Google AdWords™ For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Giving Prospects the Time of Day

The challenge

One client came to us with a simple complaint: namely, that its lead acquisition costs were too high. This client was paying, on average, $403.40 per lead (a completed Request for Quote form). With an average CPC of $13.45 just to cling to position 4 on the first page of Google for its most important keywords, the client was clearly in with a highly competitive market. Lowering bid prices would reduce lead flow by moving Fast Money further from the top of the page.

And although landing page optimization to increase the site conversion rate was clearly in order, with a conversion rate of 3.33%, that would take time. This client was in a hurry. What could we do that would instantly reduce costs without sacrificing conversions?

The solution

We poked around the Dashboard for a while, not finding much, until we hit the Dimensions tab (see Chapter 13). When we ran a campaign performance report by hour of the day report for the past 60 days, we saw our opportunity. Some times of day delivered much more valuable traffic than other times.

So, we set up ad scheduling for this campaign, with the following parameters:

• Did not show ads for hours that had generated 0 conversions in the past 60 days
• Reduced bids to 75 percent of default CPCs during down hours (when clicks were less likely to convert to leads)
• Increased bids to 125 percent of default CPCs during best hours (when clicks were more likely to convert to leads)

The result

We compared ...