Google By Day, Google By Night

Employing ad scheduling and changing the timing rules of your Google campaigns can improve PPC (Pay Per Click) performance dramatically. One example of this is only showing sponsored link ads when you know there will be someone in the office to man the phone and handle enquiries. Another example would be pausing the account during weekends when there is too much casual, browser traffic and too few conversions. Or you can employ a strategy I devised in April 2006 called the 'Weekday Evening Strategy.' This simply means running your Google campaign from around 6 pm to 11pm/midnight every weekday.

This has a number of benefits....

1) No wasted clicks from people at work who are casually searching for your product/service while the boss isn't looking. Unlike some guy who is sitting at his home PC in his dressing gown and boxer shorts, these people are unlikely to have sufficient free time to make a serious, well thought-out enquiry. Also, you wouldn’t expect someone to make a phone enquiry during business hours on their employer’s dime. Moreover, they are unlikely to enter their credit card details and make an online purchase on work computer. The user may have security concerns or this may be explicitly against company policy, even during lunch hours.

2) Cost per clicks (CPCs) are cheaper. By 6 pm the daily budget of your rivals 24/7, “100% of the week” PPC campaigns is used up or, at the very least, it is depleted and dwindling down. Accordingly, ad appearance will slow down and their ads will appear less and less – for instance, their ads may show for 1 in 3 or 1 in 4 searches. So while your rivals have had their budgets exhausted from the hours of 9am - 5pm, you can enter into the fray at 6 pm with a fresh, untouched daily budget. This will make it much cheaper for you to rise above your competitors in the ad rankings and get into the coveted top 3 positions.