Custom Ad Scheduling for Seasonal PPC success

Right time, right message

Many people believe that running their AdWords campaign 24/7 is the best or at least the only option. This is not only incorrect, it’s uneconomical and in most cases, unsustainable.

First things first; tracking. In order to make informed decisions, we must analyse data from your AdWords account.  Identify productive and profitable days, hours, services and products. To do this, we need tracking. Working without tracking is the same as driving at night without the lights on… not good!

With the information from your tracking, we’ll be able to see what’s working, what’s not, where people are spending their time, where they’re not spending any time, what’s triggering your ads and the all-important – when your ads are at their most profitable.

In essence, tracking allows us to understand our audience. We can see the trends in their activity, thus giving us the tools we need to customise our campaign to cater to their schedules, needs and wants.

From here we then can make the decision to consolidate your budget and reinvest it into the hours and days that yield the best results….sounds easy and straight forward, right?!

Please remember, even if your business is only open from Monday to Friday, 9 am – 5:30 pm, we need to always remain focused on the fact that your target audience do not operate on this schedule.

For example, let’s say you run a day care centre and it’s open Monday to Friday 6 am to 7 pm. Your current campaign is running 24 hours a day, 7 days per week, and is continuously ‘limited by budget’. Or on the flip side, let’s say your current campaign is running from Monday to Friday, from 6 am to 7 pm in line with your hours of operation.

Firstly, take a look at who your target audience is. They’re parents with multiple children, they’re new parents, single parents, nanny’s, under the age of 30, over the age of thirty; the list goes on. It is important to have this established though, you can start by identifying your target audience by looking at your current clientele.

Tracking will highlight when these people are most active online. Let’s say for arguments sake that your target audience are most active before and after work, during lunch breaks and between 9 pm and 10:30 pm (when the kids are in bed and they’ve had 10 minutes to think).

This is where custom scheduling is most profitable for you, the business owner.  You can adjust your campaign to be triggered and show to your target audience, at the right place and time, every time.

You can apply this to any seasonal business within reason. If you were operational 6 out of 12 months a year, you would apply the same methodology as mentioned above; however you would start your lead up campaign between 4 – 12 weeks before your season starts.

Be strategic, and be realistic, begin with the end in mind, and understand your target audience and their behaviour. Don’t be scared to change up your strategy to cater to your audience. It really is about being in the right place at the right time and custom scheduling allows you to do just that.

Just imagine how much time and money this will save you. You can even schedule ads at certain times of the day based on the types of devices people are using. Using the same example, you could target and schedule ads for morning and afternoon commutes for people using mobile devices. Your target audience is also more likely to take notice of you if your ads are there to serve them with useful information, rather than appearing as ad spam.

Don’t delay and speak to the AdWords experts at SponsoredLinX today on 1300 859 600, and learn to schedule your AdWords campaigns for maximum effect!

---