Monday 2 April 2012

How advert scheduling can benefit your business





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.