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Ad Scheduling And Budget Usage
Hey everyone,
I am curious if this strategy may help my shopping campaign be more effective.
I am working with a $200/day budget, manual enhanced CPC campaign. My bids range from 3-5$ per click.
Currently I am running into an issue where google seems to be showing me very high during some parts of the day, and low or not at all during other parts of the day. My budget is not being completely used up but is getting close, it seems to be doing this as an attempt to keep me within my budget while still showing my ads around the clock.
However I feel as if this is causing me a loss in valuable clicks and possible conversions as it may be lowering my ranking during key parts of the day. Based on previous conversion data it seems most conversions come through from the hours of 7 am to 4pm.
If I were to set an ad schedule between these hours, will Google show my ads more aggressively during this time frame in an attempt to use up my daily budget during the hours I’ve allocated? Rather than spacing them out periodically throughout the day?
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1 Reply
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You can either set an ad schedule (and force Google to only show on those times) or bid adjust against specific times of day (force Google to bid up or down at specific times).
I would caution that unless you have a pretty large timeline and a good amount of data on conversion activity, ad schedules can be tricky for non-B2B accounts. You tend to cut off a good amount of valuable searches by limiting spend that way.
If you are B2B, ad schedules make total sense and are very standard ‘implement at launch’ tactics.
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I would look through your Analytics data and identify the top-converting hours and days. From there, you can set up ad scheduling in 4 or 6-hour blocks in your campaigns to start segmenting data even further. If you want to copy your ad scheduling into all campaigns, remember you can do this through Editor and save a ton of manual labor.
When/if you make the switch Maximize Conversions smart bidding, ad scheduling should be accounted for to some degree. But until then, just gather data and use bid modifiers for times you want to be serving, and times you do not.
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Ad scheduling doesn’t take into account time zones. When you use manual bidding your ads are going to appear when Google can best monetize your ads throughout the day but it will still be capped by your manual bids. Since you are likely in an auction with competitors using smart bidding you’re probably losing out during times when the automated bidding of competitors is squeezing you out of the auction.
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