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June 27, 2006 |
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By: Louise Rijk - Bio - Blog |
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Pay Per Click Advertising:
Advanced Targeting with Dayparting
When you are running a pay per click (PPC) search advertising campaign, every impression counts. Every time your ad comes up, you have a chance to get a click or site visit and pick up a conversion to a lead or a sale. As pay per click technology has improved, you are able to acquire - and put to use - more data than before about these impressions. A major part of an effective pay per click strategy comes from trying to cut down on impressions without losing valid clicks. This plays a big part in improving the "quality score" of your ads, which allows you to get a higher placement for less money per click. There are a few different ways to go about doing this, but one of the methods getting a lot of attention right now is dayparting.
Bidding Strategy
Dayparting, as it pertains to PPC search advertising, involves engaging in different bidding strategies at different times of the day. Implementing those strategies has to start with looking at the data you have accrued for your PPC campaign after some time. If you've been tracking click-to-sale or click-to-lead conversions carefully, you may begin to see certain patterns develop. You may be accruing more clicks during certain hours of the day, or, more importantly, more conversions. Bidding strategy always encourages bidding higher for keywords that are bringing in more conversions. Wouldn't it make sense to bid higher at the time frames that you can expect to get more conversions? With dayparting, you can control just how much you are bidding at certain times of the day. In some cases, you can even use dayparting to not bid anything at all.
It may seem counter-productive to set up a PPC search advertising account, and then set it up to not run at certain times of the day. However, there are times when this strategy should be executed. You may be operating under tight budget constraints. If you can't afford to run your campaign all day long, you can use dayparting to keep the campaigns active at the time frame where you've seen the most success. You may not be able to run all day long, but making use of dayparting can help you to spend your budget when it will be most effective for you.
However, using dayparting simply to turn the account off or on is only the most basic strategy. You can make dayparting more effective by using it to change bid amounts for certain keywords at certain times. Rather than turn the account on or off in order to stretch out budget amounts, you can use tools to decrease bid amounts for certain keywords at the times of day when those keywords are less likely to convert. That way, you still maintain some presence when the words are being searched on, but you spend less money for what you find to be a less valuable click. The downside of this strategy is that you still rack up impressions when clicks may be less likely, decreasing your click-through-rate and ad quality score. You may want to combine the two strategies by having certain keywords turn off at one point, bid high at another, and bid low in yet another time frame. It's important to look at your keyword data carefully when deciding on a strategy. The more sample data you have available over a large period of time, e.g. 90 days, the more confident you can feel about just what times of day clicks are more or less valuable to you.
PPC Bidding Tools
In the past dayparting was only available through third party bid management systems, but the ad networks are being quick to change that. Both Google Adwords and MSN AdCenter now offer some form of dayparting and the new version of Yahoo Sponsored Search should be including it as well. As it stands now, Google and MSN are offering dayparting in different forms.
Google refers to dayparting as "Advanced Ad Scheduling". Within Adwords you can set times when you would like your campaign to turn on or off, by the hour of each day of the week. They also have a more advanced mode. Here, you can set certain time frames where your bid amounts for that campaign increase or decrease depending on the percentage that you enter. However, all of this can only be done at the campaign level. This is where the organization of your Adwords account can come into play - if you have tightly "themed" campaigns set up, it can be easy to translate the conversion data you have into a detailed bidding strategy. If all of your keywords are bundled up into one large general campaign, this can be more difficult.
MSN refers to their dayparting as "Incremental Pricing". Within each order of your AdCenter account, you can target certain days and time periods when your ads may or may not display. MSN does not currently give you the option to set dayparting by the hour, but instead gives you six different time frames to choose from. You can then use "Incremental Pricing" to set a percentage of the bid you would like to spend on each day and/or time frame. The percentages you can choose range from 0% to 100%.
Advanced Integrated Bidding Strategies
Forming a dayparting strategy can be based on data you have already accrued. However, there are a few other ways that you can use dayparting to your advantage. You can make certain ads go active at a time when certain online or offline events are occurring. For example, a sports apparel brand manufacturer may run ads for certain products only when a football game is on television and different ads during baseball season. Taking things even further, you can then target those ads to only run in certain geographic areas that correspond to the particular sports teams that are playing. You can increase bids at peak times of the day when you know there are more people searching for your product or service. Most B-to-C studies have shown that Mondays between 12 pm - 3 pm are when the most valuable traffic is active, with Tuesdays during the same time frame being almost as busy. Pay attention to the PPC data you have already accrued, as you may find a time frame that is more valuable to you.
As it stands now, Google and MSN offer free dayparting services, but they do have certain restrictions. You may want to put more complicated strategies into place that aren't possible with their tools. For example, you may not want to ever turn off certain low click volume, but high conversion tail-end keywords that receive very few searches even when they are active all the time. However, because Google only allows you to set dayparting practices at the campaign level, the tool is not up to the task. You may want your ads to only be active for a specific hour or two a day in MSN, but AdCenter restricts you to certain four-hour periods. If you are developing strategies that are that complex, you may need to pay for a third party bid management tool that gives you more control. Most keyword management programs offer dayparting and should be able to help you execute more detailed strategies.
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