EightBlack.

My previous employer decided to advertise on Google.

The conscientious marketing manager dutifully set up an adwords account and did what most people did and drove all the traffic to the landing page.

Ok, no surprise in that.

Except for the fact that in most cases, it’s a complete waste of money.

Effective PPC strategies employ landing page solutions.

Driving click traffic to a home page is one of the most basic and fundamental errors a marketer or site owner can make.

Perry Marshall calls this the Google Stupid Tax.

Which is true.

Google makes a ton of money every year because 90% of their advertisers don’t understand the Adwords system.

This same marketing person then decided to be really smart and turn off their adwords account every Friday night at 5pm and turn it back on again at 9am Monday morning.

Obviously the thinking was that no one uses the internet on the weekend to search for things.

This is where dayparting comes in.

Google have just released a feature on Adwords which allows advertisers to increase or reduce bids for keywords and pause ad campaigns during a specific time or day.

Known as ad scheduling (or dayparting), a car company could increase its search keyword bids straight after a televised grand prix or V8 super car race, in an attempt to capture more traffic.

It’s a clever move by Google - but the smart PPC marketers have already seen the flaws and wont use the feature.

Why?

Because PPC results depend on A/B split testing, keyword management, display versus destination URL strategies, tracking of all available data etc etc.

Dayparting will continue to punish the uneducated marketer on Google, especially the corporates who will get completely caught up in trying to outbid their competitors.

You’re about to experience stage 2 of the Google Stupid Tax.

And wait until you see some of the maximum CPC prices people will pay.

The only happy campers out of this new feature on Google will be shareholders.

My advice to Adwords users is simple.

If you dont understand the space, no drama’s. Admit it. Then buy the best advice available and act on it.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 20th, 2006 at 5:45 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.