Getting the most from Google dayparts

07 Nov Getting the most from Google dayparts

Google advertisers should consider dayparting tactics and strategies that can improve the results of their AdWords campaign.
Until recently, Google AdWords tactics were limited to four big elements: keywords, bidding, creative, and geography. However, when Google began offering ad scheduling in 2006, it provided marketers with another way to control AdWord spending and optimize the effectiveness of campaigns using dayparting strategies.
Ad scheduling (aka “dayparting”) lets you tell Google exactly when you want your ads to run. It also allows marketers to modify keyword bids based on time-of-day and day-of-week.
A daypart is a consecutive block of time on similar days (weekdays or weekends) when the target audience or campaign environment shares characteristics that can influence the effectiveness of a campaign. For example, prime time TV audiences are larger than daytime TV audiences, and the daytime TV audience is characterized by a large proportion of women.
The Internet contains five distinct dayparts: early morning (Monday-Friday, 6 a.m. – 8 a.m.); daytime (Monday-Friday, 8 a.m. – 5 p.m.); evening (Monday-Friday, 5 p.m. – 11 p.m.); late night (Monday-Friday, 11 p.m. – 6 a.m.); and weekends (Saturday-Sunday, all day). Each of these dayparts can be characterized by their usage levels, demographics and the type of content sought.
Daytime drama
Contrary to TV, daytime is the largest daypart for Internet use. Working people make up a largest share (nearly 70 percent) of daytime users. Working people also comprise the largest share (more than 50 percent) of early morning users. News and information content is sought during the early morning and daytime dayparts. During the evening, late night and weekend dayparts, you’re likely to reach more users at home. This may be why entertainment and sports content is sought more often during this time. A large share of e-commerce activity also occurs during evening and weekend dayparts.
Google recommends that some marketers may want to schedule their ads to run only during business hours, and others may want to raise maximum bids during high-traffic times of the day. Companies that sell consumer goods online can reduce costs and optimize their campaign by focusing in on high-conversion time periods during evening and weekend hours.
Google’s ad scheduling feature occurs at the campaign level and requires two steps to enable: First you enable ad scheduling for a campaign. Then, choose the times when you want your ad to run.
Thanks to ad scheduling, you can also determine when you DO NOT want ads to run. An important element of dayparting strategies is to remove ads during times when conversions are low or when keyword prices are high. Jonathan Kendall, of MediaPost’s Search Insider, discovered that campaigns they analyzed saw a sharp spike in cost-per-click fees after 11 p.m.
“As the day progresses, those advertisers with smaller budgets gradually begin to disappear from the bidding process, leaving the remaining advertisers paying far less for each click (which was noticed across all three of these campaigns),” he said. “Conversely, when budgets are then restored at the end of the day, many advertisers will see their cost-per-clicks soar, as they now have to outbid several additional listings.”
Daypart tuning
To get the most out of Google’s ad scheduling features, you’ll want to conduct a daypart analysis of your campaign to determine the times when your ads are most effective. By collecting and analyzing data about conversion percentages, you can tune your dayparts and increase the effectiveness of your campaigns.
The most difficult part is deciding how deep you want to go, since daypart results can be applied based on a variety of geographic, keyword, and creative factors.
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