Hyper-Targeting Your PPC Dollars through Day-Parting in AdWords

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising can be a very effective means of driving traffic to your website, and consequently increasing sales. This is especially true if your website is built for ecommerce. While PPC can be very effective, proper targeting can make it do wonders for your business. There are many ways to target a PPC campaign. The first and most obvious is through a narrow definition of keywords. The second one is through geographical (geo-targeting). The third and oftentimes overlooked method is through time (day) targeting.

Day-parting, as it is known in the industry, is an essential component to any successful PPC strategy. Day-parting means you alter your keyword bid prices depending on the time of day and day of week. So, you can bid $1.00 for a keyword during your highest traffic times and reduce that bid price to $0.50 during off peak hours (this is just an illustration).

Effective day-parting involves knowing when your high value prospects are conducting searches and ensuring your ads are displayed at that exact moment. The goal is to identify the most “conversion-rich” days of the week and times of day. The daily budget is then allocated to those days and times in an effort to truly maximize ROI. The best source to get this data is your organic traffic data from Google Analytics (or other site traffic monitoring software). Below is the hour by hour traffic pattern for one of the campaigns we manage. As you can see in the chart below, 80% of the traffic to their website arrives during normal business hours and evenings (until 11pm). There is very little traffic during the wee-hours of the night.

Additionally, the day of week traffic data below reveals that 80% of the traffic is between Mondays and Fridays.

Once a proper analysis has been conducted, the information can then be incorporated into your bidding strategy. So, in our case, we may choose to do the following:

• Weekdays: 9 am – 11 pm maintain bid price
• Weekdays: 11 pm – 9 am 60% of max bid price
• Weekends: 9 am – 11 pm 60% of max bid price
• Weekends: 11 pm – 9 am 30% of max bid price

There is no hard and fast rule on how to alter the daily bid prices. I suggest starting with a reasonable number and then making changes as your campaign progresses.

While day-parting can be very effective mechanism to maximize the daily budget, it is important to take into consideration purchase cycle latency and the purchasing funnel. Not all consumers are ready to purchase when they conduct a search, and we certainly want to be under consideration as they evaluate their options. To counter act this, we often analyze past customer behavior to estimate purchase lead time as well as any other factors which may be relevant to making adjustments. We will also set up different campaigns with different day-parting schedules to make sure we are observing alternate patterns to obtain insights on how to improve day-parting schedules.

Tags: AdWords, day-parting, ppc