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Google Adds Dayparting, Will It Help?

June 16, 2006 by 6 Comments

Google announced on their Inside Adwords blog that they have added dayparting to Adwords.  For those who don’t know, dayparting is the ability schedule ads to show at different times of the day.  An example would be using different ads for day and night, or just deciding to only advertise at a certain time of day.

I’m sure this is something that many of Google’s more advanced advertisers have been wanting for a long time, and it’s something MSN AdCenter has that Adwords did not.  As John Battelle points out though, is this that big of a deal?  How many advertisers will actually find a good use for it?
A user has to turn on this feature in their settings, but I think one of the things that has made Adwords successful over the years is it’s ease of use, and as they continually add new options and features, there are that many more things a user can screw up or waste time and money trying out.

Filed Under: Advertising, Google, Random
  • http://www.thebizofknowledge.com thebizofknowledge

    I’ve checked out that scheduling feature, and I have to agree with you. I just don’t there would ever be a time that I’d want to use it. I’m just a small-time AdWords person, so that might have something to do with it. I guess if I had data about what time of day certain searches tend to occur, this tool would be helpful. As it is though, I’ll just keep doing things the way I always have!

  • http://www.webpublishingblog.com Andrew Johnson

    Interestingly I have noticed that on some of my web sites the majority of the revenue comes during the daytime, when people would be working. For other sites, the bulk of the revenue comes in later in the evening and night. Do conversions differ based on time of day? From my own PPC campaigns it appears the answer may be yes.. but I have not determined anything conclusively.

  • http://www.conversionrater.com/ Pat McCarthy

    Hi Andrew,

    I think lots of advertisers would find the same thing to be true, but isn’t it probably because your traffic level is greater during the day? So really dayparting doesn’t help you then, as you just get more conversions because traffic is higher.

    Where it’d be more interesting is if your conversion rate was dramatically different at different times.

  • http://digitalmediaanalytics.com Matt Jacobs

    I, for one, was delighted to see Google add that feature to the ad mix. When you couple that feature with their new geo-targeting, certain advertisers will have some powerful tools to work with to drive more effective, more relevant advertising.

    I’ve heard some people question whether day-parting will work, and I can speak for its effectiveness: it works for some advertisers but not for others.

    One word of caution to throw out there: do NOT assume that optimizing day-parting on conversion will be beneficial. I’ve had plenty of clients with heavy traffic during certain times of the day and week but relatively poor conversion during those times. What I found for some clients was that they built awareness during certain times of the day and week and drove significant traffic at those times, but a substantial number of those visitors did not convert. Instead, those visitors chose to come back later and convert at a time that would never have been targeted for day-parting, and many web analysts would mistake those visitors as “organic” without the proper tracking mechanisms in place.

    The short story: day-parting can (potentially) help you build awareness that’s critical for conversion but day-parting your advertising and optimal conversion don’t necessarily happen at the same time. My advice would be to test it out with the proper tracking mechanisms in place and see what works best….

  • http://www.conversionrater.com/ Pat McCarthy

    Exactly Matt, your post is a good example of why I think this feature is potentially overrated. It takes a lot of testing, and thought in order to make dayparting work well for an advertiser. I’m sure for a minority of advertisers, they will figure it out and it will work well. For the rest of them, they’ll just screw up their campaigns and have a bad experience.

  • http://seog.net Michael @ SEOG

    One feature that hasn’t been mentioned is that Google has implemented an advanced feature that lets you adjust your pricing during certain time periods. For time sensitive bidding (say tickets), you may want to shoot to number one during key hours like 5 pm – 10 pm on the east coast. Or if you know you convert well and tend to get your best customers during the middle of the day on a busy executive’s work break, you may want to pay more just during that part of the day but then scale back later at night.

    I work in the insurance and financial services industry with a large ad spend and we have often seen more click fraud issues at night. We have manually turned off campaigns at night and also used tools for some accounts in order to reduce the number of junk clicks we get, but its nice to be able to have this feature built in directly into Google now.

    Michael @ SEOG