What Is The Most Effective Times To Run PPC Campaigns
One of the most effective methods of reducing the cost of your PPC campaign is to target your cam- paign to the most effective times of day or days of the week. Called dayparting, this strategy requires that you monitor your PPC campaigns to know what days and hours of the day your campaigns. perform the best.
Not all PPC companies offer dayparting capabilities, but many do, and some even allow you to set up automatic bid adjustments according to your dayparting schedules. This helps to reduce the cost of your ads while showing them during the most effective times of the day or days of the week.
There are other reasons you might want to use dayparting aside from the savings. Some companies use dayparting to improve the demographics to which their ads are shown. Different demographic groups use the Internet at different times of the day. If you’re targeting teens, you might find they are most active online between the hours of 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. If you know that, you can sched- ule your ads to be shown more often during those times, and the result should be that more teens see those ads.
The best way to determine the most active times for your ads is to look first at the average time on your site metric. The average time it takes visitors to click through your ad indicates their level of interest. For example, if you find that people who click through your ads between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. spend twice as much time on your site than those who click through at other times, you can assume that those who come during the daytime hours are more interested in what you have to offer. As a general rule, those who are more interested will contribute more goal conversions.
Once you’ve determined during what hours your site visitors spend the most time, you can look at the number of visitors who come during that time and the number who result in goal conversions. These numbers should give you a pretty clear idea of what your dayparting schedule should look like. An example of a dayparting schedule is shown in Table 9-1.
Looking at the schedule, it’s easy to see the pattern in the average number of seconds that visitors spend on your site. During the hours of 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. visitors spend slightly more time than they do during the lunch hours. However, the most time that users spend on the site (by seconds) is between 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. It’s these hours in which you should invest the most.
Additionally, if you’re looking at the schedule, you see the company is closed all day on Sunday and before 9 a.m. during the week, and is short-staffed all day on Saturday. These are times when you’ll want to keep your ad exposure low or non-existent.
NOTE
Dayparting also has an additional benefit that many people don’t think about. It can help you reduce the instances of click fraud that you may face. Because your ad is shown only at specific times, it is less available for your competition or other malicious souls to use it to drive up your PPC advertising costs.
Dayparting also works for days of the week and is especially useful if your products and services are seasonal in nature. For example, if you find that your ads gather the most traffic on weekends, you may decide that exposure during the week isn’t as important as exposure on the weekend. In that case, you can keep your exposure during the week to a minimum and increase it dramatically over the weekend. This should result in your budget being lower, or at the very least your budget should stay the same while the effectiveness of your PPC campaign should increase noticeably.
CROSS-REF
Another strategy that can help you reduce your PPC costs is geo-targeting. You’ll find more information about geo-targeting in Chapter 14.
