19
Jul

Top 5 Tips for Effective PPC Dayparting

When it comes to marketing, your ROI means everything. It doesn’t matter how much time and money you spend on your campaign if the results don’t justify the means. Properly dayparting your native advertisements can make a massive difference in the return you get from your investment, especially based on the relatively little effort to implement proper scheduling. However, optimally setting up these schedules can be a delicate art. We’ll take a look at some of the top tips to implement dayparting into your PPC campaign most effectively to capitalize on your opportunity to target the right audiences.

Don’t Schedule Around Hours; Schedule Around Blocks Of Time

One of the most valuable benefits of PPC marketing is the massive amount of real-time data available to you as a marketer. However, when it comes to scheduling your ads, it’s important to take into account the sample size of the data you’re working with and not keep your schedules too constrained. For most accounts and ad campaigns, trying to adjust for each hour is unnecessary and becomes more tedious than useful. Optimizing based on general blocks of the day or night, like early morning or late evening, will more often than not provide a better bang for your buck. Dayparting around hours often forces advertisers to limit their ads too much, leaving little wiggle room in case the sample size of their data isn’t enough or a delayed conversion cycle kicks in.

Plan with Your Extensions & Goals in Mind

Extensions are something that many advertisers overlook when creating their ad schedules. While your PPC campaign is probably trying to hit every data point possible to maximize ad real estate, you should also be taking the goal of each ad extension in mind when planning your schedules. Your basic ad creatives might be able to roll without exclusion, but specific extensions that call out to speak to a customer might need tailoring. For example, think about limiting call extensions to only times when your business can address them live and when those customers are most likely to try to reach you.

Organize By Category and Goal

Another influential factor to proper dayparting and native advertising as a whole revolves around how your separate and organize your native ad campaigns. Like any attempt at marketing, conversion cycles can vary to a large extent depending on the audience, and that audience can vary widely depending on the product or service offered, the time it’s shown to them, or the device they’re currently using. Therefore, it becomes imperative to see that time and day is only part of the equation when dayparting your ads, and splitting your PPC campaigns into groups that employ a common goal and cohesive targeting tactic can be beneficial. Beyond lumping together goals that target a similar audience, think about forming campaign groups based on details such as time zones as well.

Use a Formula, Don’t Trust Your Gut

Let the data do the talking. There is an undeniable amount of common sense that comes into play when creating your ad schedules, but a formula-based approach provides a concrete basis to grow your ROI. The information you gather may contradict what you expect or want from your audiences, but it’s important to listen to it. Using a formula also saves you from things like adjusting modifiers because of arbitrary incremental shifts; this is critical due to the rapidly changing and chaotic nature of the internet, where there is not always a solid and predictable backstory for everything. There is value in exploring logical justification to some data that becomes statistically significant, but your time can often be wasted doing this. Hard facts and numbers are what will ensure your business successfully builds its brand and ROI.

Revisit Ad Data Regularly

Even when your customer data appears regular, you never know what your competitors are doing. Every year, you can depend on several competitors to enter and exit the market you’re targeting, all adjusting their PPC bids just like you. Other than changes in consumer patterns, these competing businesses can cause wide fluctuations in competitive pricing with ad networks. With this in mind, it would be strategic to reassess the performance and ROI of your scheduled ads on a monthly or quarterly basis along with your competitors, so that you can always be up to date with market changes.

PPC advertisements have become an integral part of the foundation of successful internet marketing campaigns. There are plenty of opportunities to cut back and increase your ROI if your ads run on a 24/7 schedule, but even when your scheduling looks promising, there can be an enormous potential for an increase in ad performance. These five tips are simple to incorporate and don’t require sophisticated analysis or take up much time, but they can make a massive difference in the successfulness of your digital advertising campaign.

About Tewfic Kattan
Tewfic is managing partner and head of Paid Channels at Sandstorm. His 15+ years experience spans both traditional and digital marketing with specialism in PPC, Analytics and E-commerce Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) working with some of the region's largest brands including Aramex and DAMAC.

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