For marketers, hearing the word “dayparting” simply means figuring out how to maximize their exposure from the average time frames in broadcast programming in relation to the various demographic advertising factors. While it could boost their sales and push their marketing efforts forward, dayparting for marketers has yet to take center stage in their campaigns.

Dayparting for digital marketers, however, is a completely different ball game.

For one, this approach plays a key role not only in the budget of digital marketers but can also turn into an incredible profit maximizing tool when done properly. Knowing how and when to best run your pay-per-click ads on peak hours to efficiently reach your target customers would definitely guarantee that you’re utilizing every available resource to maximize your advertising dollar.

Since Google AdWords and Yahoo AdCenter run your ads all day long until the budget runs out, knowing effective dayplanning strategies become even more crucial to the success of a campaign.

For one, a marketing savvy expert would know that these search engine marketing giants actually offer a feature in their advanced settings that could help save on costs. This feature allows you to automatically alter your chosen keyword bids according to the hour of the day or even day of the week.

So whether you are operating on a minimal search marketing budget or have the luxury to go crazy with a huge one, finding the most efficient dayparting strategies is no doubt a surefire way to reach your goals.

This post aims to share effective and advanced dayplanning strategies to use for your ads to help you optimize your scheduling program and make the most of your digital marketing budgets.

  1. Apply A Formula-Based Strategy

Day after day, marketing experts come up with distinct tactics to compute for the hour of day modifier. You can simply copy off their formula, or you can simply create your own based on your personal experiences.

To give you an idea of how to start with it, remember that the basic way to do is by subtracting your hour of the day performance from the campaign average of what’s identified as your main key performance indicator (KPI).

If you manage to craft a formula-based strategy for your dayplanning, then you’ll be able to set your modifiers using a specific and secure tactic instead of relying on unpredictable and irregular trends.

Try to have a closer watch at conditions where your formula managed to evoke incredibly aggressive alterations to your first bid. Keep in mind to always set upper and lower limit ceilings to ensure that you do not fall into the trap of accidentally outbidding yourself or even boosting your own bids too radically that your previous efficiency no longer has merit.

In crafting your own formula (or even when you decide to follow others’ work instead), make sure to check for the basic factors like race, daily schedule interests, gender, location, and age.

You are already aware of the high efficiency of having landing pages and advertisements customized to your target market in running several effective campaigns and ad groups that result in as many number of clicks as possible.

Can you just imagine if you can come up with a formula that would have your target users aggressively searching for your services and products? How amazing would it be to be able to use this strategy in every PPC campaign and watch as your CPA goes down? Ultimately, this formula can help you allocate the budget to other marketing efforts by cutting down on your dayplanning costs.

  1. Combine Day of Week and Hour of Day

Remember the advanced setting of Google AdWords and Yahoo AdCenter we discussed earlier? This is where you can use it the most.

First, figure out if the analytics tool you are using can provide you with conversion reports by hour of the day as well as the day of the week. If it can, then you can conveniently pinpoint the specific time of the day when your target users are ready to make a purchase.

Source: Aillum

From there, work on adjusting the schedule of your Google Ad and increase the amount you are agreeing to shell out for a click. This would guarantee that your ad would be ranked higher and would remain visible at the specific hours you determined.

To ensure that you can go about this in a more organized and efficient manner, it’s highly advisable to use a spreadsheet to map out the data you gathered from your account. Utilize the conditional formatting feature to conveniently determine the ideal hours for you to boost your visibility.

While this strategy would clearly require more effort from you, the returns are promising as well. In making sure that you analyze your audience at a deeper level, you can find ways to capitalize on the data readily available to you and minimize your costs on hours or days that bring in low returns. More importantly, it gives you the peace of mind that your PPC program is utilized at its highest capacity and no hour goes to waste.

PRO TIP: You can actually apply this strategy to several campaigns by simply using similar settings. After making your changes to one campaign using the online AdWords interface, just download your modifications in the AdWords Desktop Editor. Then, copy the changes to the campaigns that would benefit from identical conditions.

  1. Utilize A 24-Hour Bidding Script and Use Extensions

Most of your competitors might be resorting to using their own data to determine their own scheduling program strategy. This means you could be missing out on certain hours – the ones your competitors analyzed to be the best for your line of business – and you don’t even know it.

To avoid this, you might want to utilize a bidding script that runs 24 hours. That way, you will be able to deliver maximum performance every hour of the day.

Source: Clix Marketing

Meanwhile, a huge number of businesses use the built-in features of AdWords and AdCenter to help with their campaign. In fact, one of the most widely ignored features of AdWords is the one that allows you to create an ad schedule for extensions.

While the PPC community has recognized the strategy of using extensions to maximize ad real estate, it’s important to note that paying close attention to how to take advantage of this feature would pay off as well. Check out how this company, Sleeknote, took advantage of the extension.

Since using these extensions has become a go-to strategy to simply get more out of your space, there is a huge possibility that your call to action (CTAs) buttons and snippets fail to truly add value to your ad.

Remember, these extensions are geared towards convincing people to choose you over your competitors. Adding useful information would entice your target audience into learning more about your business and could push your click-through-rates up several percentage notches.

The Takeaway

PPC advertising is one of the most highly sought after efforts in the digital marketing world. E-commerce practitioners have proven time and time again just how effective it could be and how much profit it could give them. However, the clicks are not free.

That’s where dayparting comes in. Every media planner has dayparting in the heart of each of their PPC campaigns. With its potential to rake in considerable advantages from relatively simple and even convenient analysis, this method has become the foundation of most marketing plans.

No media planner worth his or her salt would ignore the importance of running their ads on the most active hours online of their target audience. More importantly, no effective media planner would miss out on the chance to save costs or at least make every penny count.