Having the right strategy in place can mean the difference between a mediocre AdWords campaign and one that helps your business to take off. One factor that we include in our planning is timing- the times of day, and the days of the week that your ads are showing. It is important to consider who your target audience are, when they will most likely be browsing and buying, and how you can plan your ads in order to target them. Optimising this can help to increase ad impressions, improve click-through rates and drive conversions.
When are your target audience online?
When you look at search traffic volumes, patterns start to emerge very quickly to show when people are most often online. B2B companies will naturally receive more traffic to their sites during the working day, while B2C sites might see an increase in the evening, with spikes at times such as 5-6pm while people are commuting. There are also trends in the variation of devices used- customers might be using a desktop computer when they browse your website on their lunchbreaks, but then search again on their mobiles from the sofa in the evening. This predictable behaviour can have a significant impact on your ads in terms of when and how they are seen.
How micro-moments impact your campaigns
Google have taken this approach one step further with their research into Micro-moments, which they define as occurring
‘when people reflexively turn to a device—increasingly a smartphone—to act on a need to learn something, do something, discover something, watch something, or buy something. They are intent-rich moments when decisions are made and preferences shaped’.
When you start to consider the intentions and desires of your customers, you can tap into these moments of need and work out how you can be there at the right time with the right message.
How to target your key audience
Once you have worked out when are the best times of day for your ads to be shown, you can then target these within AdWords using custom schedules and bid adjustments. Custom schedules allow you to control the hours of the day that your ads appear, e.g. from 7am-7pm only. Bid adjustments allow you to further control the amount of budget you want to spend on each time of the day, for example you can set your ads to show all day but then add a bid adjustment of 30% more between 12pm-2pm, so that your ads are more likely to show for people searching on their lunchbreaks, and another bid adjustment of 10% from 5pm-10pm to capture those browsing online in the evenings.
If you are in a B2B industry then you might prefer to set certain ads to only show during your business hours, so that if you are driving customers to contact you through the use of call extensions then you can be sure that there will be a member of staff there to speak to them.
For more advice on how to strategise your AdWords campaigns,
get in touch with our team of experts here at AdPilot.
