Control Your Advertising Cost by Day Parting

Sonya Wood - April 3, 2009

Day parting or ad scheduling is one way marketers can manage their advertising costs while still displaying ads during peak times. Ad scheduling is a tool available on most major online advertising platforms, including Google Adwords, Yahoo Search and MSN adCenter.

This simple, yet powerful tool allows the advertiser to specify the desired days and times they want their ads appear online.

Before making any major strategic changes, such as implementing ad scheduling, it is necessary review performance metrics or analytics to confirm the best days and times of day to run your ads. In Google Adwords, you can even schedule reports to run every hour so you can gauge the performance on an hourly basis. Making these changes may have a significant impact on your traffic levels.

One of the main reasons ad scheduling is so powerful, is because your ads are only showing at times when they are generating the highest conversions, and not showing when conversions have been historically low. For example, after reviewing your analytics or other performance reports, you realize that your ads are not generating conversions on a consistent basis between 5 p.m. and 8 p.m.; you can use ad scheduling to turn your ads off at those specific times. Also, if you are running your ads in Yahoo, if you notice that your ads are converting at a higher rate between noon and 3 p.m., you can bid more for those particular times.

Although there are some major benefits to being visible in the major search engines 24 hours a day, it is also wise to test out ad scheduling. If informed decisions based on performance data are made, using this tool could not only save you time and money, it can also improve your conversion rates.