Test Performance with Dayparting
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Written by Atila on September 5, 2008 – 9:21 am
Dayparting, a technique normally used by broadcasters, is the practice of dividing the day into several parts and airing programs that appeal to a particular demographic known to tune in at that time. In online marketing, dayparting is simply the act of scheduling your ads to run at a particular time that you determine to be more profitable than other times. Google AdWords gives you two options when it comes to dayparting.
You may either stop your ads from showing altogether, or you may have Google reduce your maximum bids by a certain percentage. Both of these settings are sure to save you money and help you spend your budget more efficiently. If you choose to turn your ads off completely, you may miss a chance to get your brand shown at a time when your competitors are not advertising as strongly. If this is a concern, the best option is to reduce your maximum bids so that your ads still show but at a lower cost.
If you are not sure what times of the day your account is performing the best, you can run a pretty basic test and study the results. The process is simple in principle. Clone your best performing campaign six times and go into the campaign settings for each one. Set each campaign to run for four-hour intervals throughout the day. Do not yet lower any bids because you want to see the results before you make changes. You should let these dayparted campaigns run for about a month to collect data. When the test is over, use the data you obtained to decide when the best and worst times are to run your campaigns.
Keep in mind that customer behavior changes often. There is no such thing as a definitive result for any type of test you may conduct. Your PPC campaigns should always be evolving. Just because something you tried did not work last year does not mean it will not work this year. Perhaps you discovered during the summer months that over the weekends you lost money because nobody seemed to be shopping or even spending time browsing the Internet. If you carry the results of that test into the winter, you are blindly assuming that when the weather gets unfriendly, people will continue practicing the same habits they did when the days were longer and warmer. You could miss out on valuable traffic during the winter months.
You may also discover that the type of product you offer may appeal to a different demographic. If you add anything new to your PPC campaign, be sure to repeat the testing process. Just because the majority of your keywords do not perform at a certain time does not mean that a different product will not perform better at the same time of day.
