Ninety days of paid content tripled my cost per conversation

Your month 1 number is doing a lot of work. First month of any outreach hits the whole accumulated list at once, so 41 conversations was never the run rate. If you throw out month 1 and treat months 2 and 3 as the real thing, your cost per conversation is $83 to $133 and falling in the wrong direction, which is bad, but it isn't a collapse from $58. It's a business that never worked at $2,400.

Zero contracts on 88 conversations is the number I'd chase, not the cost per conversation. I've had months where 12 conversations produced two deals. What are the 88 actually saying to you? If most of them are curious homeowners with no reason to sell, the content is attracting the wrong people and paying more for it won't help.

1,900 names from public records and old inquiries is two different lists glued together. The old inquiries already knew you. The records pull didn't. I'd bet almost all of month 1 came from the inquiry half and you've now burned through it. Split them and re-run the numbers before you decide anything on the 15th.

Dumb question from someone with no dog in this. Does the agency own the video files and the account, or do you? If you cancel and they hold the assets you're paying for the same thing twice next year.

You have an offer problem. Two walks in three months and both priced where nothing works means the sellers reaching you are the ones who don't need you. Better reels won't fix that. What's the pitch in the videos, speed, certainty, cash? If it's just "I buy houses" you're competing with forty people saying the same words.

Small market here, so my numbers are tiny, but the thing that changed my response rate wasn't production quality. It was naming the actual street or subdivision in the copy. People replied because they recognized the place. Agency content tends to be generic because generic is cheaper to produce at volume.

You can get partial attribution before the 15th without rebuilding anything. Make a second form URL, put it in the email only, leave the original on the videos, run it for a week. That won't give you three months back but it tells you whether the $1,200 email option is even the right half to keep.

What counts as an inbound conversation here? Someone replying to an email, or an actual phone call? I ask because if a reply counts, 41 in month one sounds much less impressive than it reads.

Treat the retainer as a fixed cost against contracts, not against conversations. At $2,400 a month and say $12,000 of margin on a deal you'd sign, you need one deal every five months to break even before your own time. Three months with zero is not enough data to reject that. Six months with zero is. The honest problem is you can't afford to run the experiment long enough to learn from it, and that's a capital constraint rather than a content one.

@sextant that framing helped me more than anything I've read this month. I've been killing tests at 60 days because the spreadsheet looked bad, and the spreadsheet was always going to look bad at 60 days.

Read the renewal terms before you pick an option. I've seen these agreements with auto renew at 30 days notice and a clause assigning the social accounts to the provider during the term. If it auto renews on the 15th your real deadline was two weeks ago. Check the notice provision specifically, and if the accounts are in their name, get that changed as a condition of any renewal.

Option 3 at $700 plus tools is not the cheap option once you count your hours. If you spend eight hours a week on production at any reasonable value on your time, you've recreated the $2,400 and lost the writing quality. The only version of option 3 that makes sense is if you genuinely enjoy making the content, because then the hours don't feel like cost.

Your view numbers and your conversation numbers don't move together. 6,400 to 2,100 is a 67 percent drop in views. 41 to 18 is a 56 percent drop in conversations. Close enough that the content reach is probably the whole story and the list fatigue theory is a second explanation you don't need. Fix reach or stop paying for it. I'd also want to know whether month 1 included a paid boost that got dropped, because that pattern is exactly what a small ad budget expiring looks like.