Right on Schedule

How to take advantage of the new ad scheduling tools to help improve your ROI

When talking about their Tivo or another type of digital video recorder, people often say, “It’s changed my life.” That might serve as an indictment about Americans’ overindulgence with television, but at the heart of that sentiment is the powerful ability to control the timing of their TV experience, both by “time-shifting” their viewing and zipping through the commercials.

That type of time control is also at the heart of our new ad scheduling feature, which we introduced last month. Ad scheduling allows you to control the days or times in which users may see your ad, so it’s akin to the “dayparting” options long offered by traditional offline advertising. You also now have the ability to price clicks received at certain times differently than others, using bid adjustments.

To schedule or not to schedule
First you must decide whether using ad scheduling will help your business. The key thing to think about is when your business is open and closed, and when customers respond best to your advertising. When your business is closed, can you handle incoming leads? For example, can you take voicemails that you’ll respond to when you reopen?

If not, you may still find value in attracting interested customers simply to tell them more about your business (i.e., branding). In this situation, you may want to lower your bids for the “closed” hours, but still leave your campaigns active during that time.

Another consideration is that using ad scheduling may reduce your overall traffic if it is used as a filter (example: your ads are displayed nine hours per day vs. 24). To help guard against that result, you may want to use bid adjustments to increase traffic for your strongest times of day or days of week.

If you’ve made the decision to try ad scheduling, you can pick the times at which users may see your ads in two different ways:

Audience Time Zone targeting
The first ad scheduling option, Audience Time Zone, allows you to set a range of time for which all users are eligible to see your ads (subject to geo-targeting and other filters, of course). This time period will be consistent across all time zones. For example, if you set an Audience Time Zone target of 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., search users in the Pacific time zone could see your ads between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Pacific time, while users in the Eastern time zone could see your ads between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Eastern time.

Some of our largest competitors do not offer this capability, which could be useful to businesses that are open around the clock (like a fully automated website), or businesses that span multiple time zones. Conversely, if you’re using geo-targeting to only reach prospects in a small area (that is contained within a single time zone), there’s no need to target by audience time zone.

Account Time Zone targeting
The second option, Account Time Zone, allows you to set an absolute time period during which users may see your ads. So, if your account is based on the Pacific time zone and you set a 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. range, your ads could be seen between 8:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. Pacific time and between 11:00 a.m. and 8:00 p.m. Eastern time.

This option would be useful to businesses that have a set number of hours in the day during which new orders can be taken. Another way to use the Account Time Zone option is if you want to target a specific live event during the time it’s occurring, like the Super Bowl.

Even if you don’t think you have a need for ad scheduling based on the above scenarios, you may want to test it solely for increasing your return-on-ad-spend (ROAS). If you choose this strategy, be sure to use the conversion-tracking tools in your account and check your reports frequently. If you find that one time period performs better than others, think about using bid adjustments to try to win more of that traffic.

— Jeff Hecox and the Product Management Team