Google Adwords PPC Tip: Use Ad Scheduling

Here’s a really quick and easy way to improve your Google AdwordsPPC campaigns – turn on ad scheduling!

What’s Ad Scheduling?

Ad scheduling is simply configuring your campaigns to be on or off at given times of the day. Now there are 2 key considerations that you need to take into account:

1. When your users are likely to search for your product/service – this can vary significantly according to whether your offering is B2B or B2C.

2. When your competitors are likely to be showing their ads. We have observed that it is often the case that the competition begins to disappear towards the end of the day as daily budgets run out. When this happens, the bids can drop a little bit and your Conversion Rate can go up.

What Should You Do?

Your aim here is to make sure your ads are showing to the people you want to attract (of course it is!)… but it is also to ensure that you aren’t wasting your budget on the people who you don’t want to attract. Typically these would be people in foreign countries that you don’t sell to. So here’s what you need to do:

1. Start by making sure that ‘Accelerated’ ad display is off and that your ads are showing 24 hours a day – because we’re going to gather some data to find out the Conversion Rate on an hourly basis, which can be seen in Google Analytics.

2. Set up a Goal in Google Analytics to measure visits to your conversion page.

3. Let the campaign run for 250 conversions. It doesn’t have to be this high but we regard 250 as the benchmark for getting results that are vaguely reliable.

3. Once this has been achieved, use Google Analytics to see the Conversion Rate per hour of the day. This can be seen in Traffic Sources / Campaigns / Adwords Campaigns

4. Once you can see this, you should be able to determine when best to run your ads. This will clearly be a decision you make in conjunction with the daily budget you have available.

5. Set your ad display to ‘accelerated’ in your campaign settings so you can scale your campaign up.

6. Check that your budget is correct and that you are not running out before the day is over!

And You Thought It Was Just A Simple Setting!

Getting this right isn’t rocket science but there is more thought behind it than you might have first though. This is a real chance to get some competitive advantage because most business don’t get this right but if your lights are on when everyone else is closed and there are still customers outside then you could be hitting a goldmine…

Call us on 020 3239 8565 or use our online form if you would like any free advice.