In the first part of this series, I explained how B2B Marketers can improve the efficiency of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns via geo-targeting, and why this technique is beneficial, even for national advertising programs. Today’s article will explore a second, proven method of focusing PPC campaigns and improving results: ad scheduling.

Ad scheduling

Basically, there are two methods of scheduling ad serving: time of day, and day of week. With time of day scheduling, you set specific times you would like to run (or not run) ads. With day of week, you run (or do not run) ads on certain days. You can combine these two methods and set ad serving for specific times on certain days. For example, you may choose to run ads between 8:00am and 6:00 pm on weekdays, and only during evening hours on weekends.

Day/Time reporting tools

Before you start an ad scheduling program, I recommend that you analyze past campaign performance by day and time. The specific metrics you analyze will depend on your campaigns goals and how you measure success.

Google allows you to report impressions, clicks, click-through-rate, average cost-per-click, and cost – all by time of day and day of week. You can do this by generating an Ad Group, Campaign, or Account Performance Report. These metrics are great ways to better understand traffic patterns.

However, for campaigns that measure success based on conversions (sales, leads, registrations, etc.) you will need to move beyond basic Google reporting and use a third-party tool that allows you to report conversion metrics (such as volume of conversions, conversion rate and cost-per-conversion) by time and day.

Analyze historical results

Once you’ve prioritized campaign success metrics, it’s time to analyze historical results. If you work in a seasonal industry, you may want to run a separate analysis for various time periods. For example, PPC results may be different in the summer months, or may vary greatly during the holiday season. If your business isn’t particularly seasonal, it’s best to analyze a full year of data if possible, to average out any short term anomalies.

Once your data is compiled, you will likely see significant trends in campaign performance by day and by time. Below are some examples of data from actual PPC campaigns:

Implement a scheduling strategy

A common occurrence for many B2B campaigns focused on reaching corporate buyers is that results decrease significantly after business hours and on weekends. If this is what your historical data indicates, you should consider focusing your campaign, realigning your budget, and only serving ads during business hours.

Alternatively, if your target audience is small business owners and independent consultants, many of these folks work out of their home or run a business on the side. You may see better results during evening hours and weekends. If this is the case, it makes sense to focus your limited investment during these peak conversion times.

Once you have determined a scheduling strategy, you can easily implement this in each of the PPC campaign interfaces by setting your ads to run at the best performing days and times. In both the Google Adwords and Yahoo interface, you will find this option in campaign settings.

Focus your investment

Searchers (and prospects) behave differently at various times. Ad scheduling can be a great tool to add to your PPC arsenal. Whether you have unlimited funds, or a limited budget, ad scheduling allows you to take advantage of the times of day or day of week when your customers are most interested in your product or service.

Bottom line: Make sure you’re spending your dollars in the right places and at the right time!

In today’s tough economy, B2B Marketers are looking for ways to improve the efficiency of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns. If you need to squeeze more juice out of your search marketing budget, consider implementing two proven techniques designed to better utilize limited funds and improve marketing ROI: geographic targeting and ad scheduling.

In this two-part series, I’ll explain how to implement each of these campaign targeting techniques. Today’s column focuses on the benefits of geographic targeting—even for a U.S. based national PPC programs.

Analyze results based on searcher location

Have you exhausted all of the typical PPC best practices, yet still need to improve campaign performance? Consider this: You may be spending your money in all the wrong places… literally.

Most B2B marketers, who strive to reach a national audience, run only nationally-targeted PPC campaigns. And typically they don’t take the time to analyze campaign results by searcher location.

It’s time to dig deeper! This type of geo-analysis just might be the key to more efficient media spend and improved results. It can also deliver a significant competitive advantage.

There are several tools that enable marketers to collect geographic data on searchers’ locations. For this article, I will focus on Google’s Geographic Report.

Geographic reporting tools

From the Google AdWords Report Center marketers can pull a Geographic Report for any/all campaigns and ad groups. Google provides this data by day. From there, marketers can export all of this information into Excel and create/analyze a summary of geographic results. I recommend analyzing at least six months of historical data—a year is even better—to account for possible seasonal anomalies.

Within campaigns and ad groups, analyze results by searchers’ geographic location (determined by IP address). For nationally-targeted campaigns, you can view geographic data by country, region, metro and city. I recommend analyzing results by state first. Take a look at various success metrics such as volume of conversions, cost per conversion, and conversion rate.

You’ll likely find some interesting results. Very rarely do national campaigns perform equally well across all regions.

Isolate the best and worst performing locations

What to do with this data? I recommend that you create individual, location-specific campaigns for the best performing locations and eliminate (or greatly reduce your investment in) under-performing locations.

For example, let’s say you find that the nationally-targeted campaign is performing very well in the state of California but not so well in Texas. Here’s how to proceed.

• Duplicate your national campaign
• Set the geo-targeting in the new campaign to California only
• Exclude California from the original campaign

Marketers need to decide how important it is to serve ads across the entire nation. Some companies feel they must have a PPC presence in every state. If this is the case, I recommend excluding Texas from the national campaign and creating a separate Texas-targeted state campaign with a lower budget and reduced bids. This approach ensures that ads are still being displayed to searchers in this state, but you’re not wasting as much money.

If you don’t need a national presence, simply exclude Texas from the original national campaign, so that no money is spent in this underperforming region.

Spend your money in all the right places

This type of geo-analysis allows you to track results and optimize campaigns based on state-specific results. And most importantly, marketers can allocate PPC budgets granularly, with more money dedicated to the best performing regions and less money (or no money) dedicated to the worst-performing locations.

Bottom line: Make sure you’re spending your dollars in all the right places! In the next column, I’ll show you how to analyze whether you’re spending your money at the right time.