Do You Have Pay-Per-Click Day-Parting Opportunities?

by Kevin Gold

The other day I was running some data analysis on one of my clients and discovered that a majority of their leads were generated over weekends and early in the week like on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Thursdays and Fridays were almost always low lead volume days.

Based on this analysis, I am currently implementing a day-parting process to “pause” the client’s PPC campaigns during these low “performance-activity” days specifically for their high click cost keywords. I am able to day-part at the keyword-level through grouping different keyword themes (e.g. high volume, high cost) by campaign (the level in which the day-parting option is set.)

What about your campaigns? Have you analyzed your performance data to see if any opportunities exist to day-part?

In its simple form, day-parting is a good option for companies with specific hours for their call center or sales staff. Another client’s primary call-to-action is a “phone call” therefore we only run the pay-per-click campaigns during hours of operation. Other calls-to-action exist across their website including inquiry forms; however, the client’s sales process is extremely effective as a consultative sale. Therefore, we spend money on pay-per-click when the highest opportunity to close deals is available.

Consider your business model, sales process and market environment. Is there any opportunity to save money and/or maximize return through scheduling when your PPC campaigns are running?

Posted on May 10, 2007

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6 Responses to “Do You Have Pay-Per-Click Day-Parting Opportunities?”

Boris Mordkovich Says:
May 11th, 2007 at 10:44 am

Kevin,

Thanks for a great post.

It’d be really interesting if you could post the results of your experiment with that client in a few weeks.

Personally, I think that many of our readers would enjoy more real-world experiments like this with specific clients - whether it works or not.

Boris
Tim Says:
May 11th, 2007 at 5:45 pm

I’ve found Monday and Tuesday to be big revenue days for us. Using Google’s Scheduling feature, I increase our MAX CPC by 100%+ for M and T. After running through some more numbers I saw revenue fall off during the weekends, but spend was roughly the same.

So, I decided to throttle my CPC during the weekend, but I’ve recently had second thoughts about this. Specifically, I need to answer the question: “but what if people are researching over the weekend, and then purchase x days later, during the weekday?” If that were the case, I definitely want my CPC to NOT be lowered during the weekend, but I haven’t finished reporting the numbers to answer the prior question.

In regards to your “pausing” of keywords during specific hours, if you actually mean “pause” I feel it would be just fine to allow the keywords to fall to their minimum CPC - that way you’re still impressing but at a very low rate.

Day parting is also smart for advertisers with small budgets. Say you have budgeted $200 for a campaign but a competitor has $2000. By day parting and lowering your bids in the morning or during the work day, you still will have some spend left for the later-hours of the day. When, if you weren’t day parting, your competitor would have plenty of spend left later in the day with less competitors bidding on the keywords.

Create post, I’m curious what others think.
Tim Says:
May 11th, 2007 at 5:46 pm

I meant “great” post in that last sentence
Andrey Milyan Says:
May 12th, 2007 at 6:19 pm

Thanks for sharing, Tim.

All the sites I’ve worked with had a pretty big drop in traffic on weekends. Of course, that would also depend on the industry you’re in. Test, then retest and then test some more. You can’t go wrong with that.

Personally, I do most of my online shopping at work during the week (hope Boris is not reading this, lol). On the weekend I try to stay away from the computer and spend more time with friends and family (ironically I’m writing this comment on Sunday).
Boris Mordkovich Says:
May 14th, 2007 at 11:03 am

Boris is most certainly reading this.

So, about that raise…

Boris
Publisher
Denver Web Design: Hyper Dog Media Says:
May 17th, 2007 at 3:49 pm

You got to know when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em. When to walk away, and when to run (I just thought of that).

We’ve helped clients save money, increase their CTR, and get better leads through EXCLUDING visitors coming to Google at the wrong times, from the wrong continents, and for the wrong (broad) keywords. It’s a simple fix we’ve seen save up to 30% on some horribly non-optimized accounts.