Most hear this word, dayparting, from their search team or paid search agency all the time and really do not have a clue what it actually means and how it is used in their paid search campaigns. The term dayparting comes from the days of broadcasting in which the practice of dividing the day into parts and airing programs at that time to appeal to a certain demographic. Example of this would be the FX network that made it a company policy to air more adult themed content only after 10pm. Dayparting in the search marketing world is simply the act of running your search ads at a particular time that you assume would be more profitable. This is where companies can help or hurt themselves because assumption and reality as we know are two different things.
Best practice is to shut down your ads at the times you feel that do not make sense such as:
- Not having sales staff available
- Not having customer support available
- When the demographic of your product is not available (example – teenagers after 2 am)
- Or late at night when all the paid search click fraud experts come out (just kidding)
If you shut down the ads completely, you can be making a big business blunder because you can reduce your maximum bids by a certain percentage instead. This will give you the ability to have your ads still be shown but use your budget more effectively. Also, this is a great opportunity to grab some needed attention to your brand as other competitors might have called it a night. Of course my answer is to test and to find what best times work for you and your customers with dayparting.
Start by taking your best performing campaign and copy it clone it six times. Then go into each campaign setting and allow it to only run of the six four-hour blocks throughout the day. Let these campaigns run about a month to get a solid base line for each block. After a month, start reducing the maximum bids and let them run for about a month. When the test is over, use your dayparting data to decide the best and worst times you are running and at what maximum bid price makes sense (if any).
Please note that consumer behavior changes often and there really is no such thing as a definitive result for a specific test. Your paid search marketing campaigns should always be evolving and testing never stops. Just because it worked last month by no means it will work this month. If your site really rocked in sales last fall means nothing about this fall’s sales as things like economic change, updated products, and overall demand play a big part.
You may also discover that the type of product you offer may now appeal to a different demographic. For example a specific bottle of vodka may have been the drink for the over 40 crowd but now has gained some popularity in the 30 to 40 year old crowd. This is a new demographic which has different surfing habits and thus daypart testing come back into the fold. Just because the majority of your keywords do or do not perform at a certain time for a specific demographic means that another demographic will act the same way.
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