Adwords ad scheduling

[Lydia]

I'm curious if anyone uses ad scheduling in their campaigns. I'm starting to think it may be helpful to me, and here's why:

I have a small budget for my adwords campaign (a whopping $10/day) and my CTR's are pretty high, anywhere from 15% down to around 2.5%. My budget usually kicks out by lunchtime. Through this time of day my traffic is almost exclusively PPC.

Then the organics start hitting the site around 3-4 pm and continue strong to around 8-9pm. I've noticed that the while the PPC visitors usually linger around 2.5 pages per visit, the organics can stay for 5-10 pages easy.

Now, the question is, did the visitors 'arriving the natural way' spend more time because the quality of the result matched their search (from my logs, I'd say maybe yes half the time) or did they spend more time due to the time of day? It's near quitting time, or maybe waiting for the spouse to come home... looking on the internet after dinner...that kind of thing.

If my theory about the time of day is true, then maybe it makes sense to schedule the PPC campaigns to crank up around 4pm - when a visitor is more likely to stay awhile.

Does anyone else's experience confirm or refute this?

[RonnieG]

Even with a fairly substantial PPC budget, my ads are scheduled to start running about 2 PM local time. This is 4 PM on the east coast, and a lot of my leads are potential relos. But here is why I do it, and I think you can relate to this: By mid-afternoon, and certainly by about 7 PM, a lot of AdWords RE advertisers daily budgets have been spent. This means less competition for me later in the day, and the competition I do have is a) bidding less than I am, or b) is a national advertiser and my ads will better meet the searcher's needs because it is usually the few local ads still running later in the day.

[Lydia]

Ronnie, once again thanks for your insight. The first thing I did after reading your post was make a few targeted searches to look for my competitors ads. There aren't any...their budget is apparently spent for the day. In fact there was one "(small) city state real estate" keyword search that had NO ads showing. Wow. The next thing I did was schedule my local and national campaigns to start later. Thanks!

[RonnieG]

Besides less competition, you should also see lower average CPC, and better average positions for the impressions and clicks you do get, which should translate to more clicks for the budget you do have.

Not seeing a competitor's ad does not necessarily mean their budget is spend for the day. Google may simply be spreading out their remaining impressions. Unless you set your campaign settings to display your ads a quickly as possible, Google will generally try to spread your impressions and clicks evenly over whatever schedule you may set, which is generally a good thing. They will do this for other advertisers as well. So, you may see no ad for a particular keyword phrase one time, and 30 minutes later, you may see your ad or one of a competitor for the same phrase.

[RonnieG]

Over the winter, I had one major campaign that was NOT scheduled, because there was not enough activity later in the day to spend its daily budget during the winter season. Since we are in peak buyer season here now, with lots more search activity, and much better weather to be out looking at homes in, I put it back on a PM only schedule a couple of weeks ago.

Average CPC for the campaign went down 25%. Average daily click counts went up by 35%, more than the CPC decrease. I haven't figured out yet why the click count increase was that much more than the CPC decrease. Daily average registered lead counts are up by 40%, possibly because more of these leads are probably searching and registering from home instead of from work, so they have more time to stay on the site.

[Eric Blackwell]

Ron;

Interesting that I see more leads in the evening hours. For those who don't know, my site is pretty much ALL SEO as opposed to PPC (This is in addition to the solid point about CPC and spent budgets.)

Here's my hypothesis. People are together at home looking at houses after work and after the kids go to bed. When they are at work, (read: during the day), they are browsing at best, but don't have the time / inclination while looking ALONE to go deeper. When Mom and Dad are looking TOGETHER at a home, the quality of the lead goes up.

I did an interesting study of the leads from our site and it bore that out. We closed a higher percentage of evening and nighttime leads vs our closing rate of daytime leads....wierd, but true! (Not saying this is true in every case--just in mine...)

Either way...doing some PM PPCing would seem to be the way to go...

Best;

Eric

[RonnieG]

Eric,

My thoughts exactly. The bottom line for PPC: If you only have a very small budget, on weekdays, spend it in the late afternoon / evening time frame by setting your campaign schedules accordingly. If your daily spend is not consistently all gone by midnight, add an hour at a time to the campaign's scheduled start times. Weekends can start earlier, but even then, I have mine set for no earlier than 10 AM starts.

[Eric Blackwell]

Yep.

If you could time a postcard mailing to arrive in front of your potential customer when they STATISTICALLY more likely to be in a more receptive frame of mind, you'd jump at the chance. This is, at its core, no different IMO.

Eric

[drewnick]

Great discussion - I'm putting these tactics to work now and am hoping for the best.

[Eric Blackwell]

Drew;

Keep us posted on the results. Looking forward to your feedback.

Best;

Eric