How A Dead Man Helped Me Double My Adwords Conversions
We’ve all heard of Pareto’s Principle; more commonly known as the 80/20 rule. I remember reading about him in high school, but it wasn’t until a couple months ago that I decided put him to the test to see if old Vilfredo actually knew what he was talking about. Well, I have to say that I was quite impressed.
I decided to use my Adwords account as the test subject for this experiment.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with day-parting, I’ll give you a quick breakdown. In a nutshell, it’s a way of choosing what day and what time during that day you want your ad creatives to be displayed to potential viewers. Google allows you the option of “shutting-off” your ads during certain days and times that you don’t think you’re visitors will be actively searching for your products or service. This gives you the opportunity to maximize your ROI, by spending more of your budget on time slots that you’ve determined to be most effective.
Now with that said, you’re probably wondering how Pareto’s Principle plays into all of this.
Well, this is what I did:
1. I looked at all of the conversions that I had received for the past three months, and started looking for a pattern.
2. I asked myself; “Which 20% of days within the 7 day week, are bringing me 80% of my conversions?” But I didn’t stop there…
3. I then asked myself; “Which 20% of hours within the 24 hour day, are bringing me 80% of my conversions?”
When it was all over, I was amazed. In the past three months, most of my conversions were being generated between 8am-10am on Monday’s and Wednesday’s. I was able to cut out all of those other “wasted” clicks, and reallocate my budget to the most cost effective 20%. I ended up raising my conversion rate from 2% to 4%, and reduced my cost per conversion by 25%.
I haven’t tried this on the keyword level just yet, but you can bet that I’ll be doing that very very soon.
