When you are looking at promoting a service that is seasonal or even a regular product, what time of day are you making the most money, the most conversions? Sometimes you do not want to promote your publisher for the whole day especially in PPC. You want to have a good CTR, so you should show your ad when it is the most optimal for your buyers. After testing a campaign for a week, I found parts of the day I was getting low conversions where another part of the day I was getting more conversions.
This should light a bulb in your mind saying to show your ad between these times for optimal performance. You do not want to show your ad to non-buyers at times where there is no traffic or where users are less likely to do an action. You want to grab the consumer at the time they are in a buying frenzy. It is easy to just put up your ad or promote during the whole day but is it saving you money? Does it produce you more conversions? With PPC is your CTR high? etc.
There are times of the day where specific services do better than others, there are even days that do better than other days. For example with my 1 week campaign, my weekends proved to be a poor resemblance to my specific ad group. I was not getting the impressions and conversions I was hoping to get. But this simply told me not to run this ad group during the weekend. Looking at your data can tell you a lot and a big story about the specific ad. Just make sure you are reading your data properly and looking for the right things.
If you do not have enough data or do not know what type of data to collect. Use your affiliate network's reporting system and ask your affiliate managers for specific data that you need. Once you have a basic understanding of the data that the network is collecting and how they are generating the data, you can expand on that data and see what other data you can gather to help with your promotional tactics.
What to look for...
- Look at your day to day traffic and see what part of the week does better. This can tell you if the weekends are better to promote or during the week. If you make little conversions during the week but far better on the weekends, then I would concentrate on the weekend traffic. You can also see what specific days are doing better during the week, it can be specific days. Monday and Friday are your best days, but the rest of the week are slow - again concentrate on the days with high lead generators.
- Look at your results hour by hour. After looking at your data on a day to day you might want to dissect it more and see it by hour. Azoogle Ads does a great job at doing this and has great information on their campaigns. They break down a lot of the conversions by hour, this literally tells you what time of day a campaign is doing good. Every hour you can tell what leads were generated and how many clicks were received. This can tell your your CTR each hour and if you are tracking it properly - you can see which hour of the day is doing better for you. You can sacrifice 2 conversions early in the morning with 50-100 conversions maybe mid day.
These 2 simple things can help you determine when it is the best time to show your ads or when to promote a specific publisher. I am talking from a PPC point of view but this can work with any type of promotion. You just need to organize your data and see to it that it is worth the time and money to promote on specific days or even specific hours.
Just because you think you will earn more money if you promote through out the day does not mean you will earn big amounts. How much are you spending on promotion? Are those clicks converting and generating leads? Ask yourself a bunch of questions to get the most out of your money and earnings. This way you can sacrifice a couple leads to generate a bigger lead later on. Just do not get greedy and think you need to capture every lead. Sacrificing half days to generate a bigger lead count is better than collecting all the leads and having a short ROI.
