Reading a paid content retainer's declining cost per conversation before a renewal decision

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.

A list of 1,900 names built from public records and old inquiries is two different lists glued together. The old inquiries already knew you. The records pull did not. The likely pattern is that almost all of month 1 came from the inquiry half, and that half is now spent. Split them and rerun the numbers before you decide anything on the 15th.

One question before the cancel decision. Does the agency own the video files and the account, or do you? If you cancel and they hold the assets, you pay 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.

In small markets the pattern is consistent, and it has little to do with production quality. What moves response rate is naming the actual street or subdivision in the copy. People reply because they recognize 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, and run it for a week. That will not give you three months back. It does tell 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.

Measure the retainer against contracts. Conversations are the wrong denominator. At $2,400 a month and say $12,000 of margin on a deal you would 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 that you cannot afford to run the experiment long enough to learn from it, and that is a capital constraint more than a content one.

@dpatel_re 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.

Put your view numbers next to your conversation numbers. 6,400 to 2,100 is a 67 percent drop in views. 41 to 18 is a 56 percent drop in conversations. Those track closely enough that content reach is probably the whole story, and the list fatigue theory is a second explanation you do not need. Fix reach or stop paying for it. Worth checking whether month 1 included a paid boost that was later dropped, because that curve is exactly what a small ad budget expiring looks like.