VMP 260: Dennis Yu Shares How To Grow Your Veterinary Practice's Brand For Just A Dollar A Day

Brandon (00:00:03) - Welcome to the Veterinary Marketing Podcast, where it's all about how to attract, engage and retain clients to your veterinary hospital using digital marketing. In today's episode, we have a very special guest, a marketing legend who he's been just instrumental in a ton of major marketing efforts. He's had so much cool experiences and he's managed over $1 billion in ads of the Bee on Facebook and Google, which is insane. It puts me to shame as far as the size of ads management that he's overseen, which is really cool. He's worked on projects on everything from American Airlines to Nike to the Golden State Warriors. He's been on CNN. When iOS 14 changed, he went over and was on CNN, and that was really cool. So he just is in terms of marketing a legend, His name is Dennis Yu and he is from blitzmetrics.com. And Dennis is going to share with us a ton of really practical tools and tips that are going to be so helpful for growing your veterinary hospital. One of the things that Dennis has been talking about recently on his social is making sure that you understand, number one, what you're getting when it comes to marketing and how to be more effective at marketing.

Brandon (00:01:13) - And even though he's done all of these major massive marketing initiatives for major companies, he's able to really bring that insight and distill it down so that it's useful and helpful for local businesses like veterinary hospitals. So this was one of my favorite interviews so far, just because it's fun to talk shop with somebody who is so experienced and so good at digital marketing. So I've met Dennis in person at a few events and actually we competed against each other in this thing called Wicked Smart, which was part of a mastermind that was called Boardroom, and he beat me. So he's super smart guy and I just really appreciate him for taking the time to share today. So before we begin, just a couple of things. First, if you haven't done so already, be sure to subscribe in iTunes, Spotify or wherever you get your podcast from. And then second, we have two sponsors for today's episode. So here are those sponsors. This episode is being sponsored by the International Veterinary Dentistry Institute and Veterinary Dentistry.net.

Brandon (00:02:15) - If you're a veterinarian or you have veterinary that you work with, you struggle with dentistry. Or who'd like to be more confident when it comes to dental procedures, then you definitely should go to Ivdi. Org forward slash VMP that is ivdi.org/vmp to sign up for a free upcoming live training that's going to go far beyond your average dentistry seminar. This is the gateway to the Veterinary Dental Practitioner Program, an intensive master class program that is a comprehensive initiative designed to enrich veterinary associate skills while empowering practice managers, practice owners to take their practice to new heights. This live training is going to be conducted by board certified veterinary dentist Dr. Brett Beckman. He's been on the podcast twice and is incredibly talented teacher and educator. He's going to dive deep into actual cases. He's going to dissect all the vital components of effective dentistry case management, and this is going to give you some really direct insight and a clear blueprint to improve your prowess in veterinary dentistry. So if you're ready to elevate your practice and your professional skills, simply go to ivdi.org/vmp.

Brandon (00:03:32) - This is going to be the golden opportunity that helps you to make a significant impact in your practice. It's going to help to give your patients and your clients better care, and it's also going to improve the personal professional development that you have in your career. Go to ivdi.org/VMP. This episode is being sponsored by two websites by Brad Haven. We have used VR equipment and new VR equipment for over nine years now used that equipment has been helping vets to buy and sell used equipment. You can save money when you buy used everything from cages, kennels, pumps, X-ray equipment, lasers, ultrasounds, dental equipment, surgery equipment, lab equipment from a boxes and tables, tubs and sinks, vet trucks and vet boxes. What do you have to sell at used vet equipment? They bring the buyer and seller together. Also, if you're looking for a new vet equipment with amazing warranties, check out new vet equipment where they show you the price up front. They have digital X-ray equipment, dental X-ray equipment, ultrasound equipment, surgery, lighting, surgery, tables, autoclaves.

Brandon (00:04:35) - When you go to new vet equipment, you'll clearly see the price on every single item for sale. And you'll also know what the warranty is so that you can buy without regret. So today we have here is my interview with Dennis. You. Thank you so much for being on the podcast. Dennis It's exciting to have you here.

Dennis (00:04:52) - Thank you.

Brandon (00:04:52) - Brandon And Dennis, can you tell us a little bit I mean, your back story when it relates to digital marketing is like massive. Can you just give a quick synopsis of your background in marketing?

Dennis (00:05:05) - I'm a search engine engineer. I was one of the first people at Yahoo! Like 25-ish plus years ago. I built websites 30 some years ago. I've always been a geek. I believe in data and I've been very lucky to be in the right places at the right time with some huge systems like American Airlines, their Sabre system. I worked on loyalty programs there and I created the first time booking bonus. That was one of my career highlights, like almost 30 years ago.

Dennis (00:05:31) - If you booked a ticket on the Internet, we give you 5000 miles. But I've spent $1 billion on Facebook ads and on Google ads. I'm not the biggest spender. That's Larry Kim, who's got 2% of Google's global ad spend and Facebook's global ad spend, which is insane. And I just love being around cool people who optimize for results like what you are their friends. And Josh Nelson, seven figure agency group. And I'm sort of the mechanic behind the scenes and I know a lot about how to connect systems to drive performance. And I believe that there's no black box. I believe there's no magic secret. I believe it's just like with anything like flying a plane or trimming your golden Retrievers nails, There is a clear process that needs to be documented. So my life's mission is to create a million jobs, and I fly all over the planet and I work with. It's weird because I get reached out by like heads of government to do training. That's when these develop. We don't call them third world developing countries.

Dennis (00:06:35) - So I'm probably the most famous American in Pakistan, believe it or not. And one of the best I can walk around on the street and people know who I am in this country that has almost the same population as the United States.

Brandon (00:06:47) - Very cool.

Dennis (00:06:48) - So I'm just a data geek and I'm very lucky to be involved in digital marketing because of all the data that's involved to drive performance. So all the agencies, all the people who want to use data to drive sales, I'm their friend.

Brandon (00:06:59) - Very cool. That's incredible. I didn't realize you had that much in ad spend under your belt. I only have about 14 million. Right. Because the most, like the average veterinary hospital that I work with is maybe spending 20 to $30 a day. So it's like a ton of tiny little chips adding up for sure.

Dennis (00:07:18) - But imagine how much you learn when you see more and more data. Like when we did it for Rosetta Stone or Ashley Furniture or some of these big like Nike, like Starbucks, we helped launch Starbucks Frappuccino and we spent $14 million that summer.

Dennis (00:07:32) - We see so much and a lot of that directly applies to veterinary hospitals.

Brandon (00:07:37) - Absolutely.

Dennis (00:07:38) - I was just on a call 15 minutes ago with Facebook, and I have some cool new things to share that I think would be super.

Brandon (00:07:47) - You know, Let's hear. I'd love to hear it. What do you think?

Dennis (00:07:51) - So check this out. So Facebook is such a big company. That they have all these different engineering teams that don't talk to each other because it's a big bureaucracy now, just like with Google. Did you know that when you set up Facebook lead ads that not all leads show up inside the ad system, even though it is on Facebook's own instant form and it's in their ecosystem, but because it's separate products built by separate teams that you have to pass Facebook's own leads back into the system through the conversion API. And even if you were using the conversion API, which I can't tell you the percentage because it's a private like, you know, we signed these NDAs, but basically almost nobody uses the conversion API.

Dennis (00:08:34) - But even if you did and you were sophisticated enough to know how to do that because you're an agency, so you would know how to do that. Basically single digits are even passing back the conversion event, which is a subcomponent of the conversion API. So if your Facebook ads are sucking, meaning they're not converting or the quality of the leads or the low, it's because you're not passing that signal back. And that's the same thing. That's true with performance, Max. You have to pass through those conversion events and with advertising because you're more on paid. If you're not passing through the not just leads, not just clicks, not just, you know, whatever, you have to pass through the exact conversion event for the system to optimize for you.

Brandon (00:09:17) - That's incredible.

Dennis (00:09:18) - And then I found out just a few minutes ago, Amazon is launching lead ads at the end of the month.

Brandon (00:09:24) - How that's exciting.

Dennis (00:09:26) - Think about what that means. And it's the same thing across Google. Facebook. Pinterest is launching them as well.

Dennis (00:09:32) - Everyone's launching the same thing.

Brandon (00:09:34) - That's. That's incredible. Yeah. Facebook native lead ads are, I think, some of the best that you can still get out of Facebook. But it's frustrating to me to find that out because they're losing so much data that helps the ads to be better.

Dennis (00:09:47) - We have to use the CRM, so it could be a HubSpot or it could be a vertical specific one for vets. You have to pass that data back into. Facebook. Google. We like to use event tracking inside Google Tag manager. Right. And have Google tag managers the pixel that rules all the pixels and whatnot, which you're probably setting up for all your vet clients.

Brandon (00:10:08) - Yeah, we're setting up with tag manager or hiatus actually, which is been great. I've loved Heroes. It's a fantastic tool for that first party pixel integration and conversion API. So but that's, that's really interesting to learn and that's I have not been setting up well because we're using heroes on most of the lead campaigns that we're doing.

Brandon (00:10:30) - I guess it is automatically sending back that conversion data, which is good to know and good confirmation. That's good. I think to have offline conversions and also just every conversion being fed back in.

Dennis (00:10:42) - And a lot of people don't know you need 250 conversion events per month minimum. That's the official number. If you don't have 250, the system cannot optimize for you have to move up funnel to phone calls or form fills or something, even though obviously sales is the thing you want, but you're not getting 250, you have to move. You can't do that. It's just not enough data.

Brandon (00:11:02) - You're hitting.

Brandon (00:11:02) - That benchmark. So phone calls or clicks or whatever, that's that's super interesting. Is that does that number the same with Google or no, Google's 17 per day.

Dennis (00:11:11) - Official numbers a little bit lower. We're publishing an infographic that says what the minimum is for each network.

Brandon (00:11:16) - Very cool. Very interesting. Well, can you one of the things that you're most well known for, which is a lot of things, but one of it is your dollar per day method.

Brandon (00:11:25) - Can you describe that and how it's helped you? And I think there's just so much value in this.

Dennis (00:11:31) - So a lot of people think dollar, this dollar a day thing that I'm famous for is this magical secret, whatever thing, it's just testing. So if you want to run an ad on any network, the minimum budget is going to be usually a dollar a day like tick tock. I think it's $5 a day or ten, depending on the objective that you choose. Yeah, Facebook, same thing, $1, $5, $10. But think about this. When you run an ad, now you know this, but most people don't. When you run an ad, there's all kinds of factors that can cause it to be successful. It could be the nature of the targeting. It could be what you said, it could be the time of day. It could be the offer, it could be the landing page, it could be the person in it. If it's a video. And the combination of all those different factors is like a master lock.

Dennis (00:12:18) - And when you find something that wins because you know that the I don't know anything about being a veterinarian, but maybe, you know, you're an emergency vet and you're open 24 hours and you've been around a long time and people know you and you have a great reputation. Maybe you have, you know, you as the owner. There's an ad of you as the owner talking about that. And talking about how you take care of, you know, they're not just animals. You're not the owner. But, you know, maybe there's a great story that you share. Yeah. And that drives more people coming in, bringing in their pets. Well, how do we get if that's a winner? How do we get more out of that? Is it because of, you know, who's in the video? Is it because it's golden retriever? Is it because you're talking about so dollar a day is how do we create different variations against something that is already working in your business? It could be on Google.

Dennis (00:13:11) - Maybe there's a certain keyword on Google that's working well. You can make a video version of that ad, you can tune that landing page, you can change the you can do some lateral targeting, you can increase the budget. So what do you need to do to get more out of the thing that's working? Well, that's the core of dollar a day. Yeah. When I have a piece of content on any network and it's starting to work, how do I get more? Well, maybe I can post it to Twitter and LinkedIn. Maybe I can set up remarketing against it. Maybe I can add some lookalike audiences. Maybe I can take a winning picture and make that a video. Maybe I can have Maybe in the video there's someone who's working really well. Maybe I can have another technician or another veterinarian say the same kind of thing. I'm trying to get more out of that existing signal, and that's all dollar a day is. And figuring out of all the things that you could do, what's the one thing that you could do? Most people, they're just randomly making content and they have no idea that every time they put a piece of content out there, there's multiple variables that are involved.

Dennis (00:14:11) - So it's just a simple way. You put out ten items. Usually 1 in 10 will win. Yeah. And that's just how it is. Like we did it for the Golden State Warriors. We did like, it's just how it is. Okay. And the first step, especially because social is so big and that's why Google's moved to performance Max to automatically build social and is that you can't get their attention in the first few seconds. They just scroll past you. So it doesn't matter how good your offer is or what you say after the first two seconds. If they've already passed you in the first two seconds, it doesn't matter. So being able to test very quickly for a dollar a day, which is $7 for a week, that's how much we spend for each little piece of content we put through. If you only need to spend $7 to determine if it's a winner or not, that saves you a ton of money and testing for the algorithm to have to go all the way to, you know, did it get 250 conversions to see if it's statistically significant and that kind of thing? It's just a faster way of testing because if it passes the hook stage, meaning people 10% of people are engaging because of the first few seconds are actually meaningful, then we can take that remaining set and optimize for leads and conversions and something mid funnel.

Dennis (00:15:19) - And of course, you know, the lower in the funnel you choose, the higher the cost. Typically the cost of raw inventory, the cost per click, the cost per whatever. So we're not going for cheap fans or impressions or social media vanity. We're testing to see does our message resonate with a particular audience? And you know, with Google, they've had quality score for the last 20 years. Quality score is mainly it's the connection between content and targeting. Yeah. And social media like Facebook has relevance, score, relevance, score and quality score the same thing. Yeah, because it's largely based on CTR, the engagement rate, the how close content and targeting is. So I made a video with Grant Cardone and then I targeted Grant Cardone and the engagement rate was 45%. It was super because Grant Cardone people I showed Grant Cardone content. Wow, what a surprise. Of course people are going to engage and my buddy Andy runs an Italian restaurant just outside of Chicago. He's not a professional influencer.

Dennis (00:16:16) - Whatever he's, he's a chef. He makes lasagna and Italian food, okay? Like he's like, you know, one of those and just I got some simple videos of him talking about what he's doing, talking about his nightly specials. And it's delicious. I've gone there to eat. Yeah, he always lets me eat for free, which is great.

Brandon (00:16:35) - Awesome.

Dennis (00:16:35) - And. And so and just for fun, you know, no professional video or anything like that. Literally. Dennis with the cell phone interviewing Andrew McGuire, I took that a quick little video saying, Hey, Andrew, what is this? Oh, well, it's the, the, you know, the ravioli filled with special cheese or something, Right. It's delicious. I don't even know what's inside these things. I just eat whatever he makes for sure. And and I just made a tweet on that. And I put it out there for a dollar a day targeting people in that neighborhood. Not all of Chicago. Okay. Just that little neighborhood there.

Dennis (00:17:09) - And it got a 17% engagement rate.

Brandon (00:17:12) - That's really good.

Dennis (00:17:13) - Is it because I'm really good at advertising? Is it because I'm really good on video? Is it because the food was the picture? I did all this professional camera work. Why would it get a 17% engagement rate?

Brandon (00:17:24) - Just it's hyper local and also very relevant.

Brandon (00:17:27) - Right? It's super.

Dennis (00:17:28) - Relevant. Yeah. So if I'm a veterinarian and, you know, whatever, somewhere some random town in Idaho. Rexburg, Idaho. Yeah. And I'm talking about my favorite places in Rexburg and how I go hiking. There's a place in Rexburg that I, I ordered a £5 hamburger. I was with Stuart Draper of of Stu Kent, which is an education company. And, you know, we had this like this make your own burger thing. So we had this £5 burger with like bacon and cheese. It was like literally a foot tall. I'm sure it's like this cholesterol killer thing. I could take that. I could be a vet. I could say, Yeah, you know, we like to take team out here to eat burgers.

Dennis (00:18:04) - Or I could interview people that are reasonably well known, like the mayor, not celebrity celebrity, but in that town are well known. Or talking about the soccer team or talking about anything that would be known in that town. And I'll get the same kind of effects. And it surprises me that. Local businesses could be vets. Garage door, whatever. They're not taking advantage of the fact that they have those local connections. That's perfect for dollar a day because you're not trying to reach the whole planet. Then I would just target that micro neighborhood. And guess what? It drives referrals and leads and everything. That's dollar a day.

Brandon (00:18:40) - Totally genius. And nobody's doing it. Back when I used to do real estate before, I was a real estate broker before, and I used to do live streaming with properties because I found that my clients loved watching HGTV. Right? Because when you're buying a house, you watch HGTV, house hunters and things. So I would live stream of property every single day.

Brandon (00:18:57) - And Facebook Live had just come out. So I'd get crazy reach on that. But then I would also put ad money behind it as it would get engagement. And then I was to the point where I would be at Costco and I would get recognized by like 6 or 7. Yeah, like I see your videos, I watch the houses all the time. And it was just.

Dennis (00:19:15) - Your local celebrity.

Brandon (00:19:16) - Exactly.

Brandon (00:19:17) - Local celebrity. And it was only for like 20 bucks a week.

Dennis (00:19:20) - But as far as they know, you're a big deal. So anyone who's offering local services, that's that's what you do. And we've done this thousands of times with people who suck. My friend Velena is a massage therapist and she's super shy and whatever. And I said, vagina. Just like, show me, like, what is this kind of massage that you're doing? And tell me about the tissue and tell me about how do people find you and what's your like, how do you get started as a massage therapist? I've done that with so many people that they're they're not on camera sorts of people.

Dennis (00:19:48) - They're not shiny. But literally, like I was at a funeral home a couple of days ago and my friend Lani runs the number one rated funeral home in Las Vegas, if you can believe that. That's Heritage Mortuary. And she's I mean, she's you know, she's a great business owner and all that. But she also had a son, Skyler, who is super shy. But I said, Skyler, So what's it like having your mom as a funeral director? You know, and he told a couple funny stories and I said, Tyler, can you Skyler, can you give me a tour? The mortuary? And so he said, This is my favorite place. It's the chapel. And he started talking about that. I interviewed his mom. We took a bunch of these little one minute videos, put it out there, and then, as you mentioned, because they don't have a lot of fans or they have like no subscribers on any of the channels. We put it out there for a dollar a day and it's super engaging.

Dennis (00:20:35) - And it's you know, because funeral home directors like these, these guys are thinking, well, if someone's choosing a funeral home, they're going to evaluate like what kind of embalming fluid the funeral. Do you think anyone's looking like? Well, who uses the better embalming fluid? Like they're not asking questions like that. They want to know how well you care. They want to know who you serve. And I said, learning. So you have this veteran program. I didn't realize that your ex Air Force and you have a flag program that if you have a, you know, a tattered flag or you can bring it in for free, you don't have to wait till someone dies. You can bring it in any time and you process it for free. And here's all these things that you do in the community and your father served and he was like all these stories. Like, no one knows about that. Lani, why don't you put it out there? So, oh, but I'm scared of the camera and all that.

Dennis (00:21:22) - But so then I just interviewed her. I had her son hold my iPhone.

Brandon (00:21:28) - And.

Dennis (00:21:28) - Then she and I were just talking as we were just walking through. And after about five minutes, she forgot that we were filming. Yeah, we took all that like an hour and some a video, run it through some AI tools to be able to chop it up. And now there's AI tools that will chop up it, turn it into YouTube videos and do chapters and all that and transcribe it. Then you run it through ChatGPT as you know, to be able to take the transcription, which is words and turn it into something that's actually more readable and turn it into ads and make landing pages and GMB posts and all that. And then we're putting a dollar a day against that on all these other channels.

Brandon (00:22:03) - Yeah.

Brandon (00:22:04) - That's awesome. And I'm sure to them it's just normal, kind of like monotonous stuff that's not interesting, but it's super interesting to people who don't aren't exposed to it every day. And I think you get desensitized to and my I mean, the audience of this podcast has the best subject matter, right? It's like babies, food and pets.

Brandon (00:22:24) - Man. Yeah. Trinity of perfect Internet content.

Brandon (00:22:26) - Yeah.

Brandon (00:22:27) - And then one of them. So there's just so much.

Dennis (00:22:29) - You can't lose if you're a vet.

Brandon (00:22:31) - No, you can't lose, especially.

Dennis (00:22:32) - When someone's coming in and the child is, you know, because maybe the dog ate, you know, has a distended tummy because it ate all this food because no one was watching. And now it's an opportunity to explain the condition to to to teach something. And everyone's going to want to share that because they can identify with the story, especially because it's Johnny's golden retriever, especially if you do it in vertical video. Short Little. You know, one minute videos are now because of what we've learned on TikTok. The sweet spot is 22 seconds. If you are sharing expertise about something or one quick tip, did you know that if you do this one thing with your like, I have a pet rabbit, right? You know, and and I had to cut its toenails, but I didn't like, there's all these little tips, right, that you guys know that are super basic.

Dennis (00:23:14) - Whatever people like me don't know.

Brandon (00:23:16) - Absolutely. You just make.

Dennis (00:23:17) - These Can you imagine, like, how long would it take to make a whole bunch of little tips, You know, like 15 or 20 little tips?

Brandon (00:23:24) - Yeah. Just and I think being shorter and more brief and not having intros and just getting right into the content, it's a lot more important now. Yeah. And just building, building audience that way when you're doing dollar a day, do you then? So I love the this. I think it has so much value as far as where ads are going. I think that ads the creative as targeting is going to get more important because algorithms know what the content is about. For organic.

Brandon (00:23:51) - You are doing.

Dennis (00:23:52) - Facial recognition. TikTok is able to take your videos and recognize what's in the background, recognize who the people are. So you're right, your content is doing the targeting.

Brandon (00:24:01) - So I think that this is a skill that everybody needs to do if they're going to be doing any kind of advertising in the future because it's just going to get more automated and more about what you're talking about and giving you paid distribution for it.

Brandon (00:24:13) - So I think that's that's super smart. Well, I'm real quick, I want to pivot a little bit. So you're all about data and results, and I love that about your philosophy and marketing. And that's what I like to do to be very tactical, especially with ad spend or any kind of resources that you're putting in. So it has to be generating some kind of response result or lessons, right? But when it comes to things like SEO, for example, you've been seeing that the industry is kind of like the Wild West it has been ever since it was created because it's like this.

Dennis (00:24:45) - It's snake oil, 99% of its snake oil. I'm a search engine engineer and I'm telling you, 99% of the people that sell SEO are fraudulent. And they want to argue with me. My job at the search engine was to protect the search results from people trying to trick us. Now, I understand. Yes. Who doesn't want to rank number one on veterinarian city name but me as a search engine? I'm trying to protect the search results to show the goods.

Dennis (00:25:14) - And I understand all the tricks. We have teams of people that can see all the garbage, blogspot and links that you're buying and the directory submissions and all that nonsense stuff that you can easily use in any of these SEO analytics tools. We see all that, but 99% of the people that are selling SEO services either outright, fraudulently, I mean, just maybe they mean well, maybe they don't know any better because they're white labeling, meaning they're outsourcing it to someone else who's outsourcing to someone else. And we trace it all the way through and we find that there's garbage content being generated on sites in weird countries that you can't pronounce that have nothing to do with an Orange County. There's no signal on Orange County or veterinarian. It's from sites that have nothing to do with the authority or relevance of those. And that's really the core of SEO is links. 80% of SEO is where those links are coming from. If you can't build those links because there's some guy in Pakistan, look, I've got a lot of friends in Pakistan.

Brandon (00:26:13) - Yeah.

Dennis (00:26:14) - But some guy in Pakistan is trying to write an article about, you know, what your dog should eat if it has food sensitivities or something. They don't know. They don't know about your city. They don't know about your topic. Everything in local is about the the geo relevance, something about the city and or something about that topic. That's why SEO will fail unless it has the involvement of that small business owner. There's tricks that still work. They're called Black Hat. They're against Google's guidelines. I've been doing this for over two decades. You will get busted if you break those rules.

Brandon (00:26:48) - Yeah.

Brandon (00:26:50) - Absolutely. Well, I think I think there's a big difference between SEO and Web development. So people I think the biggest thing in Vet Matt is that web developers are selling SEO and they are setting up structural SEO best practices, but that's all that they do.

Dennis (00:27:05) - Yeah, they're calling it SEO, but I can. So that's what we call on site SEO. There's two components of SEO.

Dennis (00:27:11) - There's off site SEO, which is building links, that's actually SEO. And then there's now people are calling it technical SEO or on site SEO. Look, if you build a website that is on WordPress, hopefully, and the contents categorized properly of location service pages, the phone numbers are clickable, it loads fast, You tie in your GMB like they could claim. That's SEO. I consider that just general website. Like if you're going to build a website, these are 101 sorts. I don't call that SEO. Yes, it has an SEO impact if your site is slow, for example. But and you know, Google's pagespeed insights and all that like. Yeah, but I don't consider that SEO and if you're if you're building relationships, here's the number one thing. This is what SEOs will will take credit for. They'll look inside your GMB or inside your Google Analytics and say, Tara, we drove all these leads or whatnot through GMB, or we rank on all these particular keywords and all the tools will generate reports that have so-and-so agency name on them to make it look like work is happening.

Dennis (00:28:13) - Yeah, the majority of you guys can do this. The majority of the new business and new clients that you get are actually from your name. That's called branded search, and it's okay on PPC to bid on your name to protect your name because other people will bid on it and that kind of thing. But if branded search is because you have good reviews, it's because you have a good reputation in the community. It's because people are talking about you. It is not because you hired some SEO person to do this. So if you're evaluating the SEO, supposedly that's being done and you strip out all the brand search, meaning the names of the veterinarians, the name of your place and all that, what's left is non-branded search. How many of those like veterinarian city name or whatever, can you really take credit for it? Well, a lot of it's going to be because you already if you already have a lot of great reviews, that's going to be driving the fact that you're getting those rankings. So if you strip those two out, then you're looking at the increment, which is what the SEO company has actually done, which is usually nothing.

Brandon (00:29:15) - It's usually less than 5%. And the branded side, because veterinary hospitals typically don't have like no, no offense to the veterinary hospitals. They're amazing, right? The people that work in them are awesome. They love animals, but they're typically not salespeople. And so if they get a call for and I've listened to so many client calls, if they get a call for it's this, you know, ABC competitor, they'll say, Nope, sorry, here's their phone number, give them a call so they don't try to close them. So branded search is almost always a waste based on like 98% of the calls that I've reviewed. And so I always exclude branded because you're either going to pick it up organic or you're going to get traffic confusion and not need to.

Dennis (00:29:56) - Right? Well, you're doing it the honest way, but most people that sell digital are not.

Brandon (00:30:00) - Yeah, that's the easiest way to to kind of spike the the it's cheating.

Dennis (00:30:05) - It's taking credit for their own thing. Why would you do that? Oh, I know why you do that.

Brandon (00:30:08) - But it makes you.

Brandon (00:30:09) - It makes your numbers and conversions. We're conversion rates 40% like Yeah they already know like and trust you that's why.

Brandon (00:30:15) - Yeah.

Dennis (00:30:15) - Our cost per click is so cheap. Yeah, because you're bidding on our name, that's why.

Brandon (00:30:19) - Exactly.

Dennis (00:30:20) - And they don't give you access to all these other unscrupulous agencies don't give you access to the actual underlying accounts because they don't want you to see that.

Brandon (00:30:27) - Yeah, that's. That's a big red flag there that not having your own your own client account and your own. Yeah.

Brandon (00:30:34) - Yeah.

Dennis (00:30:34) - I mean you're doing it right But you know a random vet where they're people love animals, they don't know that they need to actually have admin access to the Google Analytics, to the different ad accounts, to their website, because the agencies will say like, Oh yeah, you have admin, here's this other place to go to where we just created this convenient report for you so you don't have to go to these other places. No, no, no. I need to have admin.

Dennis (00:30:55) - I need Oh no. But if you go in then you know, then you might mess things up. We don't want to give you access to that. Yeah, you know, it's really complicated technical stuff. No, no, I need access.

Brandon (00:31:05) - Definitely. I think that's a really good rule of thumb for you. Just need to understand the basic principle. It's not that complicated to break it down into a way that everybody can understand, right?

Dennis (00:31:14) - And because you do pate, it's so easy to audit. The first thing that I do is I audit thousands of accounts. It's fun. It's like I do this to relax, which I know is kind of sick. But the first thing I do when we get access to an ad account is I go look at the change history and see has anything happened in the last 90 days? And most of the time when another agency is in charge, nothing has happened. Isn't that crazy? You know.

Brandon (00:31:36) - This? Yeah.

Brandon (00:31:37) - I go into the accounts to go to change history and say, Oh look, they haven't updated it since the last account that I was looking at.

Brandon (00:31:44) - The agency who'd been charging them hadn't updated since.

Brandon (00:31:47) - Yeah.

Dennis (00:31:47) - And then the client gets mad and all this, they go to the account manager who just sings and dances because they don't.

Brandon (00:31:53) - We're letting Google their salesperson. Yeah, exactly.

Dennis (00:31:56) - Oh, but it's working so well. We didn't need to touch anything. Yeah. So when someone signed up, you talked to the salesperson, They went through this onboarding process and the first couple of weeks they did all this work to set up the account. And after that, no one touched anything for months, sometimes years.

Brandon (00:32:09) - Yeah.

Brandon (00:32:10) - Yeah. I think some of what we both know is cassiem from Solutions eight. He says.

Brandon (00:32:15) - Possum.

Dennis (00:32:15) - Is awesome.

Brandon (00:32:16) - He is awesome.

Brandon (00:32:17) - I love that.

Dennis (00:32:17) - That's how you say, that's how you rhyme. Custom is awesome.

Brandon (00:32:21) - That's.

Dennis (00:32:21) - I remember when you first started like eight years ago, he was a nobody and he came up to me, it was at an event in Phoenix and he started bombarding me with all these questions.

Brandon (00:32:30) - Yeah.

Dennis (00:32:31) - And I answered him and we even got on a Zoom call later or whatnot. And now he's the he runs Solutions eight and he's the number one Google ads guy. That's fantastic. I'm so proud of it.

Brandon (00:32:39) - Super cool. Yeah.

Brandon (00:32:40) - But he he says you should have between 100 and 150 changes per month. I think that's a pretty good rule of thumb for.

Dennis (00:32:45) - Depending on what the category changes are. So it's just like, you know, changing the keywords or changing the bid type or what? Like how about like some real changes, like changes to copy changes to the campaign structure? If you're still testing something that that reflects that an intelligent human being is is in there not just, oh, here's like. 100 more keywords were adding because Google's auto suggesting them. That doesn't sound like optimization to me.

Brandon (00:33:10) - Yeah.

Brandon (00:33:10) - No. Yeah exactly. And for for veteran hospitals, it's primarily because we don't have great conversion data being in there. So it's really important that we manage the inputs for keywords.

Brandon (00:33:20) - In there, especially.

Dennis (00:33:21) - Performance.

Brandon (00:33:21) - Max Yeah.

Dennis (00:33:23) - Where now you can upload these little videos and if you don't put in the videos, the system can't optimize. That includes going across YouTube, which is the best place to convert right now, which is Google. Google, you know, YouTube's part of Google. Most people don't know that.

Brandon (00:33:35) - Yeah, their new lead form ads are super cool, but definitely. Well, thank you so much, Dennis. I really want to be respectful of your time and you've been so generous. So thank you. There's so much good info in here and I just appreciate you being on. It's been been amazing. So thank you so much.

Dennis (00:33:52) - Brandon Yeah, and let's repurpose this and share this because we want veterinarians to know what is really going on in digital marketing and work with reputable folks like.

Brandon (00:34:00) - You and how can.

Brandon (00:34:01) - People find you. I know you have your knowledge panel. If you search Dennis, you.

Brandon (00:34:04) - You can Google me.

Dennis (00:34:05) - Yeah, that's that's how I knew I was in trouble at Yahoo! And all the other engineers that worked on my team said, We'll just Google it.

Dennis (00:34:11) - I said, Do you know a company you work at?

Brandon (00:34:15) - Yahoo! Was the first, though. I remember. I mean they had.

Brandon (00:34:18) - Yeah I know just shared.

Dennis (00:34:19) - But I can tell all of these like back in the day stories where I used to wear purple because everything was purple and Yahoo! And we had, you know, the world record for yodeling because, you know, that was the Yahoo thing.

Brandon (00:34:29) - Yeah, amazing.

Dennis (00:34:30) - I'm happy to connect with anybody, happy to do audits. I just love promoting transparency because I'm a data guy. It just makes me happy, especially people that are getting scammed by agencies that are just run by sales, burros that are trying to make money instead of actually taking care of the clients because everything's about results. You guys are all small business owners. You deserve better.

Brandon (00:34:49) - 100%. I couldn't agree more. I think it helps the industry to be better. If there's ways for people to check and see what's going on. So I really appreciate it. Dennis and Dennis, It's blitz metrics.

Brandon (00:35:02) - Yep. Is the website and got so much good stuff there, so I'm going to blitz metrics. Thanks, Dennis.