The SERPzone

Thanks for stopping by! Please feel free to subscribe to the RSS feed to stay current. Feel free to submit comments or send an email. Thanks for visiting!

One of the most frustrating things I can imagine while managing small PPC accounts is getting priced out of a keyword that has the potential for a lot of traffic and lots of sales. If you’re in that situation, there are ways to compete by getting maximum exposure and going beyond Google’s quality score. The secret: Advanced day-parting.

The original purpose of day-parting was to let advertisers turn their ads off when they don’t want ads within a campaign to be seen. This could be due to call center hours, or perhaps a drop in the conversion rate. Here’s a better idea: Use day-parting across multiple mirrored campaigns to make sure you get exposure at different parts of the day. Let’s walk through it step-by-step:

1) Go into Google’s reporting interface and run an hourly report regardless of date for a sufficient time period at the campaign level, preferably for a single campaign. Be sure to check the boxes labeled “impression share”A sufficient time period is usually at least 30 days, but possibly up to 90, depending on your conversion volumes.

2) Export to Excel, and sort by hour of day. You should have 24 entries, ranging from 0-23. You need to look for a couple things:

• At what hours of the day is your impression share lowest?
• At what hours of the day is your conversion rate the highest?

Your impression share is what percentage of search queries are you getting for the keywords within the given campaign. Low numbers mean you’re losing out on opportunities. High numbers mean you show up often.

3) For example’s sake, let’s say that our busiest hours are 6:00-7:00am, 12:00-2:00pm, and 5:00-7:00pm on weekdays. For these hours we’d set our ad scheduling to look like this:

The above example is an extreme where you only run the ads during these peak times. However, if you’re using advanced day-parting also allows you to change your max bids during these different periods within a day. So if you know the 12-2 hour is where you’re going to make all your money, you can dictate that those bids automatically be raised any percentage over the Max CPC at the keyword level that you’re comfortable with. During the other hours of the day you can run the ads at a lower percentage than the max CPC, so you don’t get charged as much per click. Keep in mind that your average position will decline.

This seems pretty thorough as-is, so why use mirrored campaigns? For some really competitive keywords, you may not even last through this small peak hours to get the exposure you’re looking for. In those cases you need more than one campaign with different daily budget caps to make sure your traffic is getting spread across the times that you want, and not whenever Google thinks its best.

Expect to spend 2-3 hours of research per campaign in reports before deciding which hours are best suited for your campaign. Due to that time requirement, I’d recommend doing this on only your top 1 or 2 campaigns, and only if you see your daily budget being maxed out constantly, but can’t afford to raise it. Another good sign is when Google suggest that you should at least double your daily budget to get max exposure.

Remember, the goal is not to get more impressions or clicks for the sake of getting traffic, but instead to maximize conversions at peak times of the day. If you execute this tactic and you’re not seeing an overall increase in sales within a month or so, don’t bother with the extra management. Kill the test and go back to what you were doing originally.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Tags: Back to Basics, General PPC, google // 2 Comments »

Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you probably have heard about Social Media Marketing.  I’ve been experimenting by becoming active with lots of social groups like Digg, Sphinn, Reddit, Propeller, Facebook, and everyone’s latest rave, Twitter.

Twitter is a micro blogging platform that allows 140 character messages to be broadcast to all your followers.  It is exactly why I haven’t been blogging lately.  The ideas I’ve had for blog postings have often found their primary points condensed and published via Twitter instead of making it way here to the SERPzone.  I’ve heard from many other bloggers that there seems to be an inverse correlation to the number of Twitter messages (or “tweets”) to the amount of time spent on the full blog.  This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because many bloggers use it to collect data that they then use in their blogs.  I haven’t used it for that purpose much yet, but who knows what the future will bring.

The point is that I have been building a list of ideas for articles that I will be writing about in detail the next couple of weeks.  I want to thank all of you for sending in your suggestions and ideas for blog articles.  I will be getting to all of them as best as I can.

The Back to Basics series will be back in full swing in no time!  If you want to know what’s going on more often, feel free to find me on Twitter and strike up a conversation.  My Twitter handle is @doubleohd.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Tags: Back to Basics // Add Comment »

Conversion tracking is one of the most important pieces of the PPC puzzle, because it lets you track results at the keyword level. Ideally your site is also equipped with an analytics package that lets you see your site’s performance in a lot more detail to see what happens between click and conversion, but if for some reason it isn’t, here are a couple quick ways to use engine conversion code to get a little more information.

In order to keep your original data valid, I’d recommend a test of any of these ideas in a mirrored account (not campaign).

Basic Sales Funnel: Google allows for five different conversion code names. Add conversion code to every page of your checkout process or important conversion steps, making sure a unique named code is on each page. After a desired amount of time run an account report with each of the conversion types selected, and you’ll see each page leading towards your final conversion has fewer and fewer conversions. This is a basic sales funnel. You can use the difference in numbers between each page to determine where you’re losing people, and how to optimize the page to minimizing that right now.

Landing Page Testing: If you have a new page you want to test performance on (which you should do occasionally), you can use Google’s 3rd party tracking on that page to measure conversion rate on the new page instead of your current page.  Copy an ad within an ad group and modify the destination URL, and then compare conversion rates between the two ads.

Measuring Bounce Rates In case you’re not running analytics (and why aren’t you?) you could add the conversion code to every page of a website except landing pages.  What this will do is show you how many people moved beyond the landing page to other areas of the site, vs. how many people clicked on an ad, and then left the site.  Divide the number of conversions by the number of clicks, and subtract 1, and this is your bounce rate in a percentage.

When performing any of these tests, keep in mind the difference between the number of conversions and the number of transactions.  If you run a report, make sure the “transactions” checkbox is checked, as this will tell you how many additional conversions got counted from the same person.  If a visitor comes back to your site within 30 days on Google or Yahoo, or 7 days from MSN, any other actions taken will still count as 1 conversion, but multiple transactions.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Tags: General PPC, adwords // Add Comment »