the company and said, “This didn’t work for me.” But it’s like, actually we don’t know anything about the campaign. It might have actually been run really well. You just had a bad strategy.

Dylan Silver (01:54)
Hey folks, welcome back to the show. Today we’re joined by Tim Oppelt, founder of Wholesaling PPC, Digital Marketing for Serious Wholesalers and Flippers. Tim, thanks for joining us here today.

Tim Oppelt (02:06)
Thanks for having me, Dylan. Appreciate it.

Dylan Silver (02:08)
What types of deals are coming across your desk these days?

Tim Oppelt (02:12)
I am doing zero deals. So I’m not getting any deals coming across my plate because I only get deals for other investors. So happy to chat about that. But I was wholesaling, for those who don’t know my story, make it super quick. We’re not gonna spend a whole episode talking about my life story here. But I started wholesaling in Delaware and I did that for like eight years out of college. And I built my business through Google Ads and SEO, and just don’t love selling. So I stopped doing it. Wholesaling is a grind. I didn’t want to build this whole big operation. So pivoted to running the marketing I was doing for myself, for my friends in different markets. And then that kind of just grew organically and now that’s all I do. We have about fifty, kind of hovers around fifty or so clients. We’re not trying to be this big conglomerate type of company. And I just run ads for them. And that’s what I do. And I’m here to yeah, spread the word.

Dylan Silver (03:00)
When we talk specifically about acquisitions for wholesalers, let’s look at that bucket. This is the area that I cut my teeth in before I became a realtor in Texas. There’s so many different acquisition strategies that folks have, right? They’ve got foreclosure, pre-foreclosure. In Texas we call the Roddy Report. You’ve got expired listings, you’ve got high days on market, you’ve got probate, you’ve got tired landlords, and that’s just to name a few.

And then you’ve got folks who are pouring money into their marketing, direct mail, PPC. There’s so many different ways for folks to acquire leads. When folks are determining what works best for them, how can they determine that? Is there one thing that makes someone a good fit for PPC versus something else?

Tim Oppelt (03:45)
Yeah. We don’t work with anybody who’s like trying to get their first deal. If they’re asking the question of like what should I do to find deals, we probably won’t talk to them for very long because typically that’s like newer folks, right? So we’re working with established investors who already have one or two primary marketing channels that they’re using to get a handful of deals a month. Like they’re probably doing at least $30k to $100k a month in gross revenue.

Usually doing cold calling or direct mail, depending on their business model. And then they want to add digital marketing as another channel to grow. And that’s I don’t recommend anybody starting out with digital marketing, whether it’s Google or Facebook ads. Those are the primary two that we do, and that what you know mostly works. Unless you’re doing like a nationwide type business model, then just do Google Ads. It’s the best one for that. But if you’re like you were doing in like a local market in Texas or something,

Start with direct mail. Once you have some success, you know how to sell, then add a channel on. Everything works. But yeah, like you need to be spending at least $5k a month at a minimum, invested between paying for ads and paying someone like me to do it for you to make it worth it. Otherwise you’re just gonna have you’re just gonna run out of money before you see some good return. So

Dylan Silver (05:42)
I’d like to get a little bit granular here without giving away all the gold because there is a lot in this conversation.

Tim Oppelt (05:48)
Give it all away, Dylan. I have a little I can give you I have a free course I made because there’s a little I just think there’s no like crazy secret sauce. I’m not trying to steal your thunder here. No, I just like I’m going to Investor Fuel. I’ll get I’m gonna give it away. Like I took me forever to make, and I was originally trying to sell it. I was selling it, but yeah, it like literally has our campaign templates process, everything that we do completely for free. I will I’m a completely open book, nothing to hide. I don’t think there’s any secret to it, just takes work and smarts. So

Dylan Silver (06:15)
For folks who run campaigns, digital campaigns and fail, are there common mistakes that you see being made? Is it a budgetary constraint? Are they not running it long enough? Is there not enough strategy and insight? What’s going wrong with folks? And there’s a lot of them who say, this doesn’t work for me.

Tim Oppelt (06:33)
That’s a good question. Let me ask you this, cause there’s that’s a Pandora’s box and I could ramble on for forty five minutes about an answer. Maybe that’s the best thing to do. But are there specific people that maybe you’ve met at Invest do you go to the Investor Fuel event?

Dylan Silver (06:46)
I’ve been I’ve been to the events, yes. I’m actually thinking of folks of course I won’t say their names, I’m thinking of folks that I’ve networked with who are flippers and wholesalers themselves who’ve told me like there is PPC but I’ve tried it and it hasn’t worked for me.

Tim Oppelt (07:02)
Right. Yeah, that’s we commonly hear that all the time, right? There’s different reasons why that happens. And like we get on calls. Most of the people that we end up signing up are people that have tried a previous agency before or company or whatnot, and end up not having a good experience. But I don’t think there’s one answer why, but there’s a few different kind of patterns that we see. So one is they never should have been doing it in the first place. Like with your friends, I’d want to meet them and I’d ask them questions about

You know, what were their goals? What were their expectations? What were their budget? How long did they give it? We had a client who signed up with us. He canceled after two weeks. I was like, why did you bother signing up? It’s not gonna work. And it’s like shame on us for not figuring out this guy was gonna cancel in two weeks. It’s like a waste of everyone’s time. We gave him his money back and told him like go anyway. And I was just talking about this with another agency buddy of mine.

Most people shouldn’t be doing it, probably who aren’t doing at least mid six figures a year in business. They shouldn’t be doing digital marketing. So I think like we I talked to this one guy he posted in like Pace Morby’s Facebook group. He was in some Facebook group. He’s like, I just did PPC, my campaign’s not working, I’ve been doing it two and a half months, and I’m not getting good results. And me being the curious person, I’m like, okay, well, who’s he using? What’s going on? And he told me basically the company told him to spend

$7,500 a month plus he’s paying another $2,500 a month in fees so he’s like $10k a month for three months so he’s all in for $30k. And come to find out that was all his reserves that he had for marketing and I’m like, okay, well if you if you just break it down with Google Ads specifically, and let me know if this like your eyes are glossing over

Dylan Silver (08:36)
I’m in the I’m in the weeds here with you. I wanna know what happens if this guy’s $30k.

Tim Oppelt (08:39)
Yeah, yeah. So if you just think about it from a sales point of view of like real estate, right? So this guy’s a wholesaler. When you launch a Google Ads campaign, it typically takes four to six weeks for the campaign to kind of get optimized for Google to get the data to learn, for us to see what’s working in your market and make some tweaks. So it basically the first month is usually the worst month of the campaign. The cost per lead is going to be really bad. Month two, it gets better, month three it gets better and so forth. It tends to get better and kind of round out by month six.

But if you think about it, you’re six weeks in. And let’s say you get a property in your contract, like this is like best case scenario, like you’re a few weeks in, you get your first contract. It could take you, on average, we see another six weeks for that property to close. Right. And that’s if everything goes perfect. There’s no title issues, there’s no you don’t have to find this guy’s cousin in jail to sign off on the deed. Best case scenario, you’re closing your first deal and getting your money back at the end of month three.

Right. And typically it might take till month four or month five to really start to see the cash coming back. You might have contracts you’re signing, but actually getting your money back. Like any type of process where you’re planning on spending all your reserves to run out by the end of month three was a bad plan to begin with. So he’ll cancel, he canceled the company and said, “This didn’t work for me.” But it’s like, well, actually we don’t know anything about the campaign. It might have actually been run really well. You just had a bad strategy. And I think me being an investor for so long

helped me. And

we have a pretty small company. So like I’m working oftentimes directly with them and we’re like talking through this stuff. Like how much patience can you give it? What is your budget? What is your reserves? What’s your market? Like you need to have the right budget and strategy for your goals and what reserves you have and expectations. It’s like kind of common sense, but a lot of people like that’s their campaign will is doomed to fail before they spend a single dollar, regardless of how it’s set up. And that’s just one I can give you like 10 other ones. That’s just like one big one I see, Dylan.

Dylan Silver (10:25)
The expectations, that’s what we’re really talking about here. Is you have to go into this understanding that this is not something that’s going to have a cash windfall in two weeks, like that one person that you mentioned. This is a months long process and it iterates and improves with time. I wanna ask you about those pivots, right? That people may tweak in their campaign. When you’re getting those results four weeks, six weeks in.

What are the tweaks that are made and are they consistent with one campaign to another or is every campaign different?

Tim Oppelt (10:57)
Good question. So obviously we’ve been doing this a long time. I’ve run hundreds of campaigns, spend probably almost $10 million in ads at this point. And yeah, we’ve been doing it for other investors for like six years now, seven years, something like that. We start to notice patterns among what works and what doesn’t work. So our main philosophy, like internally, we sign up an investor.

Like, how do we make sure this investor succeeds? When they succeed, we succeed, we get a good reputation, they give us referrals, everybody’s happy. We try to get them their first 30 leads, right? So we see that if an investor can get 30 leads in, they’re more likely to stay with us indefinitely for a long time. Because obviously 30 leads should get you at least one deal. We see about 15 to 20 leads for Google Ads will produce a deal. So 30 leads should like 100% take into account variation. You should get a deal by then.

Depending on what their budget is, the time frame will be different, but no later than month three, month two to three, they should be getting that 30 leads. And so our first goal is somewhat volume. Let’s get them the leads. So if they’re off pace, there’s a few things we can do. We can maybe tweak a little bit of the landing page thing, or we can shift their budget to more of a broader type campaign. So again, not to get like too technical here, but Google Ads, you can be super specific.

And you can be broad, just like with direct mail. You can blanket a whole neighborhood or you can target tax delinquent code violation, blah blah blah. So we tend to shift money to it’s a bit broader where the lead quality will be a little bit less and the leads will be a little bit cheaper. So you’ll get a little bit more volume. So we’re kind of playing along with that scale based on what we’re seeing in their market, what the cost per lead ends up being, to try to get them that first 30 leads. And then once we get that, we’re getting lead quality feedback from the investor too. So like, okay, if leads aren’t

Good, why is that? And then there’s like a whole bunch of reasons why that might not be that the locations they gave us maybe aren’t exactly what they should be, or maybe it’s something in their sales process, there’s a whole bunch of different reasons I won’t bore you with, but we basically get lead quality feedback. And then once we get those 30 leads, if they don’t have a deal by then, we’ll look into maybe it’s part of their sales process, what’s going on there. We try not to sign anyone up who doesn’t have a good sales process, but like this is the work, like we’re constantly iterating and making adjustments there.

And then from there, once we get them a deal, then it’s a matter of we’re not focusing on trying to get them their first deal. It’s return on investment, it’s efficiency. It’s how can we get them at least a 4x ROI by the end of month six? So that’s our next goal. So first it’s let’s get you a deal by month two or three, and then let’s get you 4x ROI at a minimum by end of month six. And that’s a little bit of a different game. That’s okay, how do we optimize lead quality? How do we maybe get your budget up a little bit so less money’s going to our fees?

It’s more of an efficiency play. What areas are producing the best leads and ROI and things like that. So it gets pretty granular, but it’s an iterative feedback loop between us, the campaign data, and what the investor’s CRM and lead quality provides us.

Dylan Silver (13:41)
I’ve got kind of a Pandora’s box question here because there’s so many ways to go here with this. But for investors who are trying to DIY this, but they’ve got a substantial budget. Let me say they’ve got multiple six figures that they’re making from a wholesaling operation and they’re trying to do this themselves. Would you say that if they’re designing a campaign with the copy being something to the effect of

Sell your house for cash versus something else versus if someone is in distress and pointing to that. Is there specific copy or specific wording that you feel is hitting more so now with distressed sellers?

Tim Oppelt (14:19)
I will reject the question a little bit. I think if someone has a substantial budget, they shouldn’t even be worrying about any of that shit, to be honest with you. I can give you an answer to that, but like the thing about Google Ads is and the reason why we’re in business is if you don’t have the money to hire someone to do it, you probably shouldn’t be doing it. And like that’s why I’m willing to give my course away to people.

But like it’s a little bit dangerous because like if beginners could go ahead and learn it, then but if they’re beginners, like they probably shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. It more so is for me to just to show you transparency and know what I’m talking about, because you’ll see hours and hours of process. It’s more of like a credibility lead magnet. I don’t think people actually go through the whole course and learn it. If you think about it, right? Like our average wholesale fee nationally is about $25k in profit,

What we see is average. And flip profit’s $50k to $60k. So this is like standard what people are making with Google Ads because the leads are really good. If you just set up a campaign like we’ll have one setting off or one ad copy that you mentioned is a little bit inefficient, you could miss out on one deal. And that one deal will literally pay for you to hire any vendor for twelve months or more. It just really does like mathematically to me, it doesn’t make sense because there’s so many moving parts with Google Ads in terms of like

What should the ad copy be? What should the campaign structure be? What should the location targeting be? Is the conversion tracking set up right? Do you have retargeting set up? What kind of mix of broad and specific campaigns are you using? Are you integrating your CRM? Is it sending data back? And there’s like all these different things that you should be looking at, the specific areas, which there’s like dozens of variables that you really need to optimize for. And if that’s not your bread and butter, like this is what we do all day.

Right. This is why I stopped wholesaling, because it’s like a lot of work to do this marketing stuff and run a campaign well. To me, if you miss out on one setting wrong, it can completely blow up your campaign. So even just missing one deal is really like you just wasted the time doing it. And plus all the time. Like doesn’t really make sense for anyone to do it themselves. Like our main philosophy, like we kind of set up our business to prevent investors from losing any deals.

Like nothing falls through the cracks. Like we’re paranoid. We’re on top of everything. Every single lead, we’re getting feedback on because we know if you miss out, like even to get one missed call with no voicemail, like you’re wholesaling. I’ve gotten some really good deals from a missed call with no voicemail. Right. So if you’re not calling every single number back and you miss out on one deal, like there goes our fees for a year. So that’s our philosophy. I really don’t think people should be trying to do it themselves. We see people try and then they end up

burning money after some time. So

Dylan Silver (16:47)
It’s very clear, hand this to the professionals because if you try to DIY it, you’re gonna be shooting yourself in the foot. You’re gonna spend money trying to learn it when someone else has already done that and they’re gonna be more proficient at it, even if you did this for months trying to hack it yourself and then you’ll leave saying, well this didn’t work for me.

I am thinking as I’m talking about this from the investors that I’ve seen and worked with, I don’t know if they would be at the scale of someone that would be a fit based on what you’re saying, but a lot of mom and pop investors tend to not even want to pay like realtor commissions, right? So they’re of course they’re gonna have to pay a realtor if they’re buying or selling a property, but even that is like haggling over the three percent. I don’t wanna pay three, I wanna pay one and a half or two percent.

Is it fair to say that most investors when they’re trying to scale underestimate the complexity of digital marketing? They think, I’ve been doing this, I’ve been successful, I’ve gotten volume, I’m doing however many flips a year, I can do this marketing thing on my own.

Tim Oppelt (17:44)
I would say go for it. Like I tell them if you want to go try to do it yourself, like good luck. Like here’s my free course. Go watch all 80 hours of videos. Or if you think and we do get some clients who think they can do it themselves better. And good luck to them. And some do run campaigns internally and to them they do all right. And that’s fine. So but yeah, I just think if you’re like a mom and pop flipper, like it’s to me not a good business

Strategic decision to go learn it yourself. Like you should be focusing on how to make your flips more profitable. So you can afford to hire someone to do the marketing, at least the digital marketing piece of it. Like every investor has to do probably one channel well. Like maybe they should be doing direct mail. You gotta start somewhere, obviously. Don’t start with Google Ads. Don’t be doing it yourself. And I’d like to ask you a question, Dylan, if you’re cool with it. Because we talk to a lot of investors. Obviously

You’ve done thousands of these podcast episodes. You work for Investor Fuel. You guys see a lot of investors. What do you see as like the sentiment among investors who want to hire vendors? Maybe it’s Google Ads or maybe it’s something else, bookkeeping or whatnot. But what do you see like are the kind of struggles in investors, maybe hesitations that they have when they’re trying to like hire for their business?

Dylan Silver (18:53)
I think a lot of people have and maybe it’s fair, a degree of skepticism and they’ve been burned and they’re cautious, maybe overly cautious. Also, it’s frankly just been more challenging for a lot of folks, other than your high level operators and even those folks, it’s been more challenging to do volume flipping, volume wholesaling over the last, however many years, especially since interest rates have been higher. And so

Tim Oppelt (19:15)
Do you think the market’s like squeezing people, you think?

Dylan Silver (19:18)
On some level, but I also think that people don’t know what they need to know in order to vet a good operator. So someone might be coming to them and they may be saying, this is the budget that you need, but not giving them the proper expectations. Hey, you need to run this for this many months. And that doesn’t just apply to digital marketing, it can be any kind of

marketing campaign. And so I think generally speaking, whether we’re talking about digital marketing, whether we’re talking about direct mail and any sort of marketing, folks need to have the right expectations, but they also need to be vetting the person that they’re going into business with to understand what is their process, what is their track record, and not just

going with someone who may have worked for one of their friends and then just trusting that carte blanche because it’s not necessarily the same thing, apples to oranges.

Tim Oppelt (20:07)
Yeah, we see that all the time. Like I literally had a sales call with a lead investor the other day. I thought like we’d be the perfect fit for him. And he’s like, my buddy in my market’s using this other dude. I’m gonna go with him. Like, all right, that’s fine. And maybe that guy’s great. And I don’t blame people for going with referrals. That’s kind of how our industry works and that’s fine. I just think that the challenges and kind of I’m starting to put myself out there a little bit more. Like I don’t do a crazy ton of podcasts. I’ve never been to these masterminds, but

I just think from the business model of an agency, right? So if you think about my business model, and I went through this last year, Dylan, where I was like, okay, I’m gonna scale my business, let’s double my revenue. How are we gonna do this? And I started spending a lot of money on marketing. I was doing Facebook ads. I realized that because I’m spending $20k a month in my own dollars for advertising, I had to hit a certain sales quota.

Right. So I need to be signing up at least a handful of investors every month for me to like because it’s stressful. I’m spending five figures every single month and I gotta have a sales team and I’m paying all these people. And you start to compromise the people you’re willing to sign up. Right. Cause I know who’s gonna succeed. But then like when you have all this budget and you have this big overhead,

Dylan Silver (21:17)
Yeah.

Tim Oppelt (21:18)
Well, you just start to sign up investors

Who maybe aren’t the best fit for Google Ads. Like maybe they don’t quite have enough budget. Like the one guy told you he like only had three months worth. If you get a really good deal, you’re gonna be successful. But it’s like they shouldn’t be taking the investors’ dollars. The investors are naive, they don’t understand any better. And they’re kind of trusting the agency’s word. And the agency has a quota to hit because they’re they have all this overhead. So I stopped doing that. We scaled back our marketing, and I’m like, no, I don’t want to pressure to sign up anybody who’s not a good fit.

It’s not good for our reputation. I don’t care how big we get. I’m happy with 50 clients. We’ll kind of just grow slowly. And I just think it’s better for everybody. And I just think if nothing else investors should take away that just understanding the dynamic of like when you’re when you hop on a sales call with these companies, like what the engine is that’s producing that sales call. Like they have quotas they need to sign up. They’re maybe telling you what you want to hear. And you just I’m not saying don’t go with companies, like there are a lot of good companies out there who can help you.

But you just need to understand everybody’s skin in the game and what’s going on here and why you know people, Dylan, who get burned and why everybody knows people at all these masterminds who get burned all the time. Because of this dynamic, there’s a lot of people who are doing ads that probably shouldn’t be doing them, never should have started doing them, or kind of sold something that wasn’t really good for them.

Dylan Silver (22:27)
You hit one dynamic there that I think everyone can relate to, whether you’re a real estate operator or not, is yeah you’re being told something by a salesperson and it appears consultative, but in reality, this person may not be telling you the full picture. Like, hey, you’re gonna have to run this for months to see like three months is basically the bare minimum. Like six months is where you should be right instead of

You’ll get your first deal typically in a month. Like that may or may not happen, right? And so when you set those right expectations, I think that generally changes people’s outcomes. But if I wear my realtor hat too, we see this too. The biggest gripe that folks have is why isn’t my home selling? And honestly, it’s because an initial conversation set the wrong expectations. With that in mind, when investors are

trying to understand the agency that they go with. Of course they can call you and your folks at Wholesaling PPC.

Tim Oppelt (23:22)
Yeah, just call us and we’ll give them the truth. Just trust us. Don’t just take our word for it. Yeah, of course.

Dylan Silver (23:27)
But you know, what are the questions, cause this is all new to all of us, what are the conversations that investors need to have before they trust someone with a large campaign?

Tim Oppelt (23:37)
Yeah, I think that’s a really good question. It’s tough. And I’m just being completely real with you because a lot of these sales guys are trained and they know all the questions. And like I can give you a list of questions, but there’s like rebuttals for all of them. I think the biggest red flags that I see are even before you hop on a call with somebody,

And this goes true for coaching programs and like not even just real estate, right? But like you’ll see testimonials on the company’s website where it’s like, I got an 11x return or I made $90k in two months, or I got five deals in my first two weeks. And when you see a lot of testimonials that are of a very short time frame, so I did XY in the first 90 days. To me, those are kind of red flags to an extent because like

You could sign up a thousand, let’s just say, we signed up a thousand people, and you roll the dice, like some of them will be successful in the first cause you’ll just get lucky and you’ll get crazy big deals in the first 90 days. And then but the next three months could be nothing. And I think if most if the majority of your testimonials and case studies are within the first three months, that means that most people are canceling probably within the first six months. And then you gotta ask yourself, why are most people canceling within the first six months? Well, maybe the service wasn’t right for them. They’re signing up too many people.

So what we’re trying to do, and we’re not perfect at it, it is difficult. We try to post case studies of people who’ve been with us one year, two years, five years. We have clients who’ve been with us for five years, Dylan. So it’s like talking to investors, like getting customers’ names who’ve been with these companies for multiple years. I think that’s probably the best way to try to really cut through the noise of some of this stuff because

from my end, I’m competing. Like, let me say you want to sign up for marketing, you’re the ideal customer, you’re talking to me and three other companies, and one company’s saying, yeah, I’ll give you a 10x return, and I’m telling you, well, you’ll get a 4x return after six months if everything’s done well. You like what the other guy’s saying better. So it’s like, well, we end up signing people who understand the game, who can smell the BS, who know, like, hey, 10x return is probably blowing smoke, you’re getting lucky and it’s not really quite honest.

I think that’s a good way. Yeah, another way, maybe if it’s extremely polished, meaning like the sales calls, like very polished, very much really good slide deck, like you can tell the salesperson’s been doing it long time. Actually that’s somewhat of a good thing, you know, that they know what they’re doing, but just know that like the company is

pouring this much money into their marketing and sales for a reason, right? And maybe there’s some overhead and there’s some pressure. I don’t know. I don’t really love that answer because it could just mean they’re good operators too. So yeah, I just think probably case studies, getting legitimate referrals, it’s tough though. Like if there was a good answer, this problem wouldn’t exist.

Dylan Silver (26:10)
And as you’re talking about this, I’m thinking about the folks that I know that have been successful with it, the folks that have been unsuccessful with it. And I’m realizing that what makes the difference could really just be that initial expectation set. And I think, even from myself being an operator in this space, before this call, I was aware that people need to have the right expectations, but now really understanding that.

You can’t expect, forget two weeks, but four weeks would be a good time frame. But realistically it’s gonna be six weeks or more. I think those expectations are the expectations that people need to have. And to your point as well, you can go with your friend who maybe a digital marketing firm, but then also too, now you’re trusting your friend with kind of your marketing dollars and you know how much

experience does he have managing other people’s marketing. So you want to do a little bit of trust but also verify, right? And then how do you do that? So it’s a complicated discussion, right?

Tim Oppelt (27:10)
It is. And I think the probably the only other thing to look out for is like, ask them what their process looks like. And I think the more specific and technical they can give you an answer, the better. Even if you don’t really understand it. Because there’s like a lot of companies that like you could spin up a marketing agency tomorrow and run some ads and call yourself amazing and come up with some testimonials about how great Dylan is, so but you wouldn’t be as good at it as me

who’s been doing it, I’ve run hundreds of campaigns, been doing it a long time. We constantly are iterating and we do the call recording and tracking. We do all the lead quality audits. We do quarterly ROI reports and all these different like audits and integrations and like all this kind of nitty gritty stuff that operators do who know how to run a business that they do well.

How we set up on a monthly basis, what do our call agendas look like? How are we keeping on track? What feedback you’re getting? Cause sales consulting, strategy consulting, all that kind of stuff. I think the more specific someone can give you an answer of what they actually do in the back end, the better. Because one of the common complaints people get is like, I hired this agency and they didn’t do anything, or their rep quit after a couple months, or I was looking at the campaign and like everything’s automated. I looked at a campaign, we signed up this investor in California.

He was spending $100k a month. It’s a big guy in Southern California. His cost per lead was $2,500. $2,500 for one lead. It was the campaign, like the marketing, I was speaking with the marketing director. They basically got like no return. They did it for like many months. They lost like half a million dollars, completely burned. And you like actually looked at the account and it was just like big agency everyone ever knows, very credible, whatever.

Nothing was being done in the account. It was all completely like automated from some like algorithm, blah blah blah. Nothing was being done. And I’m like, okay, it’s good to have like some of that stuff, but like you need some expert to do the fucking work here. And it’s

Dylan Silver (28:53)
Yeah.

Tim Oppelt (28:54)
Yeah, pivoting or just like doing something. Like literally nothing was being done. Like no keyword optimizations, bidding, audits, anything. When I’m pitching you to sign up with me.

Like how can I tell you like we just do the work? Like that’s not a sexy thing to say, but it’s true. Like we actually just do the work. And a lot of people don’t.

Dylan Silver (29:10)
I think there’s a lot of folks that understand this and they can digest, if we look at automations and AI, they can digest that in certain professions, AI and automations can replace. But it seems like you can’t do that with marketing. And this is one example. Can we talk about kind of the misconception that you can delegate a lot of this type of work

To AI and where that goes off the rails.

Tim Oppelt (29:34)
That’s a good question. I’m glad you brought that up. We’re starting to get asked more like, why don’t I just have ChatGPT run my campaign for me? Twenty bucks a month. Why am I paying you guys all this money? It was twenty bucks a month. I’m like, okay, well, I actually I made a YouTube video that was me actually trying to do it. Like I went in, I was using Claude and I went in and I tried to replicate it. And it was just telling me like nonsense things. It’s like,

AI is great for some things, but like do you know that guy? He’s like on YouTube. He’s like he has this like beard and it’s kind of like twang accent and he like has ChatGPT pulled up and he’s like asking it dumb questions and it like he the video popped up today and he was like it was the new ChatGPT-4o or whatever that came out and he was like, “How many how many E’s are in Tennessee?” And like the ChatGPT was vehemently telling him there were three E’s in Tennessee and they were like going through it.

And there’s obviously four E’s in Tennessee. And it’s like, okay, well, do you trust that technology to manage $50k a year of your marketing budget? That $20 a month service that gaslights you to spend $50,000 a year. Maybe one day we’ll be able to. Today’s not the day, and I’m not convinced there ever will be a day that will warrant AI on a twenty dollar a month budget to manage $50,000 a year or $100,000 a year budget for you. When losing one deal, one deal again, if it’s not done perfectly, will

make up for any company you’re paying for that whole year. So to me, I’m not really worried about losing business to AI. Yeah.

Dylan Silver (30:56)
We are coming up on time here, Tim. Any new projects or activities that you’re working on these days? Also anything you’d like to mention directly to our audience?

Tim Oppelt (31:47)
Yes, I could plug myself. I’m glad I’m glad you asked, Dylan. We started doing Facebook ads this year. That’s a whole another call, I think, but the Andromeda update that happened last year, basically all the money that Facebook and Meta pouring into their AI is starting to bear fruit on their advertising service. Obviously that’s their bread and butter. So basically the leads are still really cheap, better cheaper than Google Ads, but the lead quality is getting a lot better.

And then we’ve learned this spending a lot of money on our own doing Facebook ads as well. And we’re starting to see good results. Even a lower cost per lead from Facebook, cost per contract, sorry, through Facebook than through Google. Granted the sales cycle’s a little bit longer, so there’s some trade-offs, but yeah, I think if you’re doing Google and you want the next thing, Facebook is something that’s I guarantee you is gonna be more popular. It’s gonna be more hype around it, more agencies talking about how amazing they are, Facebook ads in the next couple of years.

It’s gonna be coming out, so I think we’re a little ahead of it. But yeah, if you’re interested in chatting with us or seeing if it’s a good fit, we turn down more people than we sign up. But if you’re not sure if you should be doing it, we’re happy to give you some honest feedback and tell you what you should and shouldn’t be doing. Our company’s Wholesaling PPC, just go to wholesalingppc.com. You can also find me on Instagram, itsTimOppelt. Shoot me a DM. Tell me you love me, tell me you hate me, whatever, hit me up. And I’m on YouTube as well. You can comment, I read

All the comments on there. I will give people my cell phone number, we can put it in the show notes as well. But it’s (908) 565-0510. That’s my personal cell. We’re a pretty boutique agency, so you have access to the owner. A lot of companies don’t do that. So hit me up and yeah, shoot me a message, we can chat.

Dylan Silver (33:13)
Tim, thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks for your time.

Tim Oppelt (33:16)
Thanks, Dylan. Take care, man.