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: 27% [?]

Microsoft Corp. made an unsolicited $44.6 billion cash and stock bid for Yahoo on Friday, a deal that could shake up the competitive and lucrative market for online advertising.

You can read the full article from CNN here.

I personally think this will be a good thing for Affiliates. Yahoo and Microsoft are both known for having better conversion rates than the Big G, however, alot of affiliates don’t take the time to work with all three search engines.

If Yahoo and Microsoft combine, it could make it easier for affiliates to work with only two major players than with three. Of course I have no idea if Microsoft would continue to have 2 separate advertising platforms or if they would combine them and only have one.

Also, if compnay is able to threaten Google, I would say Microsoft would be that company simply because of the size of the company and the amount of money they have.

This will definitely be something I’ll be hoping happens. Hopefully, Yahoo is smart enough to take the offer!

Popularity: 17% [?]

So I received a letter from Yahoo Search Marketing today. They are working on improving the relevancy problems they are having with their ad network. So of course what does Yahoo do to fix this little issue they are having?

Well quite simply they are going to once again put it all on their advertisers. I mean come on, you didn’t expect to read that they were going to fix the problem them self did you?

Anyways, here is a piece of the email I received.

We have noticed a large number of keywords in account ########## with compliance/relevance issues. Yahoo! Search Marketing requires that Web sites possess substantial content that is clearly and obviously reflective of the keyword.

This notice is provided to you as a courtesy. If you continue to advertise under a large percentage of non-compliant keywords, we will be forced to set your account offline until you adhere to our policies.

So as you can see from the quotes above, I have a yahoo search marketing account that has keywords that I’m bidding on that aren’t relevant to my landing page.

Now of course in Google Adwords they simply would slap those keywords with high minimum bids and that would be the end of that.

Of course Yahoo can’t come up with a system that deletes bad keywords themselves so they have to contact their advertisers and threaten to close their accounts.

Nice right? So because Yahoo can’t come up with a system to deal with relevancy problems they stick it on their advertisers and then they wonder why they are having such a problem getting people to use their ad system.

This is why I spend tens of thousands a month with Google Adwords a month and hardly crap with Yahoo anymore. This is a company that can’t seem to do anything themselves when it comes to their ad system and always point the blame at their advertisers and publishers.

Just take a look through the digitalpoint webmaster forums under the YPN section and you’ll see how they cancel peoples YPN accounts because traffic from their sites isn’t converting well yet Yahoo is displaying Vonage phone ads on a site about video gaming.

There are a lot of problems with Yahoo’s Ad Network that needs to be fixed both on the advertiser and publisher side. The first major problem is that Yahoo needs to realize that they can’t always blame their advertisers and publishers for stuff and make it their responsibility.

Popularity: 10% [?]

Hey guys, as most of you know that are members of the Click Consultants forums, I very very rarely use YSM Content Network for Affiliate Marketing. The reason is up until now they have not offered a way to Block Domains that are not converting well for you. That is as I said until now. According to an email I received from Yahoo Search Marketing they now offer a tool to block domains from their partner distribution network where you don’t want your ads to appear. I think this is a great addition and personally I think they should have had this feature out from day one of their partner distribution network launching. Its common sense that advertisers can waste alot of money when they are unable to control where their ads are being placed. I’m glad they finally implemented this as I’m sure are alot of other affiliate marketers.

Are you going to start testing your affiliate campaigns using YSM’s content network now? Leave a comment and let me know what you think.

EDIT: I also just realized that Yahoo now has a Paypal Option if you goto your Administration Tab and Goto Funding Sources and then goto Add New Card, however, it doesn’t seem to be working yet. Anyone know when they added this and when it will become functional?

Popularity: 6% [?]

Okay, so as most of you know, Yahoo is well a little different when it comes to how they run things. Okay, you got me… A Hell of a lot different! Some of the things they do really makes my mind spin.

If you are an ad network like adsense or ypn and you had your ads on a site about dog training and for one of the ads it was displaying an advertiser for voip phone service would you think this is going to convert well? Well, apparently Yahoo does! This isn’t a one time thing, it has happened to alot of people, some banned, some warned but the bottom line is, Yahoo serves sucky ads and they then blame their publishers for the traffic not converting. So that kind of gives you an idea of how Yahoo thinks…Or doesn’t think… So moving on to what I really want to discuss.

If you use Yahoo Search Marketing then you most likely realize by now that you have a keyword limit of 50,000 keywords that you can upload into your account. Now in order to place more keywords in your account you must spend a certain amount per month in order to get upgraded to a Gold Account which will then increase your keywords by 50,000 giving you a grand total of 100,000 keywords that you may upload into your account.

Oh but wait, it doesn’t stop there, if you want more than 100,000 you must spend so much per month with Yahoo to get your account upgraded to a Platinum Account which allows you to upload 1,000,000 keywords into your account. Okay, so there’s a limit big deal…Adwords has a keyword limit as well and so does MSN. Okay just keep going with me on this one!

So you reach your 50,000 keyword limit and you beg and beg and beg Yahoo to increase your keyword limit so you can naturally put in more keywords. However, if your not doing the minimum required ad spend a month they won’t do it! You can beg, get angry, call again to try and get someone else, it doesn’t matter! No matter what you do, they won’t budge an inch! (99.9% of the time)

However, You may have Yahoo create another account under your main account, a sub account, which will use the same CC#, address, phone number, etc and you can once again upload 50,000 keywords under that account which can easily be accessed from your main account using a drop down box.

WTF Yahoo! Why would you have your users create more accounts under the main account when you could simply increase their keyword limit??? I mean do you guys see what I mean when I say that Yahoo has a brain the size of an ant!

//rant

Popularity: 7% [?]