Most affiliates that have been running any type of profitable campaign know that there are certain hours when customers will convert better than other hours.

The question is what can you do about this phenomenon to help increase your ROI (return on investment)? The answer is actually quite simple and easy, Dayparting!

First lets start off with the basics…

What is Dayparting?

Dayparting is a tool that is currently available in Google Adwords, as well as Yahoo Search Marketing and Microsoft Adcenter, that allows you to set bids automatically depending on the day of the week, hour of the day, or both!

A definition of dayparting would be something like:

“Dayparting, the practice of adjusting pay-per-click campaigns based on time of day or day of the week.”

How does dayparting work?

Dayparting is currently available in all of the major search engines PPC program. In Google, dayparting is actually referred to as Ad Scheduling.

To make this alot easy let me give you a few examples of what you can have dayparting do for you and your search campaigns.

Let’s say that you are running an affiliate offer for Payday Loans. Now, we have found out by tracking that between the hours of 1:00 A.M. to 6:00 A.M. we don’t get any conversions at all.

We can now go into Google Adwords and go into our campaign and click on edit campaign, now look for ad scheduling and turn it on and we can now go in and completely turn off our payday loans campaign during those hours. So from now on between the hours of 1:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M. our campaign will automatically pause and then resume once it hits 6:01 A.M.

Lets say that we notice instead though that between the hours of 1:00 A.M. and 6:00 A.M. we are still getting conversions only not as many and we have a lower ecpc because of a lower conversion rate during those hours. What we can do is go inside of Google Adwords and the ad scheduling and instead of pausing our campaign during those hours, we can instead just lower the bids by 20% across the board and then they will automatically go back up after 6:00 A.M.

So by now you should be seeing the picture and understand why dayparting can significantly increase your ROI, because not only can you lower your bids during certain times, but you can also raise them during certain times. If you notice between the hours of 4:00 P.M. and 6:00 P.M. your conversions really pick up, you can then raise your bid 20% across the board during those times.

Again, the great thing about this is its all automatic. Once you set it up, you never have to worry about it again, it will continue to do it everyday as long as you have it on!

Popularity: 44% [?]

One of the most asked questions I receive from people starting out or even people that have been in the affiliate marketing game for a couple months is what is the best way to track which keywords are converting.

Now there are tons of ways to track keywords and its not as hard as most people think, its just hard to find good information on how to do it. So, in light of that, this topic has been born. Now this post is specifically going to talk about tracking which keywords are converting in your Google Adwords account. Again there are other ways, including using PHP, subid’s, in house tracking, and more.

This method is completely free and very easy to setup which is why I wanted to show it. Your going to need a few things in order for this to work.

First and foremost, You need to be advertising an offer where the advertiser allows you to place a pixel on their website. Most CPA companies now allow this including, Azoogle, NeverblueAds, Copeac, and others. The best way to find out if your Affiliate Company does or not is to simply ask your Affiliate Manager.

Secondly, you will need to have a Google Adwords account obviously hence the blog post title!

To get started Log into your Adwords Account. Once you log in at the top in the navigation bar you’ll see a link that says Conversion Tracking. Click on that Link and you’ll see the following screen.

From the Screen above, you’ll want to check the box that says Other and hit Continue. The next page you’ll see after you hit continue is this.

On this page you are able to choose how the Google Sites Stats button will look on the offer page. I normally always just choose a white background with black text. After you have chosen this you can go ahead and hit Continue again.

On the next page you are able to select the Language, Site Security (meaning http:// or https://) and also your code is displayed that you’ll need to copy and give to your Affiliate Manager to place on the site for you. Every time I have used this it has always been http:// security. However, make sure to ask your AM first to make sure. I’m honestly not sure if it makes a difference or not.

Here is a screenshot showing the part on the third page of language, site security, and the code.

Now go ahead and give your pixel code to your Affiliate Manager and have them place it on the offer page. They will know where it goes. After they have it placed go ahead and press continue and you’ll get a screen that says “Your new Adwords tracking setup is complete. Now, test the results.” Now of course the only way to test the results is to wait until someone clicks one of your adwords ads and completes the offer. However, if you did it the way instructed above and your affiliate manager placed the pixel on the correct page you should have no problem.

Disclaimer: Some people don’t like this type of tracking as Google has all your data on which keywords are converting. I use this method on a lot of campaigns that have been running for months and I’ve never seen anything bad happen. Its totally up to you whether you track your keywords this way or not. However, it is a FREE and EASY way to track which keywords are converting for you and if you don’t have the PHP know how or don’t wish to pay for another piece of tracking software, it’s definitely better than not tracking your keywords at all.

Also, Adwords Conversion Tracking allows you to setup tracking for your Non-Adwords Campaigns which you’ll see the link on the last page. Its called Cross-Channel Tracking. I’ve never personally used their Cross-Channel Tracking so I can’t vouch as to if its good or not, but if your not tracking Yahoo or MSN with another means its definitely worth a look!

Last but not least, here is an example of how it looks with the conversion tracking on in Adwords.

Popularity: 50% [?]

Wow, so I happened to check the Adwords blog today and Google has announced that you can now have the option of CPC bidding for placement targeting. So what does this mean to you! Well, first off when they say placement trageting they are refering site targeting. They changed the name of what it was called when they announced some new features.

Up until now, you could only bid on a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) model. This allows you to take sites where you were getting alot of impressions but no clicks for example and now only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad. So you may find a site converts really well when the user clicks on your ad from that site, but because your ad doesn’t get clicked a lot, for example maybe they have their adsense ads all the way at the bottom of their page. With the new interface you could make the site become profitable now.

I haven’t fulled around with it too much, so I’m not quite sure how it works yet as I just haven’t had the time yet. You can bet I’ll be doing some major testing with this though, and I’ll be doing that testing very very soon!

For more information please visit the following link: Google Announces CPC bidding for Placement Targeted Ads

Popularity: 6% [?]