New ad scheduling from Google Ads (AdWords)

Google Ads (AdWords) launched their new ad-scheduling tool in June, enabling advertisers to develop ‘day-parting’ strategies, which can increase the targeting of core markets and provide improved cost-effectiveness. If you know that your target customers are likely to be less active – or more active – on different days, or times of the day, then this tool now offers greater flexibility to manage your PPC campaigns.

As we previously predicted, Google Ads (AdWords) have now introduced this advert scheduling tool in response to the range of services being offered by the new Microsoft adCenter PPC tool (which has also had its ‘soft’ launch in the UK during June, with a full launch due in August). Google Ads (AdWords) are calling their new feature ‘ad scheduling’ and, like Microsoft’s version, gives advertisers the ability to automatically adjust their bids, or pause and resume their campaigns based on times of day, or days of the week.

Google claim that this is consistent with their ongoing strategy of the past year, to deliver increased control and flexibility to advertisers. However, it’s no coincidence that Microsoft’s new adCenter has always listed day-parting as one of its key features and Yahoo! is also expected to offer day-parting when it releases its upgraded PPC management tool for Yahoo! Search Marketing in the autumn. Marvellous what a bit of competition can do!

Google’s new tool is a valuable new feature for businesses whose target market may show some temporally predictable or routine behaviour, so that advertisers may wish to only bid at times when their target customers are online, or may wish to raise their bids at those times. Campaigns can now be paused for selected hours of the day, or for complete days during the week, plus the advanced option allows bid levels to be increased or decreased by any level between 10% and 1000% within 15 minute segments of any day.

This may have the effect of raising bid prices at peak times, which may lead to particularly prudent advertisers avoiding peak periods if they do not rely on reaching customers at those times. It is certainly too early to tell what the long term impact of day-parting may be on the paid search landscape, but it’s likely that more options will be introduced soon to match Microsoft adCenter’s geo-demographic targeting capabilities.

If you know your ideal customer behaviour patterns or want to test day-parting on your Google Ads (AdWords) campaign, contact us for help or more information now.

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