The first 7 things to look at when optimizing paid search marketing campaigns


#6 — Review Ad Schedules and Adjust Bids Accordingly


When you first set up your Google AdWords search campaigns, all of them are automatically set to “Show ads all days and hours.” This means your ads could appear whenever someone searches for one of your keywords at any time of any day. This may be good for Google, because they have you spending your paid search budget all day, every day… but this might not be good for your business. That’s where Google dayparting comes in.

By tapping into Google’s ad scheduling in the new adwords interface (otherwise known as dayparting), you can tailor your campaign to run hot during really strong periods of the week, and cool down when the performance is not as good.

Use ad scheduling to avoid wasting budget on bad time blocks

Once again, data is your friend when determining what days and times are good for your business and which are not. But not everything can be driven purely by data, particularly if you are investing in paid search in order to drive offline behavior.

For example, you may be a local restaurant – and you want to bid heavily near the end of the business day when people are trying to figure out where to go to dine (or for takeout).

You may be a retreat spa, and you find that Thursdays and Fridays are your best days to bid, because that’s when people are planning the type of last minute weekend getaways that are your specialty.

Or you may be a local office, where the phones are only answered in person from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m., Monday to Friday, and you want to concentrate your spend during those times.

The above examples rely heavily on solid understanding of your business and your customer. It’s actually easier to establish proper ad scheduling and dayparting structures for ecommerce sites, where the entire transaction takes place online and is almost completely trackable.

Using your knowledge and the information at hand, you can create a schedule that not only turns on and off your campaigns when it makes sense, but adjust bids when you still want to run but want to pay more or less than your baseline bid.  What you’ll end up with is a nice variety of times, and days, and good flexibility on when you show up and how high you’re willing to bid in order to do so.

Hover over your Google Adwords dayparting schedule to see details

Setting ad schedules and bid adjustments to focus your marketing budget on your best times is a great way to save inefficient spend and re-purpose it when it is likely to drive additional business for your company.

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