But while ad scheduling in Google AdWords can be extremely powerful in boosting campaign performance, it is essential that ad scheduling decisions are reliable and informed. Since so many internal and external factors can bias your day of the week analysis, advanced ad scheduling strategies are best reserved for mature and relatively stable PPC campaigns with a large amount of conversion data.

Below are three tips for getting the most out of ad scheduling, and suggestions to help you make reliable and informed decisions to take advantage of this powerful feature of Google AdWords.

1. Beware of Diluted Data

You’re dividing your conversion data across 7 days, so each day will considerably less data than if you look at your campaign on the whole. Keep this in mind, and avoid jumping to conclusions based on insufficient data.

Recommendations: If you’re identified Friday as being a high-performing day, only make slight adjustments to your ad scheduling. Just because Friday has worked better than Saturday does not mean Friday should have bids 100% higher than Saturday. Exaggerated changes to ad scheduling can turn an otherwise high-performing campaign into a poor-performing one.

2. Look for Trends

Avoid getting caught up in the detail. You’re right – Wednesday did perform better than Thursday, but is it really significant? A handful fewer sales on Wednesday and a handful more on Thursday would result in both days performing exactly the same.

Recommendations: Take a step back and look for more general and reliable insights. It is clear that Mondays – Fridays performed much better than Saturdays and Sundays, so make that your only finding from your analysis. Trying to distinguish between individual days where performance is so similar is unnecessarily complicating and confusing your ad scheduling strategy.

3. The Past is Not the Future

Just because Saturdays and Sundays have performed poorly in the past, and Thursdays have performed well, does not mean they will continue to do so in the future. Perhaps a PR campaign caused a sudden increase in sales one Thursday which is biasing the results? Perhaps you tested some new high-volume keywords one weekend which were paused after the weekend due to few sales?

Recommendations: Where possible, repeat your analysis using different date ranges, to see if your findings are recreated. If certain days consistently and significantly outperform other days across different periods, then feel free to incorporate that into your ad scheduling. But avoid making changes to ad scheduling if too many external factors could have influenced day of week performance.

Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Ad scheduling can be extremely useful for mature PPC campaigns which have benefited from a steady period of ad visibility, with limited changes to keywords, bids, ads, and landing pages. If a PPC campaign is in its early growth phrase, where multiple testings and optimisations make reliable day of week analysis difficult, keep day of week analysis for another time.

Does ad scheduling help you boost PPC profitability? Do weekdays consistently perform better than weekends? Share your thoughts and comments below.

PPC advertisers have abided by this relevant approach since the dawn of PPC, knowing that to maximize PPC profitability, ads should be shown for highly-relevant keywords, and not for irrelevant keywords. If you are a synthetic grass manufacturer, for example, you should only show ads for highly-relevant searches such as ‘artificial grass’ and ‘synthetic grass suppliers’, but not for less relevant searches such as ‘real grass’ or ‘buy grass seed online’. Showing ads for these less relevant keywords would achieve a low conversion rate and yield a poor profit.

Or so the theory goes.

But maybe there is a way to still achieve great results from these less relevant keywords? Maybe there is a way to reach a greater number of potential customers, while still achieving a strong profitability?

There is. But it involves a different way of thinking. It involves a different approach to simply bidding on a range of keywords, showing your best performing ads, and waiting for the sales to come flooding in.

Capturing less relevant search traffic and achieving a good return on investment involves 3 crucial steps – separation, qualification, and persuasion.

1) Separation

“Keywords of differing levels of qualification should be separated into their own campaigns”

Start with your most relevant and highly-qualified keywords. These are your cream of the crop keywords in terms of relevancy. If you are selling luxury apartments in New York, for example, keywords in this highly relevant campaign may include a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’), a property qualifier (e.g. ‘apartments’ or ‘real estate’), a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’), and a location qualifier (e.g. ‘New York’). People searching for ‘luxury apartment for sale in New York’ would be an extremely high quality of visitor, so these keywords must be kept separate in their own campaign.

In your next campaign, create keywords which are slightly less relevant. Keywords in this campaign might contain a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’), a property qualifier (e.g. ‘apartments’ or ‘real estate’), and a location qualifier (e.g. ‘New York’), but not a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’). Keywords such as ‘world class property NYC’ is still relevant, but since it does not contain the words ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’, they need to be kept separate so they can optimized separately.

Next, create a campaign for keywords which do not contain a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’) not a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or ‘buy’). Keywords such as ‘New York property for sale’ or ‘buy an apartment NY’ are still somewhat relevant, but since they don’t contain any descriptive or purchase qualifier, they need to be kept separate.

Then create yet another campaign for keywords with a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘exclusive’) and a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘for sale’ or buy’), but without a location qualifier (e.g. ‘New York’). This campaign will include keywords such as ‘exclusive apartments to buy’ or ‘prestigious real estate for sale’), which although are somewhat relevant, do not contain any mention of location so need to be kept separate. To increase the relevancy of keywords in this campaign, you might want to geo-target the campaign to a particular geographic area (e.g. searchers located in New York).

Keep creating campaigns, each with keywords of slightly less relevancy, until you start getting very generic and ambiguous keywords such as ‘New York apartments’. By now you should have a few different campaigns, each identifiable by the amount of qualification their keywords contain. Your campaigns may look something like the following:

• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY | PURCHASE | LOCATION
• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY | PURCHASE
• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY | LOCATION
• PROPERTY | PURCHASE | LOCATION
• DESCRIPTIVE | PROPERTY
• PROPERTY | PURCHASE
• PROPERTY | LOCATION

As you move from one campaign to the next, keywords in your campaigns become less qualified and more ambiguous.

Now comes the exciting part – qualifying your ads.

2) Qualification

“Ad messages should be qualified to cater for different types of searchers”

While showing your best performing ads might work for your highly relevant keywords, using the same ads for less relevant keywords will have very different results. Using the same ‘tried and tested’ ads for less relevant keywords is a major reason why many PPC advertisers complain about the poor profitability of less relevant keywords. It’s not the keywords which are to blame; it’s the poorly qualified ads.

To achieve a strong return on investment from less relevant and more ambiguous keywords, such as ‘apartments in New York’, you need to qualify your ads. The less relevant your keyword, the more qualification is needed in your ads. When a user searches for something generic and ambiguous like ‘apartments in New York’, you are not able to tell whether she is looking to buy or rent an apartment in New York, nor are you able to determine the type of apartment they are seeking (whether it’s luxury, spacious, cheap etc). You therefore need to qualify your ad messages, providing clarity on the crucial missing information your searcher failed to include.

For your keywords which do not include a purchase qualifier (e.g. ‘buy’ or ‘for sale’), make it clear you are selling apartments (rather than renting apartments) by including words such as ‘buy’, ‘for sale’, ‘now selling’, or ‘from $3.5m’. When a searcher sees a price or a purchase qualifier in your ad, they will immediately know you are selling apartments (rather than renting apartments), which will reduce the number of rental seekers clicking on your ads.

Similarly, for your keywords which do not include a location qualifier, make your location extremely clear in your ad messages to minimize wasted clicks from people searching for properties in irrelevant locations. And for your keywords which do not contain a descriptive qualifier (e.g. ‘luxury’ or ‘world class’), ensure the searcher understands you are selling high-end property by using words such as ‘luxury’, ‘world class’, and ‘from $3.5m’ in your ads. This will help to filter out first time buyers or property seekers looking for low cost properties.

Qualifying your ads need not be a difficult task. One of the main reasons why you separated your keywords into different campaigns in step 1 is to make ad qualification all the more easier. By keeping keywords of differing levels of qualification spate, you should be able to quickly and easily create ad messages with the appropriate amount of message qualification.

Next comes the interesting part that is crucial to achieve profitability from less relevant keywords – persuasion.

3) Persuasion

“Ad messages should make it clear you are not offering the product or service the user has searched for, but provide clear messages as to why they should consider you as a substitute”

If you are an artificial grass manufacturer, for example, and you wanted to show ads for ‘real grass’ or ‘buy grass seed online’, you need to persuade searchers why they should change their mind and consider purchasing artificial grass instead. Messages such as ‘Grass that never needs watering’ or ‘Find out why you should go artificial’ might do the trick.

Similarly, if you’re a 4* hotel in Manhattan, New York, and want to reach people searching for hotels in the close by Midtown, New York, don’t just bid on the keyword ’4 star hotels midtown’ and show a generic Manhattan ad. Don’t just include the word ‘Midtown’ in your ads either, as that would mislead potential customers, and result in wasted clicks and few conversions. Mention the word ‘Midtown’ in your ad, but instead point out how far your hotel is away from Midtown. An ad such as the following would do nicely.

You’ve made it clear your hotel is not in Midtown, but clearly suggested why they should consider you anyway. You will filter out those people who must stay in Midtown, but encourage people who are flexible to consider your hotel. And since you’ve pre-qualified your ad messages, you’ve set their expectations at the right level which will help to deliver a strong conversion rate.

Relevancy Is Still King

While separation, qualification and persuasion can help to deliver strong profitability from slightly less relevant keywords, relevancy is still essential for paid search success. There is little point bidding on the keywords ‘apartment decorating’ or ‘the apartment film review’ to sell New York apartments, so keywords must still be somewhat relevant to your offering.

That said, if it’s approached intelligently, the three-pronged attack of separation, qualification, and persuasion should enable you to target less relevant keywords and still achieve a good return on investment. Separation allows you to keep your different keywords separate, qualification helps you reduce wasteful clicks, and persuasion helps you increase your conversion rate. Use all three strategies together, and they can be extremely powerful at increasing conversion volume within your cost budgets.

Are you a fan of the mid-tail? Have you found it possible to achieve a good return from slightly less relevant keywords? Share your thoughts and comments below.

Alan Mitchell is an experienced Google AdWords consultant helping businesses in Australia increase their return on investment from PPC marketing. For more information on how a strategic approach to PPC can benefit your business, get in touch today for a free consultation.

But despite the reassuring nature of campaign budgets and the ease at which they can control your spending, they should not be used to control your spending. Instead, cost per click (CPC) bids should be your tool of choice for spend management.

More clicks, no extra spend

To understand why, suppose the daily budget for one of your campaigns is set to $100/day. Each click costs you $1.00 and your ads are showing in position 3.0. Your daily budget of $100 is being hit, so you receive 100 clicks/day.

Since your campaign is reaching its daily budget, your ads are not showing for all eligible searches. Depending on your campaign ad delivery settings, either your ads are not showing later in the day (accelerated delivery), or they are only showing intermittently (standard delivery). In either case, you are missing out on potential customers.

Now suppose you were to reduce your bids by 25%. Your average cost per click drops to $0.75 and your ads are now showing lower down in position 5.0. But since your ads are now appearing throughout the whole day for all eligible searches, you receive more clicks. Instead of 100 clicks, you now receive 120 clicks. Daily spend is now $90 (under your budget of $100).Ceteris paribus, reducing CPCs for campaigns which hit their daily budgets is likely to give you more clicks for no extra (or possibly less) spend. That’s more visitors, for no extra spend. Assuming that all clicks are of equal value to your business, and average position does not affect your conversion rate, these extra clicks are likely to mean more sales and a higher ROI.

More clicks, same CPCs

Alternatively, leaving CPCs constant and instead increasing your daily budget, will likely result in more clicks for the same average CPC. That’s more visitors, more potential customers, without paying a higher per-customer premium (CPC) for the privilege.The bottom line is this: campaigns which hit their daily budgets are inefficient.

For this reason, it is important to check on a regular basis that each of your campaigns are well within their daily budgets. If you notice any of your budgets are being reached, or ore close to being reached, alarm bells should start ringing.

Check your budgets

One simple way to keep on top of daily spending is to log in to Google AdWords, select ‘yesterday’ as the time period and compare the ‘cost’ and ‘daily budget’ columns for each of your campaigns. If any of your campaigns are hitting – or are close to or hitting – your daily budgets, either increase your budget (if extra spend is financially viable), or reduce your CPCs.

A more comprehensive approach, which looks at campaign costs a longer time period, gives you a better understanding of daily trends. By looking at a month’s worth of data (instead of just ‘yesterday’), you will be more informed and better equipped to make changes to your CPCs and budgets.

Download a campaign report

Log in to Google AdWords and create a new report. Select ‘campaign performance’ as the report type (since daily budgets are set at campaign level), select ‘daily’ as the unit of time and enter a date range such as ‘last 30 days’. In ‘add or remove columns’, ensure ‘daily budget’ is ticked. Leave all other options as default. Run the report, and export it to Excel.

Identify overspend

Once you have the report in front of you in Excel, create a new column to identify the percentage of budget spent by each of your campaigns each day, such as in the example below. Once you have done this, you will then be able to see how close each of your campaigns came to its daily budget.

Suppose you are a retailer of European holidays. You have two campaigns – one for Venice and one for Amsterdam. Both campaigns have a daily budget of $100.Looking at the % spent column, it is clear that the Venice campaign is regularly reaching its budget. Reducing CPCs for Venice keywords would likely result in more clicks for no extra (or possibly less) spend.

By all means continue to set daily budgets to protect against freak spikes in traffic which you cannot afford, but make sure CPCs – rather than budgets – are your primary tool for spend management.

Summary

When you notice any of your campaigns regularly hitting daily budgets, ask yourself a few questions:

1. Are you achieving less than satisfactory results from your current AdWords spending? If so, reduce your CPCs – you will likely see more clicks for no extra spend.
2. Are you achieving satisfactory or good results? Do you have extra funds available for AdWords? If so, increase your daily budgets – you will likely see more clicks for the same CPCs.

Either way, it’s a win-win. You will either get more clicks for the same budget, or more clicks for the same average CPC. Effective spend management is essential for a performing PPC campaign, so make regular budget checks a priority.

Alan Mitchell is an experienced Google AdWords consultant helping businesses in Australia increase their return on investment from PPC marketing. For more information on how efficient PPC budget management can benefit your business, get in touch today for a free consultation.