paid search

Day Parting – Hour Of Day

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Hour Of Day Optimization

The point of “Hourly Day Parting” is to identify the best performing hours of the day and improve your campaign performance. (Which is usually CPA and Conversions. But can be used to improve CTR, clicks and impressions, impression share, and even bounce rates)

STEP 1. Using the google REPORTS tab. Graph Conversions and Cost against Hour of Day. This way you can quickly identify specific hours of the day where cost shoot up and sales go down. (You can also pull excel reports on Conversions and Cost and then segment the data by Hours.) (See Below)

Optimizations 1

 

STEP 2. Decide if whether if you want to STOP completely during those hours or simply lower the bid. Sometimes lowering bids can help you achieve profitability during those bad performing hours by limiting your visibility and ad rank during those hours. If all else fails, as a last resort, you can then completely pause the campaign during your worst hours. (See Below)

Optimization 3

 

STEP 3. IF you look at the graph and the circle #2. You’ll see during late night hours performance vary sharply. To deal with this you can add the Total Conversions and divided by Total Cost during those hours. You can then look at the average CPA and decide if the overall CPA is above or below your goal.

STEP 4. Repeat this on a campaign by campaign bases after you set Hourly Day Parting to further optimize. Just keep in mind the more campaigns the more you have, the more work you have. manually optimizing hourly day parting data is a time consuming task.

SEPT 5. You may also want to separately look at weekend and weekday data. As most traffic behave very differently on weekends.

 

 

AdWords Keyword – House Hold Income Targeting

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Average household income levels can be used in a Keyword Search campaign to further narrow down your audience.

  1. This feature is hidden in the LOCATIONS tab inside CAMPAIGN SETTINGS

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2. Click On +LOCATIONS > Location Groups > Choose location group type > Demographics.

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3. Select the % you would wish to target.

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4. Apply bid modifier to the income tiers you just created. (If you have premium products you would like to target rich customers, then use a strong negative number for the lower 50% of the tier and increase the other tiers based on how “premium” you expect your customers to be.

Recommendation: I would recommend adding Negative and Positive bid modifiers separately. A/B Negative Bid modifiers effects on the campaigns prior to adding Positive Bid modifiers would make optimization much easier.

Remember: The income tiers are in a “OR” relationship with other locations. This means if you are targeting two cities: Los Angeles and San Francisco, and you set your tier targeting to California, you are actually targeting the entire state’s income tier.

Impressions – How To Diagnose Trouble – Part 1

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Definition

What is an impression? An impression is when an ad is displayed on a webpage. An impression is not a guarantee that the ad is seen by the page visitor. It simply means that the ad is shown on screen. The higher the ad is placed on a webpage, the more likely it is viewed by the page visitor.

Now suppose you have a campaign and it generates about 10,000 impressions every day for the past 6 month. Now, out of no where your impressions drops sharply from 10,000 a day to 6,000 impressions a day. That’s a whopping 40% decrease from the previous norm! What does this mean? where do you start to look? is this good or bad?

Part ONE

Check the basics.

  1. Don’t panic! the first thing to check is the status of your Keyword. Make sure that’s enabled. Most of the time when your ads are not showing, the little diaglog box right next to the very keyword will tell you why it’s not showing.
  2. Then check Ad Group Status. Then check the campaign status. You’ll be surprised how many new comers make this mistake! “My campaign is live! but there are no impressions!” when they mistakenly turn of an ad group
  3. Check Ad Status. This is when you want to check the status of your ads. When your website goes down or when the landing page Final URL breaks down, the Ad will be disapproved. When all ads are disapproved, no impressions will be served at all.
  4. Check Campaign settings. The settings in your campaign, are they changed? did you or someone turn bid optimizer on? did you forget you scheduled ad to be only served during a certain time during the day? A tiny change in campaign setting can set off huge change in campaign performance. Even many advanced users forget about checking this part.

Part TWO

Check the Data – Compare Impressions against other attributes to find clues

to be continued

Prelude – Welcome to Steven’s PPC Blog

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What you can expect from my PPC blog

  1. Learn reading data AND take action.
  2. Learn the inner workings of advertising platform.
  3. Learn about the upcoming developments in the advertising industry and what they indicate.

When I first started down the path of Search Engine Marketing, my biggest problem was understanding all the data that are available to me. I didn’t know where to start and how to use the data to tell a story or identify a problem. For example, I didn’t know what it means when impressions go up, what could be the cause of the increase? how do I identify what cause it to increase? And when I do identify the culprit, what attributes can I change or influence to bring impressions back to normal levels? For the first part of my Blog I hope the address these questions so anyone starting down this career path can learn fast without going through all the trail and error I had to go through.

Great PPC blogs like searchengineland.com and searchenginewatch.com focus more on industry news and some advanced tactics on a broader level. But I’m going to be going back, focusing on build a solid a foundation for you so that advanced tactics will come naturally to you with the tools that you have available.

The my second hope is to address some of the misconceptions with online advertising. Many people I know take out their pitchforks and scream in disapproval the moment they hear online ads. Most of the this is due to the lack of understanding how digital ads work and how personal information are collected. I hope to shed some light on the online advertising industry and bring some transparency to the inner works of online ads.

Thirdly I’d like to express my own thoughts on current developments and future endeavors of major advertising  companies and how the digital landscape is moving.