Waseem Saddique emphasises the importance of advert
scheduling and the opportunities it provides.
What is advert scheduling?
Advert scheduling is a concept that exists within the
Google interface, designed to allow business users who are using the search
engine as a means of advertising, to set the schedule of their advertising
campaign and choose the hours and days of the week that they wish adverts to
run.
When creating an advertising campaign on Google, the
scheduling of an advert can be set by going to the ‘Edit Campaign Settings’
page and adjusting the scheduling settings to best suit the requirements of
your business.
Waseem Saddique comments: “if you’re just about to launch
an advertising campaign, then the obvious scheduling settings should be
adjusted so that it runs every hour of the day, 7 days a week. The reason for
applying these settings is because you would not have yet established what
hours/days provide your campaign with the most conversions.”
Whilst it’s good to start out going full throttle with an
advertising campaign, over a period of time you will have attained enough data
to determine what hours and days are the most effective at delivering results.
Furthermore, it’s not always financially viable to continue running an
advertising campaign non-stop, so in the long-run you will save money and you
will also be able to make your advertising campaign more target specific to
your responsive audience.
Once you have enough data in place concerning the
effectiveness of your advertising, you can break it down into segments to show
the specific hours and days when your advertising campaign provokes the best
response. For instance, you might find that during peak internet traffic times
(usually between 12noon-3pm), your advertising position appears to be dropping
and clickthrough rates have fallen. In this situation you could raise the bid
percentage in order to maintain a high ranking position and establish steady
clickthrough figures.
Equally, you may discover that certain hours see your
advert feature much higher in the search rankings. One possible scenario is
that towards the end of a working day, when the marketplace is less active, you
can look to reduce your bids, saving you money on pay per click.
Here is a representation of what an advert schedule would
look like in your AdWords account:
How will this benefit your business?
Waseem Saddique states: “well, for instance, by
establishing that your conversion rates for your business may well be lower on
weekends, you can save money by reducing the percentage multiplier of your bids
and then increase them for when conversions are actually being achieved.”
You can also set up a schedule that operates only within
your trading hours, so you’re not running up costs or failing to respond to
clients who clickthrough to find your business is not open for business, which
could leave them frustrated and unlikely to return.
Yet, if you’re a business that has a ‘request call back
feature,’ even outside of 9-5 hours, it may be viable for you to schedule your
adverts to continue running as you may generate business from those who do
their ‘research’ during the evenings and call up the following day.
Remember, the internet is a 24/7 shop window and you
don’t want to leave everything wide open for your rivals to take advantage of.
Perhaps most importantly, advert scheduling practically
forces you to monitor and evaluate the effectiveness of your advertising
campaign on a regular basis. It may be that no apparent trends appear when
carrying out your campaign, in which case you can keep your scheduling 100%
consistent at all times.
Another scenario may see fluctuations in the effectiveness
of your campaign during certain hours or on certain days. This is always worth
monitoring in order to ensure that you are making the best of the budget that
you have and that your advertising campaign is proving to be cost
effective.
