Franchise and Multi-unit PPC Optimization with Mark Jensen

Join franchise and multi-location marketing expert, Mark Jensen to learn from his experience managing a $1M per week PPC budget across 1,800 locations of Extra Space Storage.

Key things we discuss are:
- How the PPC landscape is shifting in the past 3-6 months
- What are some of the challenges in managing multi-unit and Franchise PPC marketing?
- What are some PPC best practices that can improve success?
- What should franchise marketing practitioners be monitoring and measuring in their PPC campaigns and why?
- How you can tell if you're paying too much and/or not getting much from your outsourced or in-house PPC partner
- How you can tell if you have a solid PPC marketing vendor

Want a transcript of the podcast? Here you go!

Dave Hansen (00:02):
Hey guys, welcome to another episode of the advisory board podcast. I'm Dave Hansen, the host today. We've got an exciting character with us. His name is Mark Jensen, AKA Marcus T. He's also, he's been a semi famous punk band entrepreneur, semi famous - also one of the early managing partners over get found first. A pretty well known SEO PPC firm and he's been managing a ton of you know, very large multi-unit PPC campaigns for groups like extra space storage. So I wanted to bring him on early in the podcast series because he's kind of a witch in this space of PPC is known it and tracked it for many years and and multi-unit multi location PBC is a totally different animal than running it. Just one campaign for one side. So Mark, thanks for joining us.
Mark Jensen (00:55):
Yeah, absolutely.
Dave Hansen (00:57):
Yeah. Anything you want to add, any color to you before we jump in? Any content?
Mark Jensen (01:02):
You know, I've been in internet marketing now for about eight years. Had a lot of exposure to all the different channels in digital marketing, including running that agency, which I think kind of helped me think more like a business owner in this. So going in and, and running this large account for extra space storage that I, gosh, I think we're spending about 52 million a year on 1800 locations. Yeah. Having that business hat when you're working with accounts this size, it's, it's been really helpful and I hope through our discussion I'll be able to kind of highlight some of those nuggets that I've been able to find.
Dave Hansen (01:37):
Yeah. Good. Well, we're gonna, we're gonna pull them out of your brain, so thanks for, thanks for doing that. Hey, so talk, let's, let's just start kind of high level, like what's changing? So PPC is always changing. That's the one thing that never changes with PPC is it's always in a state of flux. Thanks. why don't you share a little bit with us about, about what you've noticed changing in the last maybe, you know, 90 days, six months,
Mark Jensen (01:58):
Okay. Yeah, I mean, first off at caveat, this was saying when we talk PBC, it's almost exclusively Google, right? If you're not on being, you should go there. That's got a generally lower cost for Claire. She can get a, you know, a good conversions there, but it's just not the volume. Like PPC is ubiquitous with Google right now. So we'll kind of reference it by that. The first thing I'd say is covert, right? That's on everybody's mind right now. So much negative news right now. So let me give you some, some potentially good news is it's not the nail in the coffin for every single business out there. I've seen a lot of companies really thriving right now. Thinking of like home renovation or, Oh gosh, like mold removal, these different projects of things people are finally starting to get out on these places are actually increasing in volume right now. So what I'd say is that, Hey, not all industries are impacted the same and not all locations are impacted the same. So something you should do if you're having somebody manage your account is going and ask them, Hey, is there opportunity to actually take advantage of this right now? And not in a slimy way but just like, Hey, there's more interest so let's lean in.
Dave Hansen (03:16):
Yeah. And you know, just a thought to share on that, cause I've got an interesting insight. One of our partners, they generate leads for home service companies and at a very large scale and one of their directors, and I will keep this I won't share any details of who shared what, but they shared that actually HVAC, plumbing, several the home services way up emergency plumbing was way up. Like people are flushing like napkins and paper towels down the toilet, I guess.
Mark Jensen (03:44):
Right. Which is why we are discovering our ineptitude and using our own household things.
Dave Hansen (03:49):
Yeah. Like, well that works in the office toilet, I guess it doesn't work. People are doing, but they're spending more time in their homes. And I'm glad you brought it up because it's an area that we do a lot of work in the client, the other, but that, that niche of, I'm in my house constantly now I'm out on my deck working and my decks, crap, I want to replace my deck or I want to do redo my floors. We can need to get new carpet. Like we have seen an insurgence, a resurgence of leads flowing into, you know, painting, plumbing, HVAC, all sorts of, all sorts of places where a lot of business owners I think are, had been pulling back like, Ooh, save money. I'm afraid. And so what's happening to the competition for those clicks?
Mark Jensen (04:25):
Right. It may not be the time for us sturdy for, for a lot of companies right now. Absolutely. the little tidbit out there like addressing covert in your ads could actually be a good move right now too. So if you're, or you've got somebody managing this, look at cleanliness, leaning into no-contact, things like that, those are performing really well right now.
Dave Hansen (04:47):
Hmm. A question for you. I have somebody who told me that if you referenced coronavirus or covert in your PPC ad copy that Google's blocking those, is that right?
Mark Jensen (04:58):
Hmm. Say I'm not, I'm not sure. Yeah. The only ways I've seen it lean into is not specifically naming Cove it, but just addressing the, the value adds that accompany wants to bring to the table,
Dave Hansen (05:11):
Which is frankly a better psychology of marketing anyway. Stop talking about the, you know, features, benefits, talk about just the benefits of the value that you bring. So yeah. Okay. That makes sense. Yep. Sorry to put you on the spot. Cool. So any other trends that you are seeing right now as far as how people should be using or are using PBC?
Mark Jensen (05:31):
Yeah, you know, I love the good buzzword. So let's let's say a couple of big data AI automation that's been around. That's great. Wow. Who's not excited, bright. Now I don't know. But yeah, I'd say that those are still still top of mind. Google's rolled out some of these automated, Ooh, machine learning features in the past, but they're getting better and they're getting better. This is the way that, that things will be moving is automation. And I think one of the things that we're going to start seeing is a difference in how campaigns are being made. And this should be changing already. It used to be when you would create a PBC campaign, it would be extremely broken out, right? You go and you look at anything that was built and you know, four or five years ago, it's going to be very, very intricate. With these automated technologies, they need a lot of data, right? So if you're super broken out, you're actually minimizing the data that this machine learning can grab. So it may not be super popular with some people that want all that control, but having more condensed builds will actually benefit this type of technology more. So that's what I'm going to expect to be seeing is more and more consolidation, fewer keywords, fewer ad groups, things like that. And really leveraging some of this automation in exciting ways, honestly.
Dave Hansen (07:01):
Yeah. Well I come, I have a background in that a little bit. The natural language processing machine learning space for being an inflation. And if you want to train an engine, I've seen, I've seen engines that can translate patents in certain languages as well as humans, but they are very specific content in a very tight, tight content domain, but lots of volume flowing through it. So that makes total sense. Right? Exactly. Yup. Very cool man. Yeah, well I've got a couple of, I got a couple of questions for you, Mark, since you're the expert, if you're ready to be on the hot seat. Yeah, race yourself. So let's, let's shift gears back to multi-unitbecause that's kind of the focus of what we want to talk about today. And there are a lot of people that run franchises that are running a dealership, programs that have hundreds of locations. And this is a big challenge for a lot of them. I've talked to them, they've told me I was what you think of this. So talk to me a little bit about challenges. Like, how is it different? Like what, why is it challenging to run PPC campaigns for multi-unitfranchises or otherwise? Otherwise,
Mark Jensen (08:01):
I think one of the, especially as you start getting bigger and bigger and your portfolio gets larger it can easily become unmanageable. And this is especially true if you've grown over the past few years. Things that you're not thinking about is standardization, right? You're, you're just getting off and you're excited and you're building this business. So what you're going to have is you're going to kind of have this Frankenstein account. Now what I don't want to do is just lean into, yeah, that's really tricky to manage. But also it's really tricky as a business owner to know what in the world is going on when you can't do good roll up reporting, like what products are doing well, what services are doing well, what regions are doing well. All these things are a little tricky if you don't have good standardization and taxonomy. So it's kind of a crazy one. It wouldn't seem like high impact, but