It’s All About Timing: Dayparting

I’m a creature of habit, as are most people. If I analyzed my activities over the last five years, I would see clearly defined trends. And, if I were to give this data over to an advertiser, they would be wise to use it to target me efficiently. An advertiser would look at my data and notice I often order food for pick up around noon. Logically, restaurants would want to serve me an ad at about 11:50 AM when I am deciding what to eat. This is a simple but effective example to express that dayparting just makes sense.

While dayparting makes sense, the strategy behind it can vary and depends heavily on your goals. I recently looked into dayparting within my display programs given a budget decrease due to the slower months of summer. However, after taking a look at the data, I realized there are many factors you can consider including but not limited to: cost per click, conversion rate, order volume, cost per order, and more. So, before you begin building your strategy, contemplate your goals and how these metrics relate to your goals. Here are a few things to consider:

Do you need to stretch a small budget to ensure coverage all day?

Are you hoping to increase sessions and aiming to increase bids when the research phase is high?

Or, are you aiming to grow conversions and are willing to pay a little bit more if it means you increase orders?

In your industry, what is the relationship between the discovery/research period and the purchase period?

Are you okay if you program goes dark during low performing periods or do you only want to dramatically decrease your coverage?

Finally, AdWords only allows you to segment a day into 6 sections so choose your divisions wisely.

There are many ways to approach dayparting but it is a very obvious and effective way to may a large impact on your display programs! After all, I think someone once said “time is money.”