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There must be times of the day or days of the week that are better ROI than others. Does anyone have any knowledge about what times of the day or days of the week may be good times to pause a campaign and save some clicks but not lose as many sales?
I am an affiliate and my mother store says sales pick up around Sunday evening, are strongest Monday and Tuesday and fall off from there, picking up again on Sunday evening.
There must be times when people do more browsing than buying. That is the time I would consider pausing.
Also, a rep at CJ said most sales are made during the work day, as opposed to evenings or weekends. I guess most people shop online on company time!
Thanks.
It's very different when people shop on the Internet. I have got a site where most of the sales are comming on Saturdays and another where the weekend is totally dead. It depends on your business
That would be up to you.
You can pause adwords, FindWhat & Lycos.
The only way to pause overture is to run your account dry or back down all your bids ONE by ONE which is a major PAIN.
The info the CJ rep gave you was very generalized...
With online sales increasing every year, during the holiday season, December will throw demographics way off.
For months outside of December, it depends on the target product (vertical industry)...
We have experienced verticals such as the travel industry, that do perform better during work hours. Though you have to remember that in the US that means from around 8AM EST to 8PM EST (taking the West coast into consideration).
Other verticals such as the "Infomercial" type products, do better during "non work" hours... You don't see the Ab Doer advertised on television at 3PM in the afternoon?
You know when your sales are coming in, so it's basically tuning a "Downtime" process (reducing your bids to the minimum).. Most of the Overture approved bid management services, offer a "Downtime" mode, that can be set to reduce your bids to the minimum allowable amount, during scheduled periods, on a day to day basis.
During the day, I hover around positions 3>5 for chosen keywords (reason being this is when a lot of the fraudulent clicks are made, and conversions are NOT so high)
From 8pm > 7am our bid management software goes into overdrive as this is when the highest conversion rate takes place, combined with most of the competitors being asleep and not being able to play games.
works a treat for me (using GoToast rules based management)
Shak
For example, I'll try to highlight any additional fees, charges, etc. I'll point out any limitations in mr product/service. Etc.
Have you tried using an ROI tracking / conversion tool? Assuming you have an ecommerce site, there is a bid management company that allows you to assign a "rule" to automatically reduce or increase your bid price based upon a predetermined Return On Advertising Sales (ROAS).
If not then I'd suggest you may not have good enough keywords or well written ads in your campaigns or you haven't worked out the value of each visitor.
If you don't have your ads avaiable for viewing 100% of the time you could miss out on that big sale. As Shak does you can throttle back at the times that YOU identify, don't pay any attention to what others might say about typical patterns because every industry is different.
If you are selling globally then prime time is all the time.
Just one thing to clear up on Overture. Although you can't pause the ads you can click the button that will tick the box of each of them and then use the Bid Options button to change the price on all of them to 5 cents rather than doing them one by one. The only downside is it puts them all on Auto Bid, but when you put them back on you can change them to fixed.
Unfortunately you will not be able to cut costs of advertising and not loose any sales at all. Unless of course you're doping something ridiculously wrong and your campaign does not bring you returns as well.
You have to investigate your market as whole and your particular website statistics as well. You have to know who is buying from you and where are they buying from. For example, if you do not ship to anywhere except US, there is no need to advertise for you late at night and early in the mourning, since most clicks will come from people overseas.
Also I found an interesting trend for some products - people would research for something during the afternoon and would come back later, after work, to make a purchase.
Here is an example of one planed advertising :
It took me 3 month to pinpoint one online business, for which I am running a marketing campaign, to 2 days of the week that bring between 40% and 60% of the entire weeks business if managed properly. During those 2 days we do not let anyone outbid us on any targeted keyword and customer rep office is open from 7 AM till 12 AM.
The other 5 days are much more relaxed and most of the traffic comes from free search engines (where they enjoy high rankings) and referrals.
I looked more closely at my sales and realized that I am making money all the time and every day, only some days and some times my profit margin is better than others. So, even though sales may be slower at some times, costs were also lower at those times and I was still generating positive income.
So, with that info, I just have to work on conversion, testing and refining ad copy, weeding out keywords that may be too generic, etc.
I like figment88's suggestion:
"When I need to boost ROI, I try to prequalify better. I'll make the ad copy more and more restrictive so in so many words it is saying "only click here, if you intend to buy."
I was getting too much credit card fraud on a particular product, so I added "strict credit card check" to the ad copy.
Anyone have any other examples of ad copy that makes more buyers than browsers click?
Thanks again to all for the info and hints.
Here's what I found in their support section.
How do I place my account temporarily offline?
Answer :
To place your account offline so your Search Listings will not be available on Overture, simply send us a request using the Support Request Form or call our Account Services team. All of your Search Listings will be saved and will be available when you place your account back online. Please note however that some of your listings might lose their bid placement due to the nature of our dynamic marketplace. To contact Account Services, please use one of the following numbers:
United States: 1-866-999-6837
I like the fact you can't take ads offline, makes it more beneficial for those that are serious about this marketing method, rather than the 9-5ers.
I have seen the trend where people will browse at work, due to the high speed LAN, pickout what they want, and order in the evening. A lot of companies frown on personal shopping, even during lunch hour, so it makes the order fullfillment process more stresfull, if you need to hide the web page from the boss.
