Now, to give you an example of what I’m talking about is when you’re running your campaigns, you want to make sure they’re running at the right time of day when people are going to be looking for what you have to offer. Not only the time of day, but the time of year as well.
Wasps In Snow – You Don’t See That Often
So, a good example would be if you’re a pest control company and you’re running your ads in the middle of December for wasp and hornet removal in Minnesota. Obviously, we don’t have a lot of problems with wasps and hornets when it’s 20 below zero. If you are running campaigns in December for wasps and hornets, there’s going to be some clicks, but it’s going to be fewer clicks and you’re going to be allocating some of your budget towards that group.
Most of the clicks are probably going to be bogus as not very many of them are going to lead towards conversions. You’re throwing money out the window.
With that said, on the other end of the spectrum, we have an attorney client who is a divorce attorney. Now, typically for most service businesses, we will run ads between 7:00a.m. and around 9 or 10:00 p.m. The reason we do that is sometimes people wake up before they go to work and they’ll do searches. During the day while they’re at work, they may do searches, and then at night when they get home after they remember, “Okay, I need a plumber,” or whatever it might be, they might still do searches.
But typically, during the late-night hours and early morning hours like up until about 7:00 a.m., we find that a lot of those clicks don’t lead to conversions. Every now and again one will, but not enough for us to justify keeping those ads running and we don’t want to use all our budget by 7:00 a.m. on clicks that just aren’t going to convert.
Timing is Everything in PPC
And on the other end of that, you’ve got other clients where it works really, well to keep your ads running.
We have an attorney that works with us who’s a divorce attorney. Now, we weren’t getting a lot of traction with this campaign. We were getting some, but I said, “You know what? I want to run an experiment.”
Divorce attorneys are dealing with people who are obviously going through a bad situation in their life, but when are they most likely to do searches to find an attorney?
Well, maybe during the day they might not do a bunch of those searches because they might be at work as divorce is a very sensitive (and private) issue. They might not want to sit down and type it into their computer at work in case somebody walks by, starts asking questions.
We started figuring, “Well, maybe they would do it later at night after the kids have gone to bed.” We started really spit balling with this and thought that maybe they’ve had a significant fight with their partner, or maybe they’ve had too much to drink and they’re starting to look late at night.
When Are People Most Likely to Search
So, we turned the ads on to run throughout the night and the campaign exploded (in a good way). We started seeing conversions right away.
So that’s what I mean by timing is everything. We figured out that’s when they started getting most of their good conversions. Now, it didn’t justify turning the ads during the day off, but we did decide to leave it running throughout the night, and it’s been extremely profitable for the client.
The way to do adjust your time is, when you’re in your Adwords campaign settings, click on the campaign that you want to adjust and then click on “settings”.
If you scroll down, you will see advanced setting > schedule start/end date > add scheduling.
Now, you will only see this if you go up here in the campaign type, if “all features” is checked. If all features are not checked, you will not see this area. So, make sure that’s checked and you can go down and you can schedule it.
My suggestion would be to think about the timing. Pest control companies don’t get a lot of clicks late at night. If they do, they’re usually a bunch of crap. You might not want to run those ads after nine or 10:00, up until probably about six or seven a.m. And you can test with that, but you get where I’m going with this.
So, go down and make sure your timing is correct, because with PPC advertising, timing is everything. Make sure your ads are scheduled to run at the right time of, not only the day, but of the year as well.
All right, see you next time.