Date
Apr 15
Pay Per Click marketing, also called PPC or CPC, is one of the best ways to deliver quick traffic and conversion results to your business. There's no question about that. However, one of the more overlooked aspect to paid search marketing is day-parting. Now, once you've got your keyword research done, you've set up your campaigns in contextual categories and you've created a bunch of ads to be displayed, you're almost ready to go.
First, launch the campaign for a pre-determined amount of time. You'll find that your campaigns begin to align in a particular pattern. You might see that people tend to search for your keywords after 5pm, when they get home or you may find that your traffic peaks during the work-day. One example is office products. As businesses run out of supplies or need to get new ones, they'll search for keywords relating to the office supplies they need. Using some past client data, we found that most people, around 80% of them, searched for office supplies between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m.. Research on wedding planning usually starts around 1 p.m. and ends around midnight.
Using the bell-curve model, we can now see that most of our traffic comes from certain times of the day. When we overlay conversion data onto the search patterns, we might see that actual sales of office supplies happens before 11 a.m. and tapers off around 4 p.m.. For wedding planning, while the research happened during work hours, most purchases come after work.
In order to maximize the effectiveness of the budget, it's essential to trim some of the fat from the campaign. What we'd do in these scenarios is create a separate campaign of the top converting keywords and turn them on an hour before the peak purchasing times then turn them off an hour past the peak purchasing times. This allows the maximum amount of the budget to be spent on converting users. Simultaneously, we take another campaign and run them throughout the peak research times. We'd lower the bids a little bit so that they're not too expensive, but at the same time, this allows us to passively target people who are looking for information and resources and not necessarily ready to purchase.
While we understand that day-parting in a PPC campaign will lose a small percentage of the people who are looking for our products, when you're focusing on a return of investment and lowering the overall cost per acquisition, it can be a critical strategy to day-part.
