Posts Tagged ‘msn’

Posted by: Bob Dunlap, Director of Marketing

Virtually all mature markets have at least two strong, if not dominant, competitors.  Right now, Internet search has only one, named Google.  While Google is clearly the 800lb gorilla, competitors like Yahoo and MSN are always working on their algorithms, tools, and partnerships in an effort to take some of Google’s market share.

Now, Google may have yet another competitor. Former employees of the Mountain View, CA firm have launched Cuil (pronounced “cool”), a new search portal. They say it delivers more relevant results than any other search engine (yeah, I know, we’ve heard that before…). Will it be as good as or better than Google? Will it deliver the results that surfers and affiliate marketers are looking for? It’s way too early to tell.

Putting a dent in Google’s search dominance has proven to be a very tall task. Is this finally the one to watch? We’ll all stay tuned to see if “cool” lives up to its name.

Posted by: Beau Blackwell, Marketing Coordinator

Many of our product publishers and affiliates turn to Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising, such as Google Adwords, to help drive quality traffic to their sites. While there are many ways to improve the performance of PPC advertising, one of the most useful, but occasionally overlooked, methods is a technique called daypart bidding.

Daypart bidding, also known as Ad Scheduling in Google Adwords, is a tool that is offered by both Google and MSN’s AdCenter. It allows you to adjust your bids in a particular PPC advertising campaign, based both on the day of the week and the time of day. You can turn off campaigns completely, or boost your bid to double your normal bid or more. It’s quick and easy to use, and gives you a great deal of control over your advertising.

While this technique can be especially useful for businesses with specific operating hours, it can also be very advantageous for online-only businesses like ClickBank clients. Since ClickBank reports the time of day of every sale, it can be helpful to analyze what days and times deliver the most value for you, and then adjust your advertising bids accordingly. For some people, this may be during normal business hours, but depending on the product it could be late at night or on the weekend.

Once you’ve identified your “prime time,” you can adjust your bids to make sure your product or site is getting maximum exposure at that time. Likewise, if there’s a particular day or time that your site just can’t seem to convert, you can turn down your bids during those times to save your advertising budget for more effective periods.

One great thing about daypart bidding is that you can make use of it even if you don’t have any kind of Web site analytics installed. All you need are the PPC advertiser’s traffic reporting and ClickBank’s sales reporting to start improving your advertising efforts and getting the most return on your investment. To achieve the biggest improvements, though, you should combine ClickBank’s reporting with Web site analytics and testing to get a complete picture of your site’s traffic and sales.

If you haven’t already tried daypart bidding, give it a shot and see how much more you can get out of your budget!