Marketing Techniques
December 4, 2009The Truth About PPC Dayparting
High up on the list of overhyped pay-per-click practices is dayparting, the practice of increasing bids during the hours of the day when conversions are at their highest. At other hours of the day (usually during the wee early-morning hours), bids are lowered or keywords may be paused altogether.
This idea is a holdover from the world of broadcast ("push") advertising. In the traditional media world, dayparting is the practice of dividing the day into several parts, each of which caters to a different audience. Television and radio stations could then charge different prices based on the audience that was expected to see an ad at any given time.
This not only gives media buyers the ability to stretch their ad dollars, they can also use it to better reach the people who are most interested in their products. This is why commercials for family products run during the day (better demographic targeting) and infomercials run at night (the ad spots are cheap.)
Unfortunately, neither of these concepts translates well into pay-per-click marketing.
The Demographic Marketers
Dayparters tend to fall into two camps. Let’s consider the first: demographic targeters. These marketers use dayparting in an attempt to maximize the number of impressions they are serving to their target audience. They believe that because there are more sales when traffic is highest, this is a sign that their target demographic is more active. Thus, they raise their bids or activate their campaigns during the busiest hours of the day.
However, pay-per-click allows us to directly measure the correlation between a searcher’s interest in a product and their decision to buy. We no longer have to make guesses about our audience using the indirect relationship that exists in broadcast advertising. We can measure this relationship directly.
And measurement almost always shows that there is no direct correlation between the time when things are busy and when people are ready to buy. These days, people may be ready to buy at noon during their lunch break, or they may be ready to buy at 2am when they can’t sleep because they are so worried about their problems (which your product will solve, right?)
The internet is an instant-gratification medium. Advertisers who try to use day-parting to segment their audience just don’t get this fundamental fact.
This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to better target your ads. It just means that you should be using proven methods which work (such as keyword matching.)
The Cost Cutters
The other camp of dayparters consists of those who use it as a means of cutting costs (and conversely, increasing ROI.)
They argue that if conversion rates are lower at night, then money they save by pausing their campaigns at that time outweigh the opportunity cost of the sales they missed. This results in an effective net profit.
This argument holds a lot more water than the first, to be sure. But just because a boat has smaller holes, doesn’t mean it will float.
Here are a few of the reasons why dayparting doesn’t make for an effective cost-cutting measure.
Dayparting Ignores “Assists”
Not every one of your keywords will appear to be a winner. There may be dozens of keywords to which you can never attribute a sale, but as soon as you remove them from your campaign, your conversions drop like a rock.
When a visitor fails to buy the first time they click on one of your ads, but does so later after clicking another ad, it is known as an Assist. These keywords assist other keywords in doing their job. They are the Scotty Pippen to your Michael Jordan.
Unless you install special tracking, however, you will fail to see the assist at work. And herein lies the reason why so many people mistakenly try to cut costs during low-conversion hours. They fail to see that many of those late-night visitors come back the next day with their wallets out, ready to buy from that site they found the night before.
Dayparting Doesn’t Cut Costs As Much As You Think
You’ve already seen how CPC prices are determined in no small part by the overall demand for a keyword. Because demand for ad placement goes down at night, CPC prices tend to drop during this time. In addition, traffic volumes are much lower at night.
The combination of low search volume and reduced average CPC means that the total cost savings realized by pausing campaigns during non-peak hours is often small in comparison with the spend during peak hours. It almost doesn’t seem worth it.
Dayparting Helps Your Competitors
Conversely, when you pause your campaigns, you reduce the competitive bidding pressure for the remaining advertisers. You are actually making it cheaper for them to advertise in your absence.
In essence, you’re increasing the efficiency of their campaigns, probably far more than your own.
Dayparting Adds Management Overhead
All three of the big search engines offer dayparting in their feature set these days, so the cost overhead of buying a third-party solution to manage dayparting has largely gone away. However, there are still some lingering complications that require your attention.
Chief among these are the differing ways in which the search engines handle dayparting. With Google, dayparting is based on the time zone where your campaign was set up. If you’re a California advertiser who’s dayparting your campaign from 8AM to 5PM, your ads will actually appear from 11AM to 8PM in New York. It’s for this reason that dayparting becomes far less useful as the geographic footprint of your customer base grows. (Note that Bing works the way it should – dayparting is based on your visitors’ time zone.)
As the pay-per-click algorithms evolve over time, you’ll need to assess the impact of any changes on your dayparting strategy. For example, Google used to use your absolute clickthrough rate (regardless of the position of your ads) when calculating the relevance of your campaign. If you used dayparting to lower your bids, your campaign-level quality score would be negatively impacted. This is (allegedly) no longer the case, but there will always be subtle complications that you need to stay on top of.
Richard Stokes is the CEO of AdGooroo and a long-time internet marketer and entrepreneur. This article is an excerpt from his upcoming book, "The Ultimate Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising" (Entrepreneur Press, May 2010).
Posted on 9:53 AM | Permalink
September 15, 20095 Common Mistakes With Search Marketing Campaigns and How to Fix Them
There are over 850,000 companies advertising their goods and services on the search engines this month (September, 2009) yet only a handful truly excel at it. At AdGooroo, we monitor virtually every advertiser in the world and see some common mistakes. Here are the top five which can stop your campaign dead in its tracks!
Mistake #1: Failing to Track Your Visitors
Pretend for a moment that instead of promoting your business over the web, you were to take a more traditional approach such as television advertising. You might be prepared to spend upwards of a quarter million dollars just for production, to be followed by potentially millions of dollars of national media buys.
With so much at stake, it seems unlikely that you would simply write a check and forget about it. Not by a long shot. I bet that you’d be watching the sales figures like a hawk to see if your campaign was bringing customers in. And if it didn’t perform, you’d cut your losses quickly (and probably fire your marketing manager.)
Most of our businesses will never grow to the scale where we can afford big-ticket television buys. Fortunately, internet advertising now gives us a way to purchase smaller, more reasonably priced blocks of traffic.
The downside of this is that these less expensive campaigns tend to fall off the radar of most managers and entrepreneurs. There is a false sense of security that comes from spending “only” $500 a month or so on search. We tell ourselves, “Maybe it will come in, maybe it won’t,” or “Let’s just start it and see what happens.”
This is nothing more than a shortcut to failure and I don’t want you to fall into that trap. So please take this firm, but friendly, piece of advice:
If you don’t track your campaign… you will lose. Period.
If you blow off the numbers behind your business, your marketing will be mediocre because it will be built on opinion and guesswork.
Guesses and opinions are the enemy of good marketing. If you let the numbers tell you the truth, you’ll make your website better. You’ll make your advertising better. Your sales will end up 5x, 10x, even 100x over where you started.
Mistake #2: Trying to Save a Bad Website with PPC Advertising
Hands down, the surest way to improve your PPC results is to improve the efficiency at which your website converts visitors into buyers.
Too many marketers hope that adding an AdWords campaign will redeem a low-performing website or product. If that doesn’t fix their business, they compound their error by raising their bids. They make the same mistake that many “dot com” companies made during the late ‘90s; they pour money into a losing business in a mistaken attempt to “grow to profitability”.
To do it right, you have to accept pay-per-click advertising for what it is: a way to multiply your existing business. If you add PPC to a bad business, you’ll simply lose money faster.
On the other hand, if you add PPC to a good business, you will make more money… if you do it right.
A proven technique for improving the efficiency of your online business is through website optimization. Website optimization is the art and science of enhancing the user experience of a website with the goal of converting visitors into customers.
There are several good books on the subject. One I recommend is Tim Ash’s book, “Landing Page Optimization.” Tim’s book is quite in-depth, so I’ve also written an extensive treatment of the subject aimed at time-pressed website managers in my upcoming book, “The Ultimate Guide to Pay-Per-Click Advertising” (Entrepreneur Press, February 2010.)
Mistake #3: Targeting Too Few Keywords
In both organic and paid search marketing, keywords are the bait that lures prospective customers to your Web site.
People will find your site based on the keywords where your ads appear. For this reason alone, it’s important to expand your campaign with as many relevant terms as possible. Yet according to Marketing Sherpa, the average B2B (business-to-business) advertiser only bids on fifty terms. This is not a recipe for success!
Keyword selection may not be the most important success factor for paid search, but it’s certainly in the top five. The time you spend perfecting your keyword list will dramatically improve the potential results of your pay-per-click advertising campaign.
There are many good tools for this. Some are free, some are not. In the free category are the Google AdWords keyword suggestion tool. In the paid category are WordTracker and AdGooroo. Each of these tools generate keyword suggestions in different ways and the resulting lists are very distinct from one another, so you should try to use several tools to get the best coverage possible.
Mistake #4: Gladiator Bidding
Gladiator bidding refers to the practice some marketers have of trying to buy the top spots at any cost and without regard to ad quality. This is often the mentality at large corporations who are long on dollars and short on search expertise.
What ends up happening in these cases is that the advertiser succeeds at capturing the top side ad placement and pushes other, higher-quality advertisers further down the page. However, their low quality score fails to secure them the coveted premium ad spot (above the organic results) and it ensures they will pay a price close to their maximum bid.
I cover the math and provide some in-depth examples of this in my book, but the takeaway here is that Gladiator bidders pay a 48% premium over the expected CPC price. Yes, you can buy that #1 spot, but you will pay dearly for it.
Mistake #5: Ignoring the competition
Gone are the days when you could run your pay-per-click campaigns in a silo. The search engines’ increasing focus on relevance as well as high demand for ad placement means that advertisers are judged against one another to determine which ads will be shown and which will not.
If you want to take a bigger bite of the apple than your competitors, you have to keep close tabs on them. This practice is known as Search Engine Intelligence (or SEI for short).
At a tactical level, you need to know when competitors are making improvements to their quality score and bids. As they succeed in doing so, your relative advantage to them will be diminished. Having even one competitor close the gap can put the hurt on your campaign. Having a few do it can be catastrophic. This is the main reason why campaigns which are left to their own devices invariably decline after a few months.
The price you pay for your ads is determined in no small part by your competitors’ aggressiveness and the ratio of your optimization efforts to theirs. Your quality score relative to other advertisers in your industry also determines the placement of your ads and the amount of traffic you’ll receive from paid search. And finally, it also plays a huge role in determining how much of the available search traffic your ads will be exposed to (coverage.)
Another important tactical benefit of watching your competitors is that it allows you to defend against such tactics as bid jamming, which can result in dramatic drops in impressions and clickthrough rates, or even result in your being banned from valuable keywords altogether.
Paying attention to competitors’ paid search efforts can pay off strategically as well. Because PPC is so measurable, many companies test new products, features, and services on the search engines prior to widespread launch. You can get advance notice of these changes if you’re watchful.
You can also use paid search to peek inside of your competitors’ business models. If a competitor launches a new pricing model or brand while aggressively increasing CPCs, keep a close eye on them for awhile. If they later drop CPCs and/or pull the model, you’ve found something which didn’t work. Our competitors have saved us countless times at AdGooroo from launching features which the market truly didn’t want.
This wraps it up for our discussion on common mistakes. There are others of course, but most search advertisers would be well served by simply focusing on these basic rules. Good luck in your online marketing efforts!
About the author: Richard Stokes is a long-time internet marketer over 15 years experience in technology and advertising management. He founded AdGooroo, a leading search intelligence company, in 2004. He was previously a technology executive at Publicis Groupe/Leo Burnett. He has a BS in Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois and an MBA in Entrepreneurship and Technology Management from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University. Richard is a regular speaker on search marketing topics, is a certified expert in both email marketing and conversion optimization, and is the author of "Mastering Search Advertising - How the Top 3% of Search Advertisers Dominate Google AdWords".
Posted on 5:48 PM | Permalink
February 23, 2009Free Webinar: "Mastering Search Advertising - Part 2"
Please join us for the second in our 2-part webinar series, "Mastering The Art Of Search Advertising With Author Richard Stokes" presented by AdGooroo and ROIRevolution. This webinar will cover many topics from the book.
Space is limited! We recommend you register early as the first session was over-subscribed.
Part 2: Tuesday, February 24th, 2:00pm EST (1:00pm CST / 12:00pm MST / 11:00am PST)
Duration: 60 minutes
What You'll Learn in Part 2:
- 4 Rules To Dominate Positioning In The Search Results
- The Winning Keyword Formula!
- How To Get A "Great" Quality Score
- The One Word You Don't Want In Your Ad Copy
Register for Part 2 of this FREE webinar series today!
Missed Part 1? Watch it here:
Posted on 11:04 AM | Permalink
January 7, 2009MarketingSherpa Case Study: Email Marketing in Tough Times
In tough economic times, search marketers turn to AdGooroo more than ever. See what Marketing Sherpa said about our 2008 direct marketing initiative and the more than 1,400% ROI it generated.
Read full case study at MarketingSherpa
Posted on 10:40 AM | Permalink
March 28, 2008Free MP3: "Top 5 Ways to Increase Landing Page Conversion Rates"
What if there was just one change you could make on your site that could increase sales by 22%?
A simple change that would cost you next to nothing and would increase your ROI across every AdWords ad, every banner, and any other marketing channel you use?
Chances are, there are not just one of these changes - but many.
In this free MP3 download, Stephen Tournquist, Research Director for Marketing Sherpa, and Richard Stokes, President and Founder of AdGooroo, talk about several areas you can improve on your site including:
- Optimizing your registration and checkout forms
- Common mistakes with submit buttons and a four-step process you can use to find the perfect buttons for your forms
- What eyeflow is and what makes it so important
- How many columns should your pages have?
- How font size, style, and color can impact your sales
- How third-party "trust" seals can actually hurt your sales (and how to find the right trust seal for your site)
Audio (MP3, iPod/iPhone compatible)
Slides and case studies
Posted on 10:48 AM | Permalink
June 29, 2007Panama's great, but you can't track ad copy with it...
Yahoo's new Panama platform lets you track keyword performance or ad copy performance, but not both...
At the date of this writing, Yahoo is in the middle of rolling out their Panama advertising platform. While Panama includes many compelling additions that make Yahoo a much more attractive advertising medium, it is still very difficult to track Yahoo conversions, especially if you have a large number of keywords or plan on doing ad copy optimization.
This is primarily because Yahoo does not currently offer a method to automatically tag your destination URLs with the keyword phrase that the search engine user typed in.
Consider the tasks you need to do as an advertiser with a modest number of keywords (say 10,000) in order to properly manage a campaign on the Yahoo platform. First, you need to upload all of your keywords, assigning each to an ad group (same as Google).
Next, you need to manually tag each of the destination URLs with the keyword. This is because Yahoo does not provide an automated way to do this (Google provides the {keyword} tag). This is a considerable amount of work, but it can be done with some creative use of Excel.
However, if you want now perform ad copy testing, you are stuck. This is because each destination URL requires a custom tag to track the individual ad performance (in Google Analytics, that tag is "utm_content=1", where 1 is replaced with the version of your ad). Because Yahoo does not allow you to run multiple ads at the keyword level, you now have to choose between not performing ad testing, or performing it at the ad group level (which means you can not track keyword level performance).
So at this time, the only way to track keyword level conversion rates and perform A-B split testing on different versions of ads is to assign one keyword per ad group... hardly a scalable solution.
However, if you are willing to live without A-B testing and are also content to not use a third-party analytics tool to track your keyword data, then Yahoo does provide a means to track conversion data directly within the Yahoo interface.
Here are the steps required to do this:
- Login to your Yahoo! Marketing Solutions account
- Click on the "Administration" tab
- Click on "Analytics"
- Enable analytics by clicking the blue "Enable Analytics" button.
- If the radio button next to "Conversion Only Analytics" is not selected, select it and then click the "Activate" button.
- Choose a revenue value model to assign to each conversion:
- "Constant Average Value" assigns a fixed value to each successful conversion. This is useful for many lead generation sites.
- "Dynamic Value" allows you add a script to your conversion page that assigns a specific order amount. If you do not add this script, then you’ll see conversion rates only in your account. For the latest instructions on how to add this script, check the Yahoo help documentation.
- Copy the tracking script provided between the tags on your conversion page.
- Finally, you need to turn on automatic tracking URLs. Click the "Tracking URLs" link at the top of the page. On this page, select "Tracking URLs on" and then click "Save Changes"
That’s it. You should start seeing conversion data in your account from this point on. This data will allow you to start optimizing your Yahoo bids. It will not allow you to conduct A-B split testing however.
If you're supportive of Yahoo and are possibly looking to reduce your dependence on Google, call your Yahoo rep to ask them to add this feature. Hopefully we'll see it soon...!
Posted on 11:33 AM | Permalink
May 5, 2007The Importance of Landing Page Alignment
Why great web design doesn't always pair well with good search engine marketing results.
Those of us who've been doing AdWords for awhile tend to underestimate the importance of landing pages on PPC performance. Perhaps this is because it's a relatively new twist on the PPC algorithm (this change was implemented in July '06), or perhaps it's just because we spend most of our time working on keyword expansion, ad copy optimization, and bidding strategies. But whatever the reason, it is clear that Google has made this a major factor in their algorithm.
Case in point, I have been recently working with a search marketer in the travel industry who has been trying to expand the focus of their site from one particular destination to a global travel portal. The regional site does well, generating between 60-100 clicks per day at an average CPC of only $.12 and a margin of about 30%.
This particular marketer realized if he could duplicate the same success on a global scale, he stands to generate huge revenues (and profits). His company created a brand-new design focused on a global market. Realizing that this could quickly become an enterprise app, they chose to rearchitect the site using .NET technologies and AJAX.
The new site is amazingly informative and far more usable than the old PHP site they were running on. Test users agreed that it was a big improvement over the old site.
However, Google didn't.
The company ran three test campaigns, including an exact duplicate of their previous PPC campaign. The average CPC rose to $.30 and traffic declined to less than 10 clicks per day (across three cities, not just one). The new site is a complete bust. Regardless of the fact that it provides a great user experience, it doesn't comply with Google's ideas of what makes a great site, and so it doesn't get the traffic.
So while there was no way to predict this in retrospect, it appears there are a few significant differences in the structure of these pages that are to blame:
- The average page size increased from 47k to 375k, an eight-fold increase.
- There is now a massive reliance on javascript to render the page correctly. Googlebots do not process javascript, so to test the effect of this on page rendering, we turned off javascript and rendered both the old and new sites. The old site rendered correctly, but some of the advanced search functionality no longer worked. This would obviously present no problem for a Googlebot. Not so for the new site ... it no longer rendered most of the text. The area and hotel descriptions were still in the page source, but could not be viewed in the browser. This probably appears to a Googlebot to look like cloaking, a very bad SEO practice.
- Because of the use of .NET, the new pages now contain nearly 85k of hidden binary code. This not only slows the page rendering down, but also dilutes the ratio of spider food the Googlebots are finding.
So my recommendations to this company were to remove the cool AJAX functionality, figure out ways to reduce the page size to less than 100k, and remove as much hidden binary data from the underlying HTML as possible. Finally, the next version of the site should be tested to ensure that a Googlebot will see visible text on the page which reflect the content of the site's PPC ads.
This example should serve as a reminder to everyone that you should be wary of trying to make up for bad site design decisions with great SEM marketing - sometimes, it just doesn't work.
Posted on 3:07 PM | Permalink
April 30, 2007Think you've got Trademark bidding under control? Think again!
I often tell our customers to not rely on data gained from an occasional "spot check" of Google or Yahoo search results, but sometimes I need the same kick-in-the-pants myself. I've recently been spending a bit of time monitoring the term "AdGooroo" within Google as an affiliate advertiser has been illegally using our trademarked brand name in their ad copy...
Continue reading "Think you've got Trademark bidding under control? Think again!" »
Posted on 10:57 AM | Permalink
November 29, 2006Big changes coming to Yahoo! Search Marketing
Yahoo! has announced upcoming changes to its PPC bidding platform that will presumably make it work much in the same manner as Google. The current system of bidding for a particular rank will be replaced with a more complex bidding algorithm that targets, but does not guarantee, a specific rank.
Continue reading "Big changes coming to Yahoo! Search Marketing" »
Posted on 1:17 PM | Permalink
June 13, 2006Generating Revenue Forecasts using Google AdWords
One of the more vexing problems with launching websites, whether they be associated with marketing campaign launches or entirely new businesses, is getting an accurate estimate of Google traffic. It is nearly impossible to create a reliable revenue forecast without this information, so getting it is of utmost importance to the internet marketer.
Some of the ways that marketers attempt to estimate traffic include using estimates from the Overture keyword tool or WordTracker. However, these estimates correlate very poorly with Google traffic. Even clickstream services that utilize actual search data from ISPs suffer in that they only generate an estimate of actual PPC clickthrough traffic ... not the total search impressions available for any particular keyword. In a perfect world, Google would provide this information ... but today they don't.
Continue reading "Generating Revenue Forecasts using Google AdWords" »
Posted on 2:29 PM | Permalink
March 29, 2006Google Copywriting 102
This article continues where the previous article on Google copywriting left off. Today we'll talk about the basics of Google copywriting.
Continue reading "Google Copywriting 102" »
Posted on 2:43 PM | Permalink
March 28, 2006Google Copywriting 101
There is plenty of generic advice you can find about search engine advertising on the net. Some is good. Some is just plain wrong. To be successful, you'll have to sort it out for yourself, but you won't be able to do it until you know the cardinal rule of Google advertising...
Continue reading "Google Copywriting 101" »
Posted on 5:15 PM | Permalink
March 9, 2006A Powerful Technique for Supercharging AdWords Results
After the "coverage" concept gels in our clients' heads, the next thing they ask us is how they can use the data that we provide them to increase the number of impressions that their ads are getting. We then proceed to teach them the full methodology for maximizing their PPC traffic. The following is just one of the techniques that make up the entire system.
Continue reading "A Powerful Technique for Supercharging AdWords Results" »
Posted on 5:41 PM | Permalink
January 9, 2006Using AdGooroo to Diagnose and Fix Impression problems (Part 3)
Good results so far with the new campaign. Here are our results to date:
Since we've started, coverage has increased from 24% before this exercise to 39% (62% increase). Our AdGooroo ranking has gone from #40 in this category to #3:
Continue reading "Using AdGooroo to Diagnose and Fix Impression problems (Part 3)" »
Posted on 2:46 PM | Permalink
December 30, 2005Using AdGooroo to Diagnose and Fix Impression problems (Part 2)
There has been some improvement from the steps taken earlier, but the results are mixed. Overall coverage in the keywords I'm monitoring has declined, however due to the keyword expansion my overall traffic has increased and my avg revenue per visitor has increased by 36%! I started to get excited, but then I noticed that this increase in revenue was nearly offset by the increase in advertising costs. So now I'm tying up more money in AdWords, but my profits haven't budged. I have to diagnose why this is happening before going any farther.
Continue reading "Using AdGooroo to Diagnose and Fix Impression problems (Part 2)" »
Posted on 2:27 PM | Permalink
AdGooroo: The leader in Search Engine Intelligence. Our keyword tracking service allows you to find competitors' keywords, identify top ad copy, diagnose campaign problems, track PPC and organic rankings, fight trademark infringement, and more...