Okay, so you have chosen your target market keywords, written your ad text, set your budgets and the campaign is now ready to go. You want to get good bang for your PPC buck so you choose broad modifier match term over broad match and you choose some exact match too. Later, you eagerly check back to see your ads now live and excitedly wonder just how many clicks, impressions and conversions occur as a result of your work. Later still, you check the AdWords interface to see the stats to determine your test campaign findings. And then you check Analytics metrics for the visits, referrals and more. Wow, some conversions, but not as much as you had hoped for – especially as you did plenty of keyword research, plus you already knew that your landing page was top-notch and your products in demand. Surely, everything was done right? Yes, maybe. But there is still some head scratching going on because you are wondering if you addressed everything? Maybe not…
This is where a function like ad scheduling could help. Even though the campaign may be only one week old and probably not mature enough for SQR (search query report) data to be effective, a tweak to change the times in which the majority of the PPC advert spend/cost is attributed could be the answer. We don’t want to miss the peak traffic now do we? So how do we do this? From experience, I set up a report with Google Analytics which measured PPC activity day-by-day and hour-by-hour. From there I created a graph to see the results in full. Over 24 hours, I found that 09am – 16:00 saw the least activity (despite the lunchtime spike), 16:00 – 21:00 saw strong activity and 21:00 – 00:00 saw the best activity (with 00:00 – 09:00 the weakest activity).
Via the AdWords ad scheduling function, I adjusted the PPC ad spend increasing the amount where the activity was greatest and holding back where the activity was weaker. So overall no change in the spend budget, but just a smarter allocation of it. Due to more budget applied to the busy times I could get more conversions and keep it in the high positions. So back to the original question: ‘Is PPC ad scheduling worth the effort?’ You bet!
Of course, there other tweaks and methods such as adding product or site extension or mobile for Google click to call, but in the spirit of keeping things simple, we could touch on these next time.
Laurence Murray
PPC Manager
