The Emergence of Dayparting

By Gary Finn

Account Executive

There were some interesting debates at last month’s Search Engine Strategies Conference in London with regard to perfecting paid listings.

One of the most noteworthy was the issue of Dayparting which is likely to impact the PPC landscape within the next twelve months. For those unfamiliar with the concept, Dayparting refers to controlling when your ad appears on the engines: what specific time periods and day of the week .  

For example, it can be used to fine-tune the demographic targeting of your ads for your target audience. Let’s say you sell car insurance. You might discover that the best time to serve your ads is during 12pm-2pm during weekdays as this is when you get best ROI. Dayparting allows you to pinpoint exactly when to display the ads thereby enabling you to have more control over your budget and stay competitive .

Currently, Yahoo! offers dayparting but only on a selective basis. However, the potential major player here is the recently launched MSN adCenter. MSN adCenter’s killer app is its range of targeting options. Not only will an advertiser be able to target specific time periods but a wide range of behavioural targeting options such as age, gender and lifestyle. This should prove to be hugely successful with marketers and will necessitate the other PPC networks to follow suit.

Consequently, as of this month, Dayparting functionality was added to Google AdWords that enables AdWords account users to set ad scheduling.

Through this new AdWords tool, advertisers can adjust their bids automatically to pause and start up their accounts based on the time of day, or specific day of the week.

Many advertisers and agencies have been making the request for Dayparting for a while now. Dayparting, whether used on Google, Yahoo! and MSN, may enable advertisers to have greater control over their ad spending. Inevitably, this will be a great help to ad buyers, aiding in greater control of their campaign management.

However, it is important to remember that Dayparting is an advanced PPC strategy, and might not be for every advertiser. It is essential that you truly understand your site’s traffic first and crucial that you watch your site’s user habits over time before incorporating this into your PPC campaign.