Have You Considered to Day-Part Your Campaigns on PPC Engines? If Not, Think Again as Savvy Marketers Have Doubled Their Response Rates with This Technique
Your search marketing campaigns can be very sensitive. Small things can make the biggest difference. A comma in your ad boosts conversions by 78%. One word in your landing page headline results in $300/day more profit.
One of a few elements of optimizing your current campaign for better ROI is using day-parting. For those who haven’t even heard of this, day parting means running your ads on specific days or even specific hours of the day. Google, MSN/Yahoo alliance allows you to day-part your campaigns with ease.
Proper Tracking
But before you start day parting, you first need to gather data. You need to know what days of the week you get the most conversions, which time of the day results in the least amount of sales. In order to do that, you need to track everything carefully.
Quality free to paid tracking software/services allow you to do that. Prosper202 and Bevo Media are 2 free best tracking solutions available right now. Google Analytics is another totally free and very powerful tool. Use them to find out when your marketing works.
Data Gathering and Testing
Once you install tracking pixels it will show you the conversions: day, hour, minute, geo-location, IP address even of conversion. Gather the data. Only you can tell when it’s enough. You may need to wait till 30 or 50 sales occur until you can make a decision. If it’s lower CPA you’re going after, then wait until 100 conversions to get even better data.
No matter what business or industry you’re in, you’ll notice that some days perform worse, sometimes as much as twice, three times worse than other days. Evenings may produce much more conversions that the middle of a day. Such things you’ll never read about or never know until you test and see with your own eyes. That’s when you have a real power to boost your campaign’s effectiveness to the next level.
Time to Act
Once you get enough conversions, you can start making adjustments.
First, take a look at your worst day of performance. Let’s say, on Monday your conversion are 3%, while on Wednesday as much as 7%. Should you immediately pause all traffic coming on Monday? You could, but analyze further. Are you still profiting on your worst day? If you’re at profit or breaking even, you may consider leaving all days of the week. In that case, look at time of the day.
If on average you convert from 15-20 leads from 5:00pm to 9:00pm and only 6-8 from 9:00pm to 12:00 midnight, you could pause traffic from 9:00 – 12:00 evening. However, I’d suggest first working on your worst weekdays. If Monday, Sunday and Saturday bring you the lowest ROI (although profitable), day-part those 3 days of the week. Eliminate traffic that don’t work and leave only those hours that produce your leads. Leave your best days of the week intact. Because they’re giving you good ROI already. And it’s possible that your sales during 9:00 to 12:00 are coming on those best days like Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. This way make a slight improvement and don’t slice off all your traffic.
On the other hand, if you’re starting out, then making drastic decisions is a must. So you could easily pause weakest hours and weakest days. This will probably reduce your traffic as much as 3x. But ROI may increase as much as 5x because of that.
