Dayparting pay per click for higher profits

Dayparting is the practice of scheduling changes to your campaigns at specific times of the day to follow known trends. The goal of these intra day changes is to maximize profits when you know conversions are the strongest and minimize spending when conversion is the weakest. If you want to use this advanced technique, there are basically 2 steps.

Data Gathering phase:

You have to know your trends in order to make good decisions about your bid scheduling. Let’s use Azoogle as an example. In Azoogle you can check your stats by the hour, and export those reports. In your statistics, simply choose “By Day Report” then click the “BH” selection to show results by hour.

I would export these reports for at least a week (2 weeks is better). Once you have the data for a time frame you can go back and see by day and hour, which times had the best and worst conversion rates. With this information, you might come to a conclusion like from 2pm-4pm conversion rates are 25% higher than the rest of the day. Or from 1am-5am conversion rates are 38% lower than the rest of the day.

Scheduling phase:

Now we can implement changes in our PPC accounts to reflect the performance data we gathered. Using Adwords as an example, here’s how its done. First you have to enable the feature, by selecting your campaign then click the “edit settings” button. In the campaign settings screen under “advanced options” check the box in “ad scheduling”. Now click the “edit times and bids” link.

Adwords will let you make changes down to the 15 minute interval. In simple mode you can only pause and run ads during certain time frames. This might be helpful if you have really horrible conversion rates at a certain time and don’t even want to run the ads. But we need to click the “advanced mode” to really optimize the campaign. You can get as granular as specific days of the week and weekends, but for this example let’s assume all days of the week are equal. So choose “bulk edit” and all days.

Based on the example above, here is what we scheduled. We have increased our bids by 40% during the high converting times, dropped our bids by 50% during the low conversion period, and kept them at the default bid which is 100% for the rest of the day.

After we save the changes, you can see the scheduled bids throughout the day by the height of the green bar during the time period. The higher bar is the increase bids, the shorter bar is the low bids.

That’s all there is to it. Dayparting can be a really powerful tool to increase profits and especially to decrease wasted spends throughout the day. Give it a try!