Paid Search Optimization Through Dayparting
The search engines provide a number of methods to control the advertising spend rate of your paid search campaigns. The most commonly used tool search engines offer is the bid limit. Assuming you have accurate data on the conversion rates of your keywords and know how much a lead or sale is worth, this is easy to calculate. If not, there is an industry worth of software vendors to help you manage these bids.
This assumes, however, that a click at one time of day is worth as much as a click at another time of day. For many advertisers, this reasoning is incorrect and leads to sub-optimal campaigns. It is quite common for users to do their shopping for products from the office during the day, but actually consummate the purchase that evening at home. The time/date stamp of the order would lead an advertiser to increase its spending at night, when the actual decisions are being driven by adverting during the day.
The next most commonly used is the daily budget. This method tends to be sub-optimal as it leads to one’s campaign being offline at unpredictable periods throughout the day.
Dayparting, however, allows you to vary your campaigns by the time of day and the day of the week, so that they are optimized to deliver the most valuable traffic possible. The data extrapolated from dayparting will also eliminate the weakest campaign elements, thus creating the ability to conserve your ad spend for the most efficient daypart.
Practical Dayparting Tips
- Start by generating an hourly Cost Per Action (CPA) using lead time/date stamps and hourly clicks. If you choose your analytics system properly, you should be able to determine this. While this does not give you all the information you need, it likely puts you ahead of your competition.
- Be sure to differentiate by day of the week. The behavior of users can vary greatly between a weekday and the weekend, and even between two consecutive weekdays.
- Although trends may be more difficult to tease out of the data, you might benefit by looking at the day of the month as well. To be fair, however, any such trends found may be better attributed to seasonality, then something that can be addressed with dayparting.
- When performing lead generation, the relative lead quality is particularly important. Business to Business (B2B) customers might be able to generate a good number of leads on the weekend, but if they are all trash, the advertising dollars were wasted. You need to track the leads throughout the entire sales cycle and tie the eventual closes back to their original source.
- If engaged in ecommerce, the Average Selling Price (ASP) should be similarly monitored. Perhaps in the evening, you see a higher attachment rate of training DVDs with your software offering. Track this data, and use it to inform your advertising.
- The geographic controls of the search engines are fairly rudimentary. It’s not unusual to see traffic coming in from all over the world, even when the campaign is ostensibly limited to just U.S. visitors. If you limit your campaign to times when Americans are awake, you may screen out the overseas visitors further.
- If you’re in the B2B space, your best traffic is most likely going to come in during the business day. Ideal times for Business to Consumer (B2C) sites can vary widely by product selection and audience.
- Search- and content-networks see different user behavior, and might require different dayparting configurations. As always, search and content advertising should be configured and tracked differentially, so that their separate values can be determined.
- In the long run, when a transaction occurs is less important than when the visitor first came to the website. Many people, for instance, shop for items online during the day, bookmark the site from which they intend to purchase, and then consummate the purchase when they get home that evening. As a result, while the transaction happened in the evening hours, the advertising that led to the sale occurred during the business day. All too few analytics systems, however, provide visibility into the first visit time/date stamp.
- Your bid management system might allow you to turn down bids at non-peak time periods, rather than turning the campaign off entirely. Perhaps your keyword costs two dollars a click during the business day, but fifty cents at night. Even if the clicks aren’t worth as much at night, the lower price might change the economics to your advantage.
Dayparting with Google
The three main paid search systems (Google, Yahoo and MSN Live) offer very different dayparting capabilities. Those in Google have been around the longest, but are fairly rudimentary, with only the ability to turn campaigns on or off by day of the week and hour of the day.
You can manage this within the “Edit campaign settings” screen of the Google AdWords system. Look for “Ad scheduling” under the Advanced Options section. As with most things in the AdWords, the interface is intuitive and easy to use.
Dayparting with Yahoo
The announcement of Yahoo’s Panama included great fanfare about their new dayparting system. Somewhere between this announcement and the actual release of Panama, however, dayparting disappeared. Yahoo has not currently published a release data for dayparting capabilities.
Dayparting with MSN Live
MSN Live offers the greatest degree of control, although the bar was not set very high. Settings can be done by advertising group, rather than campaign (a significant improvement over Google).
Unfortunately, you can control ads by day or by time block, but not a time block on a particular day. I suppose if you wanted to pause from 8pm Friday through Sunday, you could have a separate ad group for Friday, and pause that one from 8pm on, but that’s a great deal of hassle. Pausing by time can only be done in pre-set blocks, such as 3am to 7am.
Bids can be increased by time block, location, demographics, etc, but only in +10% increments. This is not a big issue, but if you want to bid less on Saturday, you’d have to lower all your bids by x% and then have a daily increase of x% for the other days.
By far the most powerful capability is incremental bidding by location. You could, for instance, bid more for traffic from Illinois to support a new Chicago sales representative.
Dayparting with MSN is confusing to set up. You have to first turn on targeting by day (choosing all days if needed) in order to be able to increase bids for certain days. It is a clunky system, but easy enough to manage once you figure it out.
When competing in a high volume, aggressive bidding environment, dayparting can boost your campaign’s efficiency on any search engine (that allows/has it). It requires a heavy amount of research, planning, and testing but generally results in increased conversions and better CPA for a variety of B2B and B2C clients.
