A Picture Is Worth 1000 Words!

One of the more esoteric aspects of paid ad management is day-parting. It’s hard to explain. It’s hard to analyze. Different platforms support day-parting in different ways. And not everyone calls it the same thing. Day-parting is confusing. But day-parting a landing page? That’s a concept that doesn’t naturally occur to us.

Let’s say you have an item you want to sell, but it’s an item that’s better in demonstration than in print – you can make a better impact by showing a video clip than by writing an explanation in text on the landing page for your ads. There are lots of times where this could be true; just look at www.willitblend.com and watch the dude put an iPhone or a sneaker into the blender he’s selling. That is way more effective than writing a description about how powerful the blender is.

Once you make the decision to feature video on your landing page, there’s one more question – do you make the video auto-play or do you make the user click to play it? The answer is “it depends.” Practical wisdom tells us that people shop at work when they aren’t supposed to. If you’re selling an item that gets good PPC traffic during the day, but you suspect auto-launching a noisy video will attract unwanted attention, you should allow the user to click to play. The problem is once the evening traffic sets in, it’s often not only OK, it’s more effective to auto-play the video.

Day-Part Landing Pages

Make two versions of the page, one with a click-to-play video and one with an auto-play video. Set up one campaign with a day-parting schedule for “work hours” and use the click-to-play page as the landing page.  Duplicate that campaign, change the ad schedule for “after hours” and land those ads on the auto-play landing page.

Presto. You have day-parted landing pages.

Of course, you will want to test for the optimal times for using auto-play versus click-to-play, but the work time/after hours divider should provide a good place to start. And video isn’t the only thing that merits day-part landing page testing. There may be instances where a text-intensive page about house-painting consistently converts better than a graphics-intensive page at 9AM on Saturday because more users are more apt to read details on that subject then as they prepare to go to the paint store.

Think like a consumer. What times of day (or days of the week) are you more likely to be interested in lots of detail? What times of day are you more likely to be interested in brevity? You’re a shopper too, you know. You can use your own tendencies and those of friends and relatives as a guideline for establishing your test times. Then learn how to use the Adwords hourly and daily reporting to figure out what works during which specific time periods for various criteria – time of day, day of the week, even day of the month. For example, any grandmother can tell you that you have garage sales on a pay-day weekends where people are more likely to have disposable income and you run your ad in the newspaper on Thursday. Look for those kinds of patterns online as well.

This gives your A/B testing a whole new dimension.

Enter Placement Management from Google – think of it as working the old style content network in reverse. Instead of going into a campaign set-up trying to dig through those “categories” and add a list of sites you think your ads might perform on, you can now set up your content network ads to blast all over the content network to start with (only for a few days). Run a Google Placement Report after a few days to see where clicks are wasted and then selectively block the money pits as you find them. Don’t let your ads run too long with out checking in on this report or some of those keywords are liable to get away from you. I set a Rainlendar reminder for 48-60 hours, then I run the Google Placement Report, sort by highest spend, and whack out the sites I don’t want to waste money on anymore.

It’s easy to be seduced by big brand names… “wow, I can run my ads on MySpace!” Great, millions of teenagers will see your ad for a free trial download of the latest professional firewall protection on the market and you’ll pay for hundreds, maybe thousands of clicks made by unqualified buyers who don’t need professional firewall protection – they just responded to the ad that said “free download.”

The second most important key to success on the content network is controlling it. Keep tabs on the content network and you can easily control the spend and make the most of the dollars (or cents, in some cases) that do get spent there.