eMarketing and Targeting By The Hour (AKA Dayparting)
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Written by Nancy Stevens
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Sunday, 14 May 2006 |
Pay per click marketing offers a variety of new features. One of the most advanced benefits available is that of targeting ads by the hour or time of day also called Dayparting. But how useful is this? While a great concept on the outside, it takes some creative thinking to come up with ways that it can be used to your advantage. Of course there are some situations where targeting your ads by the time of day is a no-brainer these include:- Your target audience is likely to be on the Internet at specific times
- You want to avoid audiences at certain times
- You want to create some type of association between the time of day and your product/brand
Here are some examples where hour targeting or dayparting could be useful:
- If you are selling a sleeping aid product, you may want to target the ads for very late night hours when people who can’t get sleep may be searching the Web.
- You operate a restaurant that offers take out food. You may want to advertise dinner specials for pick up in the late afternoon hours when people are leaving work and may be short on time. Obviously, in addition to targeting by the time of day, you would geo target this ad as well.
- Your business has a lot of excess inventory that you want to sell quickly but not necessarily sell to a liquidator. You could establish a daily fire sale at the same time everyday and advertise during these hours. This can help create a sense of urgency, and get customers to visit your web site on a daily basis and during off peak hours.
Hopefully these scenarios will spark some ideas where targeting by the hour may work for your business.
In addition to coming up with creative scenarios, you may want to do some old fashioned data analysis to see if targeting by the hour could be useful. Analyze your web logs for:
- Are your conversion rates higher at specific times of the day? If so, then you may want run a test campaign where you only advertise during those times. Why waste money running ads that don’t convert?
- Are there specific times of the day where your conversion rates are significantly higher for your organic search engine results versus search engine marketing? If so, you may not want to use pay per click during those hours.
- Are there times of day when your server hits near its maximum peak and may be subject to slower response times? If so, you may want to avoid advertising during these hours. You don’t want to pay for a customer to come to your Web site and then leave because your site is running slow.
Targeting by the hour (dayparting) is still relatively new in the PPC world, and it will take a while for success stories and benchmarks to develop. So for now, keep it in mind as you develop and evaluate your Internet marketing campaigns, however I wouldn’t run full speed ahead without running full ad tests to see if it has a positive impact on revenues.
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