John Hasson

Dayparting is the fancy word for when you say you only want your ads shown at certain times of the day or that you want to pay more during some time periods and less during others.

I’ve got a campaign running entirely on google’s content network. I scrapped together a quick chart of conversions and mapped them out by hour of the day.

You can see the the spike in the afternoon and the drop in the early mornings..
All times are MST and 1 = 12am (if you are getting confused by the numbering on the bottom.)

Here is how it was converting at this time. Since this was on the content network I had my bids relatively low. 15 cents per click. These stats are for the 7 days before I did the Dayparting adjustment.

Based on this I adjusted my min bid to 5 cents a click and used Dayparting to increase it up to 15 cents per click for the times when I would get the most bang for my buck.

So for everyday I’ll be bidding 5 cents at low times, 10 cents from 8am to 3pm (plus 10pm to 11pm) and then 15 cents at the premium time (3pm-10pm)

So far pretty boring right?

Now look at the stats for the 7 days after Dayparting.

Do you see it?

Lower Cost, Higher Conversion Rate, Higher CTR, and so on.

Long story short I just made adjustments to show the ads to people who were likely to convert. The only thing that went down were clicks and impressions (which makes total sense since I am now showing the ad to more qualified people) This resulted in a 35% increase in conversions and a 46% drop in cost per conversions, this is a good thing.

Tags: Advice, Online Moola, PPC, Pay Per Click by John Hasson
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I haven’t updated things here (or twitter much either) because I have been crazy busy with all my different projects. So by the time I get to writing a blog post (which I just do for fun) I am out of steam. It has been.. what.. about a week since my last post?

I am making progress all my little projects . My next projects will be in the lead gen host-n-post space. I have a few providers that I have found that are already setup for host-n-post. So I will be building the necessary databases and websites for running a bunch of different lead gen campaigns across a bunch of different verticals. I’ll probably do a basic tutorial on how to do this after I get it up and running and have all the kinks worked out. So you can always look forward to that.

Oh wait.. before I do that I have a bunch of leads I’ll be building sites around that aren’t host-n-post. They are more of the iFrame type. But if you build a real website for them (not just 1 or 2 pages) it should be fine. I’ve been doing a test run with them using a direct PPC traffic to them, just to see if they are viable and to get an idea of converstion rates, which keywords work and so on.

I almost hired somebody full time. He is an affiliate of mine (I do a few small private lead gen offers that I run through a select few affiliates). After talking about it and comparing his goals to my goals, we decided to leave things as they are. He doesn’t really want to work for someone else long term. I totally get that, so I am back to just me doing all this… well my wife occasionally writes content for me.

I am still traveling to Denver weekly for my last client I had before affiliate marketing started to take off. The weekly travel and dealing with all the stuff that goes along with that is getting pretty old. The project is supposed to be done soon, then I’ll have more time to decide what I want to do next.

Tags: Uncategorized by John Hasson
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We were riding back from dinner at a really fancy restaurant. Neil was about as impressed with the fancy food as I was. On the way back to the hotel in the H2 Limos provided by elite retreat somehow we got on the subject of AMEX cards. A few us us all had the Business Platinum card, but Neil was pressured into whipping out his black AMEX card. A few of us passed it around (it really is made of metal for those wondering). I took a quick look or two at it and then handed it back to him. Then I told him the number, the name and the expiration date. Neil took it all in stride and said yeah but you didn’t get the security code. Oh thats easy I said, lemme see the card again. We all laughed as Neil put the card back in his wallet, safe from my eyes.

Neil, not to worry, I have since forgotten the number..

Tags: Elite Retreat, Personal by John Hasson
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I spent a few months with VMWare Fusion and then Parallels on a BootCamp Partition. Both work fine, but I like Parallels better.

Both products have a free trial. I started with VMWare’s Fusion since I use VMWare’s server products and am pretty happy with them. Install was easy, it didn’t take long to get my bootcamp XP partition up and running in Fusion. When setting it up I ended up creating a SMB share on my XP system and then accessing it via OSX to get at my windows files–I didn’t see any other solution for accessing my windows files easily while Fusion was running the bootcamp image. Every now and then I would get screen artifacts from Unity (makes the mac and xp windows all part of the osx desktop). And kept messing up on my Command+C vs Ctrl+C when switching quickly between OS’es.

Well my 30 days was nearly up, time to try parallels. Install was just as easy. Paralells had just a few things that made it come off as more polished. It already gives me a share on the mac desktop pointing to the Bootcamp image while Parallels is running. The Coherence works about the same (I still get screen artifacts occasionally), and Parallels automatically maps Command+C to Ctrl+C for me (great for when I forget to switch). I ended up buying Parallels primarily because it seemed to integrate with Mac just a little better then VMWare’s fusion.

At this point I would make a cool table to show things mapped out.. but here is the summary:
Parallels has better OSX integration (great for Visual Studio), but VMWare will let you play Quake! You decide which is more important for you

Tags: Advice by John Hasson
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All attendees were picked up by a stretch limo.  We arrived to the brand new Intercontinental in style.  My room was on a high floor in the corner, we had beautiful views of San Francisco.

The night before things started we had a networking cocktail, I made a lot of friends and met a lot of nice people.  The small group atmosphere really adds to things.  I only had to remember 35 people

Day 1, We had an excellent breakfast provided.  Then we started the event.  They had a nice non-disclosure form we had to sign.  Everything shown was off the record and not to be released.  No live blogging was allowed.  No video was allowed.  No recording was allowed.  No pictures were allowed.

Excellent speakers.  Excellent.  Having things “off the record” really opened things up. We were sharing our ideas and suggestions pretty openly.  I am sure we all held something back–there really isn’t enough time to share everything

I can’t provide details on what we learned since we had a NDA and it was all off the record.  I can say that I will be going again and that I learned a lot, made some new friends and was very impressed by the whole event.

Jeremy and crew did an excellent job putting this event together.  They deserve a lot of credit for making this happen.

If you want to know more you can call me (contact me via the “Talk To Me” widget on the right and I can give you my phone number).  I won’t be sharing things that are under the NDA but I can expound on some things that I am not willing to put here in a public blog.

Tags: Advice by John Hasson
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My father is an adjunct professor there teaching business classes. I was telling him about my latest project (just launched into beta yesterday) as well as a bunch of other stuff that I do about making money online and just general business and marketing stuff that I do. During this conversation he asked me to come as a guest speaker for his class. I figured.. why not.

Then he tricked me into wearing a suit and tie.. at least I looked good. His class had around 10 people in it. I rambled on about PPC, researching your market, networking, funding sources, gave some ideas that I haven’t even started like a comparison site about products made by “green” companies, marketing spring break vacation to facebook users.

I started about how I made connections with people and how important it was to actually care about people. People can generally tell when you are just being nice to be nice vs actually caring about you. Then talked about how I found ideas and products that I could market online and so on. Somehow we got into funding. Venture Capitalists/Angel funding vs self funding. (I pick self funding when possible) Next we talked about very (and I mean very) basic concepts of Search Engine Marketing/PPC–buy low, sell high–basic. Then I talked about how I took the way I played MMO’s in the past and then I took those same concepts of find the best way to be successful at the game and applying them to my business life. Thus making work be the same as fun for me.

It may have seemed a bit dry, one kid was in the back talking to someone during about half of it. Everyone else seemed bored. It looked like just three people were actually listening. Did that give me a 30% conversion rate?

Whenever talking to people I wonder… Should you start with I make $XX,XXX a week/month to get their attention? Maybe I’ll do that in the future, but to me that always seemed to be a little too “look at me, how awesome I am” and I am not really trying to go for that right now.

Tags: Personal by John Hasson
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