Phone numbers, MFA's & Dayparting

What impact will it have on AdSense publishers?

[farmboy]

Over on the AdWords forum, there is a thread about a new AdWords feature that enables advertisers to have their ads turned on and off at different times of the day.

Excerpt:

How businesses are expected to use the feature:

Small Businesses: Set their ads to run during normal business hours. This will ensure that their phone doesn't ring at hours when they aren't in the office.

I suppose there are a number of businesses that run ads and want people to visit their website then do business by phone as opposed to ordering via their website. But when I first read this, I recalled the recent thread here about phone numbers in ads. I wonder if this will result in more of those ads that have phone numbers?

Also, I wonder what, if anything, this will mean for MFA ads & AdSense publishers. Will weekends see a lot more MFA's? Will it be harder to spot MFA's by visiting your pages?

FarmBoy

[jomaxx]

I think the overall effect over the course of a week will be more or less a wash. Perhaps a more complex picture than we've seen in the past, but not that big a difference, especially since advertisers already had crude tools with which to accomplish this anyway.

With improvements to customer service like this, all you can do is have faith that the improved control will result in an improved ROI, resulting in increased budgets and higher bids at peak hours. In other words, that a better product will be at least as profitable in the long run. In other words (and to really dumb it down), a good thing is better than a bad thing.

[farmboy]

...resulting in increased budgets and higher bids at peak hours

Hmmm. Makes me consider experimenting with only showing AdSense at peak hours so as to only capture the higher bids.

FarmBoy

[Rodney]

I get most of my traffic during regular business hours, so I hope that all advertisers daypart their ads to show during business hours :)

[toomer]

Also, I wonder what, if anything, this will mean for MFA ads & AdSense publishers. Will weekends see a lot more MFA's?

I've already noticed quite a difference in the ads I get during the week, versus the ads I get on the weekend.

My 'smartphone' site was horribly overrun with ringtone ads all day yesterday. Crappy CPC's. Today? It's all PDA's and cellular serivce plans. Much better (and more normal) CPCs now. I didn't do anything to the site between now and then. So to some extent, I think this was already happening - and think it is a good idea to provide dayparting support for AdWords publishers.

Interesting idea, the thought of only displaying AdSense ads during US business hours ... might help combat the MFA blackhole that 21 mentioned in his other thread. Maybe a good idea would be AdSense during prime advertising hours (8am ET to 8pm PT?) and then something else like YPN! or another ad network during all other times?

I think you might be on to something here ....

[jomaxx]

It would be worthwhile to certain advertisers to use this. I can't imagine it would be profitable for any publisher to show ads only during business hours.

Even if it did increase your CPC or your smart pricing score, the question is does it do so disproportionately? Will you earn more money running ads 25% or 33% of the time vs. 100% of the time? This seems doubtful to me.