There are many tools that AdWords provides to advertisers in order to try and optimize their accounts and budgets. How best can their money be spent?
One of the tools that I find to be extremely helpful in some accounts to eliminate wasted spend is using time of day bid adjustments. This can be useful in accounts when you have specific times during the day, such as office hours, you are wanting to advertise during or have campaigns being restricted by budget.
The first thing I do when implementing time of day campaign adjustments is download a “Time of Day” report via AdWords into an Excel document. Normally, I start by going back to the past 3 months worth of data. This can vary depending on how much traffic you see and can take more or less time to get enough data.After bringing the data into Excel, I use a Pivot table to gather the data.
After bringing the data into Excel, I use a Pivot table to gather the data for each hour of the day. From that point on you can use something like the conditional formatting in Excel to add a color scale to the numbers. You will end up with something that looks like the image below:
You can then evaluate the data and decide what points you want to adjust bids up/down, or even prevent your ads from showing at all during certain periods of time (such as during non-office hours or at very high CPC periods).
Once you’ve evaluated the data, you can implement your Time of Day schedule.
Go into AdWords, then navigate to the account (or campaign level) Settings > Ad Schedule.
You then need to create an ad schedule and make sure to segment out the specific days and times you want to bid up or down (ex. Tuesdays 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. would need its own scheduled segment).
Finally, after doing this you are able to adjust the bids on each specific segment of time. In the below example, bids were adjusted down 15% during the selected times.
After that, you are finished! Now you just need to do further checking into the adjustments at a later time to see if any further changes are needed.I hope that next time you run into an account or campaign with wasted spend during odd hours or an extremely tight budget that this article will help you.
I hope that next time you run into an account or campaign with wasted spend during odd hours or an extremely tight budget that this article will help you maximize your ad exposure.
