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PPC Plus upgrades outdated Google advertising by delivering vetted, high-intent inbound calls alongside AI-nurtured leads, replacing the passive form-fill model with engaged, conversion-ready prospects.
If you've been running Google PPC for a while, you already know the rhythm. Budget goes in, leads fill out a form, and then you spend the next several weeks chasing people who may or may not remember signing up.
It's not broken, exactly. But it's never quite felt like the full picture either.
That's because it isn't. And over the past year, we've been working to change it.PPC Plus is what happens when we take everything we've learned about Google advertising since 2020, layer in the latest AI improvements Google has been rolling out across its platform, and rebuild the experience around a simple question: what would it look like if we delivered you an engaged consumer instead of just a contact?
The honest answer to that question starts with understanding why the current model keeps falling short.
The problem with "just filling out a form"
The form fill has always been a compromise, specifically a way to capture someone's contact information and hope that consistent follow-up would eventually surface real intent. The challenge is that this model puts all the work on you.
And when you're juggling active clients, showings, and everything else, not every top-of-funnel registration gets the follow-up it deserves.
The result shows up in the data across our entire client base. Leads go cold. Databases grow into archives of missed opportunities. A real portion of the marketing budget you put in quietly evaporates without ever producing a conversation.
It was what we were asking agents to do with leads that had never signaled any real intent to begin with.We've seen this pattern too many times. And the more we looked at it, the clearer it became that the problem wasn't agent effort.
What is PPC Plus?
That recognition is what PPC Plus was built around. It's an evolutionary upgrade to our existing Google PPC infrastructure, and not just a new product category.
Same channels we've always used. But rebuilt around a fundamentally different goal: delivering engagement, not just contact information.
The most important change is that a growing percentage of the leads we generate now come in as live, vetted, inbound phone calls routed directly to you through our call center.Here's the thing: when someone searches for a realtor and then picks up the phone rather than filling out a form, that self-selected action tells you something a registration never can. They're not browsing; they want to talk to someone right now.
We've built the infrastructure to capture those moments and get them to you filtered, qualified, and ready for a real conversation.
How the waterfall model works
That infrastructure runs on a two-layer structure, and understanding it changes how you think about what a "lead" even is. PPC Plus doesn't replace the long-tail pipeline — it puts something on top of it.
| Lead Type | Source | How It's Delivered |
|---|---|---|
| Inbound phone call | Google search, Maps, display | Vetted by our call center, live-transferred to you |
| Website registration | Google ads → IDX site | Worked by AI Squared (text + voice outbound) |
At the top: high-intent consumers who see a phone number in your ad and call. They're self-selecting into urgency.
At the bottom: longer-tail registrations who need nurturing over time.
AI Squared handles that outbound follow-up, turning passive registrations into active conversations.
The goal is engaged consumers at both ends, ready now and ready later, running in parallel rather than sequentially.
The cost story (this is the part that surprises people)
Running both ends of that in parallel, you'd expect to pay more for it. The data went the other way.
PPC Plus delivers a 10-20% lower cost per lead than standard PPC. Not the same cost. Lower.
And that's because Google's AI targeting improvements at the bidding and placement level have compounded faster than the premium attached to higher-quality leads.
Case in point: here's what that looks like across two real clients we ran as A/B comparisons:
Smaller budget client (same month, side-by-side)
| Campaign | Spend | Leads | Cost Per Lead | Phone Transfers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard PPC | $400 | 18 | $22 | 0 |
| PPC Plus | $500 | 33 | ~$15 | 3 (1 already active client) |
Larger budget client
| Campaign | Spend | Leads | Cost Per Lead | Transfers | Outcomes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard PPC | $2,400 | 148 | $16 | 0 | N/A |
| PPC Plus | $3,200 | 217 | $15 | 6 | 5 met or appointment set |
We're not charging more for PPC Plus on the platform side. The only incremental cost is the AI Squared subscription that powers outbound follow-up on the registration leads.
And we've consistently seen that offset by the efficiency gains clients see from day one.
Why the inbound call changes everything about ROI timing
"From day one" is the part worth sitting with, because the inbound phone call is what makes early ROI possible in a way form-fill PPC never could.
Standard Google PPC has always carried a realistic expectation of three to six months before you see meaningful return.
PPC Plus changes that math by creating the possibility of fast wins alongside the long-term build.One of our team leads described the shift directly: "My agents are having conversations now where they're asking, 'When do you want to move?' And getting a real answer. That wasn't happening before."
Another picked up two listings from inbound calls without running a single seller-specific campaign. Motivated sellers are disproportionately likely to call. They want to talk to a human, and a phone number inside an ad gives them a direct path to do exactly that.
The filter layer that makes it work
Seems like a solid system at this point, right? The catch—and it's a real one we knew going in—is that not every inbound call from Google is worth taking.
Historically, roughly seven out of ten calls generated by Google call ads are spam, bots, or wrong-number situations. Agents who've tried running call ads on their own know what happens next: they get burned out, stop answering, and abandon the whole thing.
That's why we built our own call center as the layer between Google and you. Here's how every call gets handled:
Our call center staff (not AI) screens every inbound call, because the variety of scenarios still requires human judgment
They verify buyer or seller intent before anything gets transferred
Qualified calls are live-transferred to your phone with contact details already captured
Missed transfers are logged with full details so your team can follow up, though live-answer rates are meaningfully higher
All outbound follow-up on registration leads is AI-driven through AI Squared: that's where our data on conversation patterns is deep enough to automate confidently
The split between human-handled inbound and AI-driven outbound is intentional, and it's held up. Right now, the human layer is what makes the filter reliable.
The one number that tells you where the real opportunity is
Reliable on our end, though, only solves half the equation.
Here's something we share openly with every client before activation: roughly 40-50% of the live transfers we send through PPC Plus currently go unanswered.The technology is working. The calls are warm. The prospects are verified. And nearly half the time, nobody picks up.
That gap is the single biggest leverage point for any team on this product, which is why we do a one-on-one setup conversation before activating PPC Plus for anyone. We want your CRM routing dialed in and the right agents assigned to receive transfers before the first call lands.
Save the Ylopo number in your contacts. Make sure your team knows what a transfer sounds like and why it's worth picking up.
In terms of intent and conversion probability, that call is the closest thing to a referral you'll get from a digital marketing system.
What needs to be in place before you switch over
Treating those transfers seriously, consistently and at scale, comes down to a few things being set up correctly before the first one arrives.
PPC Plus has one non-negotiable prerequisite: AI Squared, our combined AI Text and Voice suite, must be active on your account. That's not a gate for its own sake.
The 90% of leads that still come in as form registrations need to be worked, and AI Squared is the system doing that outbound follow-up. Without it, the bottom half of the waterfall stalls.
Beyond that, here's what the setup looks like:
| Requirement | Detail |
|---|---|
| Minimum ad spend | $600/month, same floor as standard PPC |
| AI Squared | Must be active; handles outbound on all registration leads |
| Onboarding call | Required before activation; we set up CRM routing together |
| Lead filtration | We recommend low filtration; AI Squared works the leads; we screen out renters |
| Existing PPC | Shift your budget over; no need to run both in parallel |
The onboarding conversation isn't a formality. The setup on the receiving end (specifically how transfers route, which agents answer, and what the CRM captures) determines as much of your outcome as the technology generating the leads.
See what PPC Plus can do for your pipeline
That setup conversation is where we'd like to start. Reach out to your Ylopo Customer Success Manager or growth team contact and let them know you're ready to explore PPC Plus.
You can also email us at marketing@ylopo.com or support@ylopo.com and we'll get the right person in touch.
If you're not yet running AI Squared, our combined AI Text and AI Voice system, that's actually the conversation to have first — because it's the foundation the whole model runs on.
AI Squared is what turns registration leads into active conversations through intelligent outbound texting and calling, and it's also what reaches back into your existing database to surface leads you may have written off months or years ago.
Agents who've made the switch consistently tell us they'd never manage a team without it again.
The cost of nine human ISAs doing the same work is what convinced one of our longtime team leads: nine salaries, management overhead, and inconsistent output, replaced by a system that contacts every lead in the database on a defined cadence without burning out.
Together, PPC Plus and AI Squared are the most complete version of what we've been building toward since day one, and we think the numbers make the decision straightforward.Part 1 of a 2-part series. Part 2 covers how AI Squared turns every lead in your database, new and dormant, into an engaged opportunity.
Aaron Franklin
Head of Growth
Aaron "Kiwi" Franklin is the Head of Growth at Ylopo and a serial technologist and entrepreneur who has over 25 years of experience creating digital solutions for major brands and pioneering companies where technology and real estate meet. His depth of expertise stems from leading development of the first website for Apple to founding a global community of over 1,000 elite athletes.