What time of day works best?

[kingoftherodeo]

Hey all

Out of interest which times of day work best for you in terms of your ppc campaigns for different verticals?

I was going to test some adscheduling but wondered what anyone else may have already found out?

Thanks

[tbp]

It really does depend on your market, as with most things to do with PPC.

I`ve used ad scheduling before when I was really up against things budget wise, as it stopped money getting spent when I couldn't watch what was happening (do have to get a few hours of sleep a day ).

It didn't make a great deal of difference though.

There are a couple of periods throughout the week where things change, most are easily explained:

12 - 2pm on weekdays - Workers surfing the net using their employers PC's during their lunch break.

7pm - 11pm - People sitting down on their PC's after coming home from work and having dinner.

Saturdays are usually quiet, as people go out and do things in the "real world", shopping, family trips etc

If you are in a very expensive area, advertising after 6pm can be good as a lot of peoples budgets are used up by that time, giving you cheaper clicks.

My best periods at the moment are evenings, I can make very little up to 6pm, and then it calls comes in during the 7 - 11pm period.

You really need to keep a close eye on your sales and CPC costs for a couple of weeks, and it should allow you to see patterns. Log your commissions compared to your CPC costs on an hourly or 2 hours period during the day, and you can get quite a good picture of whats happening.

[kingoftherodeo]

Hey Man

Thanks for your reply thats really handy. Yeah i'd made the same assumptions about those times of day. Thing is at the moment im trying all three engines, yahoo, msn and google. I tried MSN first as i had £100 free voucher. Msn worked well even on a £10 a day budget.

Im about to start on google as of tomorrow but trying just a £10 a day budget to start. Its not hugely pricey in this area but as you can imagine £10 wont go very far so im wondering whether to try ad scheduling to start with or just try it on all day, i have it set to accelerated so my ads are always shown instead of spread evenly. Maybe test a few days this week with various settings, what are your thoughts?

Thanks again - your help is appreciated, im getting there

[tbp]

Im about to start on google as of tomorrow but trying just a £10 a day budget to start. Its not hugely pricey in this area but as you can imagine £10 wont go very far so

It all depends on the area landing page.

One of my best sites has a £10 budget a day, and uses nowhere near that, but still makes £50 - £60 profit a day. Its a combination of having a landing page that converts well (mines between 60 - 80% conversion), and a good level of commission.

Personally, I won't promote products less than around £30 on PPC, unless I know they are really good sellers.

[kingoftherodeo]

Thanks TBP

I'll give £10 a day a go to start with and see how it goes. It worked well on MSN but i want to try Google on its own so i can see how each engine performs, then i can run them all at once if i can see its working well.

Thanks

[tbp]

As I said on another post today, if you get conversions the budget becomes largely irrelevant.

I don't care how much I spend a day on adwords, as long as im earning x times more than that in commission.

If you aren't getting commissions then you should pull the ad's and look at why you aren't making sales, and then adjust things and start again.

Having a big budget isn't going to help make sales. If you make no sales with a £10 budget, its unlikely you will at £100 (unless your CPC is very high!).

[hero]

the new webgains reporting can help you with that - we now report impressions, clicks & sales on an hourly basis, which you can use to understand how your users & campaigns perform. To view reports by hour: Site/Campaign Overview-->detail level: hourly. Also, in all the shortcuts, you will find the hour shortcut within them at the scale menu.

thanks

[jimbanks]

Also best to work out what times don't work best. Dayparting used to be a pain to implement, now it's easy.

I've rarely seen a sector work really well between 2am and 7am (apart from PPC.....Pills, Porn and Casinos), now those 3 are largely non events on the PPC side of things.

Prime time can vary based on sector, age, sex of your likely user base and also topicality can be important - e.g. England not qualifying for Euro 2008 would have an adverse effect on trips to Switzerland and Austria but many other destinations, cruises etc. would have been booked, you could win or lose based on that few hour window.

[kingoftherodeo]

Hey All

Sorry havent had chance to check on this recently. Thanks for all your input.

Google worked well for me but i dont want to put more in until i've looked at it and refined. MSN still works well for me so that ticking over nicely. Im going to try yahoo soon and perhaps google again but with dayparting, its expensive so need to reign it in, it did however convert well.