CTR & time of day

[Ryan Ward]

I have noticed that my CTR is 2 or 3 times higher from about 4 in the afternoon vs before that. I am considering only running my ads during those times during the week and all day on the weekends. I believe I will still reach my daily budget by doing this, but, I am not sure. Has anyone played around with this enough to return any guidelines or thoughts on this?

[RonnieG]

Part of the reason you are seeing this is that some PPC advertisers have spent their limited budgets by that time of day, so their ads stop showing. When that happens, your ads start to get better positions, and therefore better CTR. As soon as Google offered the capability to schedule campaign run times, I used it to start all my ads at about noon local time M-F, and 8 AM weekends and holidays, thru midnight. That schedule spent most or all of my daily budget each day, with a much lower cost per registration than I had before. But when I bumped my daily budget by 30% recently, I had to move my start time to 10 AM each day to spend it all. CPC increased slightly, and average ad positions suffered a bit, because I didn't change my bids. Average CTR only went down a little.