Trying to Stretch Your Holiday Ad Dollar? Don’t Forget Dayparting!

Lauren Owens - December 10, 2013

By now you should know how your holiday ads are performing. You may have even tweaked an ad here or there, based on which keyword groups and landing pages are working, and which are not. If you want to stretch your ad dollar even further, there’s a time-honored trick you can use: Ad Scheduling (also known as Dayparting).

By using Dayparting, you can schedule your ads to run when your key audience is likely to be online. For holiday shoppers, this might be around lunchtime and in the evenings. Before you do any “dayparting” though, it’s important to know for sure.

To see when your ads are performing best, login to your Adwords account and navigate to the Ad Schedule section:

Then, drill down so you can see how individual ads are performing hour-by-hour.

Once you know when your ads are most popular, you can turn them on so that they’re only running during those times. This will help you stretch your ad dollars during the holiday season, and help you improve your ROI – as you’ll be running your ads when your audience is ready to buy.

It’s important to remember that Dayparting is a surgical tool, not a sledgehammer. Because all of your ads don’t run for the same reasons you would never want to take an all-in or all-out approach.

So, while you might employ Dayparting on paid search ads, you wouldn’t necessarily use the same technique for your remarketing or display ads. These ads, of course, serve to remind users of your brand, and should run whenever your audience is online – even when they’re not ready to convert.

Looking for more holiday help? Check out our Ecommerce Holiday Checklist.