The goal of any marketing campaign is to put the right information in front of potential buyers exactly when they need it. Unfortunately, the power of timing is often overlooked when it comes to paid traffic campaigns – they usually run on a relatively simple 24-hour schedule.
Of course, your audience won’t be using the Web every hour of every day. Most enterprises will cater to a specific part of the world with a small range of time zones. Everyone has to sleep, so maximizing your visibility during the most active hours can help you save money.
Enter the concept of dayparting.
Dayparting is a PPC advertising optimization strategy that involves targeting your audience when they are at their most active and receptive. Campaign managers do this by adjusting their bids during appropriate days of the week and hours of the day for their user base.
Dayparting in AdWords: The Tactical Considerations
In AdWords, dayparting is restricted to a maximum of six time periods.
This turns out to be more than enough for most campaigns since you can get plenty of mileage from scheduling around blocks of time; it’s rarely, if ever, necessary to schedule for individual hours. However, it’s vital to ensure you use best practices throughout your campaign.
For example:
Avoid Accelerated Delivery
Accelerated delivery is an AdWords feature that emphasizes serving your ad rapidly at the start of every day until your budget is exhausted. Unfortunately, this will supersede your dayparting strategy: Your ads might appear during only one or two of your targeted time segments.
Leverage Negative Modifiers to Maximize Your Budget
When you’re dealing with a smaller budget, it’s essential to make every penny count. Raising bids during certain periods of the day is the traditional approach to dayparting, but using negative modifiers during off-peak hours is a better way to maintain budget adherence.
Keep Regional Campaigns Together
Dayparting is only effective when used on campaigns that share similar goals – and time zones. Marketers sometimes make the mistake of configuring dayparting settings in a way that cuts across multiple regions. When this happens, positive results will be down to luck, not data.
Keep an Eye on Your Analytics
Although patterns of online activity don’t shift much throughout the year, conversion patterns are more reactive to seasonal changes. Check in with your analytics every month and keep an eye on quarterly results. This will validate your assumptions about dayparting’s effectiveness.
Dayparting is a great way to raise marketing ROI. It can be particularly helpful for small, nimble enterprises that place a high premium on advertising dollars. It all starts with deep insight into your customers, so know them well before you start.