LossMarketing / PPC Agency (Real Estate)

Forty percent of the form fills I paid for were the same nine people

I spent four months and $11,600 building an interest list of prospective private lenders for a small note buying vehicle. Agency contract was $1,900 a month plus ad spend, and the reporting metric written into it was form fills. Their dashboard showed 214 leads. When I exported the raw rows and deduped on email and phone, there were 63 unique humans. Nine people accounted for 86 submissions between them, mostly the same three retirees hitting the form from different devices after retargeting chased them around for weeks. Four of the 63 turned into a real phone conversation. Zero commitments. Separately, my attorney stopped the whole thing in month three because advertising an investment opportunity to strangers raises general solicitation questions I had not answered, and that is a securities attorney question, not a marketing one. So I paid for a list I could not legally use the way I imagined and the list was a quarter the size I was billed for. What I would do differently: define lead in the contract as a unique deduped contact with a phone number that answers, and get the legal question settled before a dollar of spend, not after. I would also demand raw row level exports weekly rather than a dashboard screenshot.

Answer

3wendy_park48CapitalPRO7

The loss is in the contract language and everything else follows from it. I have read three of these agreements this year and all three defined a lead as a completed form submission through agency owned tracking. That single sentence does two things at once. It makes the agency the sole scorekeeper, and it makes duplicates revenue. Ask for the definition to read something like: a lead is a unique contact record, deduped against all prior records on phone number, delivered to a CRM the client owns, with the source campaign and the timestamp attached.

While you are in there, check who the ad accounts are registered to. If the agency owns the Google and Meta accounts, your conversion history and your audience lists walk out the door when you leave, and you start from zero with the next shop. Also check whether the retargeting audience has a frequency cap and an exclusion for anyone already in the CRM. Nine people generating 86 submissions is what an uncapped pool looks like on a small audience.

On the legal side, you got the sequence backwards but you caught it in month three, which is cheaper than catching it in year two. The part I would want in writing from the agency now is confirmation that the landing page and every ad variant have been taken down and the pixel audiences deleted, because those keep working after you stop paying.

3 replies

4aaron_fitz10 Get yoursPRO6

The dedupe number is the part that gets me. 214 to 63 is not a rounding error, that is the entire basis of the invoice. Did they push back when you showed them the export, or did they just say the platform reports what it reports? I have seen retargeting pools do exactly this on small audiences, where the same warm bodies keep circling because there is nobody else to show the ad to.

3Rena Expert

Two separate failures here and they need different fixes.

The billing metric is the first one. Form fills are a platform event, not a person. On a small audience with heavy retargeting, submission counts inflate fast because the same warm contacts convert repeatedly across devices and sessions. Any agreement that pays on events rather than deduped contacts is going to drift from reality in the direction that favors the agency, and it does not require bad faith to do it. The workable definition is a unique contact record, deduped on phone first and email second, that passes a stated qualification test. Cost per qualified conversation is the number that governs whether the spend pencils, and yours was roughly $2,900 on 4 conversations. Whether that is tolerable depends entirely on the value of one closed relationship, which for a capital raise is a much lumpier figure than for a seller campaign.

The second failure is upstream of marketing. Running paid advertising to solicit investors for a pooled vehicle can constitute general solicitation, and whether that is permitted depends on the exemption you are relying on and on how the rules apply to your facts. That is a question for a securities attorney before any spend, and the answer also changes what your agency is allowed to write in the ad copy and on the landing page.

Your write up reads as though better attribution would have saved the campaign. It would have saved you money. It would not have made the offer legal to advertise.