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If you have a local business and you work from Monday to Friday, why would you need to run your AdWords Campaign from Monday to Sunday? That’s a key question I ask all of my clients.
The other day, one of my clients decided to run a campaign from Monday to Sunday to the whole United States with a $20 budget. I told her this wasn’t a good idea due to the limited budget. I also told her to limit the days of the week and the hours of the day.
After a week had passed by, I told her to reconsider my advice as we were limited by budget and the business received no calls on Sundays and Saturdays. She decided to implement my advice, and now we are stretching our budget during the week and the campaign is being more efficient.
Timing is everything; you want to make sure your ads are showing when your customers are awake and online! Ad scheduling or Day Parting simply lets you specify certain hours or days of the week you would like your AdWords ads to show.
Always Track Your Results with Call Tracking
Always keep in mind: You need a way of tracking your return on investment. It’s always best to have both call tracking and conversion tracking to see a real ROI on your campaign. If you are not tracking your campaign, it’s like you are walking blindfolded. How will you tell it’s been a successful campaign if you are not tracking your results?
Once you have conversion tracking installed, after a few weeks you’ll start noticing a trend of people’s time of buying (If you’re an ecommerce business, it’s a MUST that you have conversion tracking installed). If you have people buying at eastern, pacific, mountain or central time, you need to have your ad showing throughout the day at those essential hours.
For Google AdWords, It’s Always Cyclical
Almost everything in this world is cyclical, as advertisers we need to be in the lookout for what day of the year has the highest traffic and what day is a low tide. Weekends are always slower than weekdays, (most people do their research at work) and there are even times of the day where people tend to research more.
This is why you need to learn more about your consumer’s behavior and your industry’s way of buying.
All market behavior and all businesses have specific time periods in which they are more profitable than others. This is why everybody needs dayparting or ad scheduling in their AdWords campaign.
There are so many ways to use ad scheduling efficiently:
1) Schedule Your Ads to Show When You’re Present in the Business
If you are a local business, you don’t want your ad to be shown on a Sunday night if you are not going to be working at that time. Stop throwing your money away! So first things first, just pick the days you are available to answer your phone.
2) Lower or Disable your AdWords Campaigns During Low-Response Periods
Once you’ve gathered enough data in the campaign, you’ll start noticing a pattern. So we’ll be able to reduce the ad scheduling, and start picking on what hours of the day you’d like to show your ads (Keep in mind there will always be couch-surfers at midnight clicking on your ad, but these are outliers and you need to consider if they are worth your money).
In this particular case, I’d definitely reduce from 8 to 9 am, then from 11 am to 8 pm, and only 10 pm. Just take a few seconds and look at 10 am; it has 1 conversion for $244.45 cost per conversion in the last four months! That’s crazy expensive. It’s a pretty good indicator to just remove that time of the day and work with the ones we chose.
Evaluate your dimensions and see what hours of the day convert better than others.
After evaluating and analyzing this wonderful Dimension tool, you’ll be able to see what hours and even days (we’ll learn more about this later) are not even worth the effort. You will find that some of your campaigns are losing money at certain hours of the day.
And it should look like this:
3) Increase Bids for High-Converting Time Frames
For example, you now may determine the hours your best conversion rate occurs between 1 and 3 pm. Therefore, all you have to do is to increase bids at that specific hour.
4) Schedule your Ads to Show Higher on the Weekdays with the Greatest Conversion Rate
Also, you can even determine what days of the week you are having higher traffic and a higher conversion rate. For that, all you need to do is go over to the Dimensions Tab and hover on top of Time and then click on Day of the Week.
After that, you will see something similar to the following screen:
As you see can see: for the last 4 months, Tuesdays have the highest conversion rate. Therefore, I definitely recommend bidding higher on that day and lowering bids on the days that convert the less, like Thursday.
For seasonal products, I would even consider pausing days. I know that most people are scared that your competition will over-ride you, but come on! You are wasting valuable money here and we all know that money doesn’t grow on trees. At least give it a try, I promise you will see results.
5) Bonus: Use Location Bid Modifier to Schedule Your Bidding per City, State or County
My favorite one, with enhanced campaigns you can now adjust your bids by location. You can increase and decrease bids by percentages. You can decrease bids by 90% and you can increase bid by 100%.
You can do the same with your locations. Now, what if you have it in a mile radius? I always recommend you to pinpoint your locations like this, so you can bid higher on that city that brings the most calls or leads.
Quick note:
Keep in mind that if you ever decide to pause your ads, adhere to the time zone that is set for your AdWords campaign.
Also, Google hasn’t yet given you the option to adjust your bids to use location and time targeting at the same time. For example, New York from 8 AM to 5 PM and Denver City from 1 PM to 8 PM.
Always take advantage of your search cycles and what’s going on on an annual and weekly basis, especially on the holidays! Take advantage of this feature by knowing your industry’s trends as much as possible, this way you will be able to capitalize on your money.
