William Charlwood

To make AdWords work most profitably you need to beat Google’s system or you need to beat your competitors. Preferably both.

This article describes an advanced technique that can give you an edge and in certain circumstances can boost your ROI by several percentage points. It concerns time-slicing your campaigns to find out when they are most profitable.

Nearly everyone using AdWords learns the hard way that some keywords are more profitable than others. More experienced users learn that different ads are more profitable too. Advanced advertisers start targeting their campaigns on a geographic basis because it is often easier to sell to local customers than to ones a long way away.
But what about different times of the day? Take yourself for instance. Are there particular times of the day when you are more likely to spend money than at other times?

There’s probably no hard and fast rule here but I know that I am more likely to spend money for my business in the afternoon. I’m not sure why, it’s just that looking back on my recent purchasing history, I’ve reached for my wallet more often in the afternoon than in the morning.

For personal purchases, I tend to buy things online in the evening. I may do some initial research during the day, perhaps in my lunch break, but my real spending goes on in the evening. I’ve also noticed that I get more sales enquiries from a campaign I use to promote my AdWords optimisation site in the afternoon than in the morning.

So if you are an advertiser, how can you use this information to boost your own profitability?

The first thing you need to do is find out when your pay per click / AdWords campaigns are most profitable. It’s quite easy to do this on a daily basis by running the appropriate report using a few weeks’ data at the day resolution level. This will tell you what days in the week are most profitable for you provided you’ve set up conversion tracking or some other suitable analytics system.

But to fine tune the process and gain competitive advantage – something that’s vital if you are operating in a hotly competitive area – you really need to identify what hours in the day are most profitable too. This is not so easy because at the moment Google doesn’t report conversions on an hourly basis.

So we need a workaround.

The way to do it is to use the AdWords Editor tool to create mirror copies of your campaigns and then use the Scheduling facility to run them at different, non-overlapping times. For example, you could run one copy from midnight to 6am, a second copy from 6am to 12 noon, a third copy from 12 noon to 6pm and the fourth copy from 6pm to midnight.

After a while you’ll be able to see from the conversion tracking data which time period is most profitable. At that point you may wish to adjust the bid prices you set in each campaign to reflect their relative profitability. If in your business you tend to get higher conversion rates in the morning, it would probably be worth your while boosting your keyword bid prices in the morning so that you get more of this profitable traffic and then dropping them back again during the rest of the day. This is something you can do quickly, easily and automatically by using the advanced settings within the AdWords scheduling facility.

You can set the system up to increase or discount your keyword bid prices across a whole campaign for your chosen time periods. For example, you may decide you want to boost your bids from 9am to 11am by 20%. Cut them by 25% in the afternoon, and then take them back to 100% the rest of the day. Once you’ve set this up Google will automatically adjust your bids on this basis according to the time of day so you don’t have to fiddle about making loads of changes all the time.

The time dimension is easily overlooked in AdWords campaigns but effective time-dimensional analysis can boost your AdWords ROI by several percentage points. It takes effort but if you are spending a lot of money, you should try it.