the PPC Book|Pay Per Click Blog | Long Tail Thoughts in a Short Tail World

If you’re a Pay Per Click Analyst, like myself, this is good news. Just like with the introduction of the quality score, Google has added another layer of complexity to the equation. Is dayparting rocket science? No, of course not. But is it something else to pay attention to? Yes, of course. So in effect, the more complicated the better for the analyst. A sort of built in job security. Dayparting just adds to the amount of work that goes into managing a professionally built PPC campaign. In the words of Larry and Sergey,”Ad scheduling allows advertisers to run their ads and modify their bids based on time of day as well as intra-day and intra-week cycles in campaign performance.”

Businesses that need to use dayparting -

Anyone with a storefront or daytime hours in which no one is available to answer the phone after hours. Duh. Especially with the who knows how long it will last ability to put your phone number in an adwords ad text, this is a key consideration for the small business owner or anyone else who relies on a phone conversation to close the deal. Top of mind companies that should use this:

Mortgage companies
Insurance companies
Big ticket retail
High touch retail and service industries

Being able to synch your ads to the time that you actually have live help available is going to save you a bundle in blown opportunities. For example, last night I am surfing high and low for a merchant account provider. I must have clicked on 15 ads that matched exactly what I was looking for. However, it was 11:30 PM. Maybe half of them had the live help banner on their site, but guess what, none of them was actually staffed by anyone at 11:30. I wanted to talk to someone because I had specific questions. No dice, and a lot of wasted clicks for those advertisers. If not turning your ads off in this scenario, you could at least lower your bids to $.10 or something less impactful.

All in all, more options are a good thing for advertisers. Better control of your spending is never a bad thing, it just means you have to pay more attention. As Kevin Lee of Did-It said recently, “Doing dayparting badly is as bad or worse than not doing it at all.”