Not Every Hour Is The Same When You Advertise…
Thursday, May 31st, 2007 at 3:15 pm by Anik Singal
As many of you know, I’ve always considered myself more of an e-mail and SEO affiliate. I never did much PPC at all, too much tracking and headache for me (the thought of logging in multiple times a day scares me - I prefer to sit around and collect free traffic). Yes, yes, I know, PPC CAN be “sit-around” traffic too, I just never played with it until end of last year and mostly starting in Q1 this year.
Honestly, I just got tired of hearing all the HUGE stories of affiliates making a GAGILLION dollars using PPC, so I wanted in!
Well, as my PPC brain swells with wisdom and knowledge, I’ve learned a few things I want to share with you affiliates who are also looking to grab a piece of Google, Yahoo or MSN’s traffic.
A) I found that a LOT of these affiliates who claim to make $1 million+ in commissions are also spending close to $989,000 in ad expense (yes, I do exaggerate a bit).
B) If you’re just starting, don’t expect your PPC to be profitable right off the bat - typically it can take days for you to work your costs down, tweak your keywords, etc…
But, here’s the real doozy for me that I’ve never really read in all these “I make a million bucks an hour sitting on my a** on the beach” guides. I noticed that Google lets you control what day of the week and exactly what times you want your ads to be displayed.
I thought, “Surely, it should not matter? All traffic should be equal so long as they are searching the same keywords and are from the same geographic location…”
WRONG!
Just to see why Google even offered this ridiculous option, I started keeping track of my sales on a few of my campaigns by time over the period of a month. I just created an excel spreadsheet and marked a sale when it came in.
Indeed on some of my campaigns I noticed an even spread - so it really did not matter what time the ad was running. But, on some of my campaigns, especially one of them - WOW was I wasting money!
I was actually wasting about $25 a day ($750/month)! I noticed that ALL my sales only came in between about 3 PM and 1 AM ET. The rest of the time was dead on sales, maybe a few stragglers, yet the clicks seemed to come in just as fast.
I was quite surprised and shocked (also felt sick to my stomach thinking about the amount of money I wasted). So, since then I have stopped advertising at those times and guess what? NO DROP in sales.
Now, your accounts may or may not be SO clear to see, but it’s worth a shot.
1. What times are the best for your niche?
2. Do your ads still pull on weekends?
3. What about holidays? Should you shut ads off?
So, you see, not every hour or even day is the same - track your ads!
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