Now that Google has officially launched Ad Scheduling, more advertisers both big and small will be testing out and using day-parting. If you are one of these advertisers, then you need to realize that there are no guarantees that day-parting will work for you. Positive results will come from the appropriate setup, analysis, and testing of your day-parted campaigns.
Setting up day-parting isn’t usually a difficult process. Add in times that you want certain parts of the account to be on, and times when it should be off. A more important area of the setup is the analysis you do prior to choosing what those times should be if any at all. Day-parting seems to work best for B2B type of companies as their customers are, for the most part, only actively looking for their products during business hours. To see what dates and times you should choose, you need to study your logs, discount or add any seasonal affects, and decide if it is better to be off at periods that don’t work as effectively as others. Once you have gathered this information, you are ready to start day-parting.
Next, you want to analyze how the campaigns perform with day-parting compared to how they performed before. You may be surprised that day-parting has no overall affect on your efficiency, maybe it got worse, or maybe you are more efficient but your volume has taken a hit, or maybe your campaign is performing better than ever! Either way, you want to make sure that you continue to monitor and compare data to find the best mix of having your account day-parted while reaching the goals of the client.
Finally, like all else in the world of online advertising, comes testing. Just because you analyze the data and see good results doesn’t mean you are done. Every now and then you should test for a statistically relevant amount of time (depending on your volume). Your campaign might perform better using different time settings or even not day-parting at all. Over time, the marketplace changes, consumer preferences and actions change, the company or brand changes, the seasons change, etc., etc., etc. If you keep testing, you will make sure that the campaigns are in the best position to compete against the other companies and satisfy the needs of your target market.
Overall, the added features from the engines to give all advertisers the same features and abilities will help level the playing field out. The ones who can’t afford 3rd party software that gives them the ability to do what the larger advertisers have already been able to do can now have more control over their campaigns and their performance.
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