Two significant recent developments:
- Google has upgraded the way in which AdWords and Google Analytics manage time. Firstly, you can now set the global time zone in both AdWords and GA.
- Closely related to this is the facility to choose the time of day when your AdWords ads run.
For example, if your website’s goal is to generate phone enquiries, but only during working hours, then you are now able to run your ads from 9am to 5pm in your local time zone, or you can raise your bids for certain time periods. If you set your time zone in AdWords, it is also applied to a linked Analytics account. The serving of ads at specific times of day is known as “dayparting“, and it can be a highly effective PPC management technique.
Of course, in order to establish whether or not you should use dayparting, you need a good web analytics package. Some of the key questions to answer:
1) When is your traffic visiting your site?
2) When is the traffic converting best?
Sometimes the two are not the same – many of our PPC management clients ask us to turn off their ads when they have few clickthroughs. But the number isn’t as important as the conversion rate – you may have fewer clickthroughs, but are they converting better? In Google Analytics, you can set the date range view to hourly and then check your conversion reports (Content Optimisation -> Goals & Funnel Process -> Goal Conversion) to establish when conversions are highest and whether dayparting might be useful for your site.
The example below shows that the best converting time of day for this goal is 4-6pm. If you raise your CPC budget for this time period you’ll attract more of your best converting customers.
Remember, dayparting isn’t suitable for everyone – use your web analytics.
July 4th, 2006 at 8:13 am
I think you are missing something here… Day Parting isn’t realy about the ability to dislpay ads at different times of the day – though of course that is useful. Its actually about being able to track the click troughs at different times of the day.
Previously within Adwords there was no time information – all Adwords data was collected and reported on a per day basis. And the day was defined by PST. So for example, a UK site that relied heavily on Adwords visitors, had large chunks of visitors showing in the middle of night according to GA and all other analytics solutions (because PST is -8 hours GMT). It was an issue bugging G for sometime.
However now the data is timestamped, not only can you align your data to your actual time zone, but you can also track it properly. That is the real reason for the Day Parting.
One caveat here is that if you run multiple Adwords accounts in multiple timezones you have to sync all of them to the same one timezone or use a different web site with a different GA account.
HTH