ad scheduling

[doctor gerlis]

We have a number of campaigns which have been running for some time and I am generally pleased with the ROI. However, competition is pushing up costs, and google search seems be be in its usual spring high activity mode.

I am convinced that ads run during the working day when we are open for bookings are more valuable than ads run overnight and weekends. My belief is that I want the client to see, click and book in one action. We do not sell product online so can only make sales when we are open. Of course, having ads run at other times must be of some value, but given a zero-sum-game (ie fixed budget), am I right to spend more in the daytime and less in the evenings, night and weekends? Can someone please tell me if the huge volume of clicks on a Sunday is more likely to be casual browsing or of real sales potential?

[netmeg]

It depends on your niche. I notice your nick includes 'doctor' - if you are in the health care business, it may be that you get a lot of browsing traffic at night and on the weekends. I have a client who is in health care, and his clinics are mainly open during normal weekday hours, but we typically have big spikes of traffic on nights and on weekends - the nature of their business is rather sensitive, and I believe that people who are looking for this particular procedure probably would rather search on their own time from their own computer, rather than at work.

[Rehan]

Yes, it very much depends on your niche. The best thing you can do is to spend some time testing to gather stats on the conversions and then optimize your campaigns based on the information that testing gives you.

When you are testing, you should probably set your campaign's delivery method to "Show ads evenly over time" during the testing phase so that you get data across the whole time period.

[netmeg]

Do you have more than one phone line?

You might think about running an alternate landing page "off hours" with a different phone number on it - then when you're back open during the week, keep tabs on how many people come in via that line as opposed to the regular phone number. It won't be exact, but it might give you more information than you have now.

[doctor gerlis]

Thanks- this has been helpful and you are right about the type of business we are in. I still would like some more feedback from others. The genuine potential customer may be browsing in the evenings, but it is my prejudice, based upon observation of clicking and booking, that these few patients are swamped by casual browsing and people who want information but who will never be customers. Also, I don't think the Sunday clicks are really of great value, but people are bored and sitting by their pc. Tell me I am wrong!

[Rehan]

Personally, I find that Sunday conversions are pretty decent for retail products. I figure people are out shopping and browsing at their local malls during the weekend, and when they come home they get on the computer to do further research on the product and often find a better value than they saw in the store. (Monday is also a good day for conversions because there are plenty of people that only go online at work.)

But as the saying goes, "your mileage may vary".

[doctor gerlis]

Rehan, you confirm my prejudice that many people use work computers mainly, and are not afraid to search for potentially embarrassing items. Elsewhere on this forum someone talks about 3 surges in search activity, 11 am, 3 pm and 8 pm; My belief is that the first 2 are more valuable.

[deep_alley]

Another thing you can test out is to see how many return visitors you might have and if its the returning visitors that are buying.

I noticed that in a retail campaign of ours. 3 out of 5 people would most of the time land up on our website but buy either later that day or within the week. My assumption is that they were browsing other websites to check products and price.

Maybe you can get some analytics (google analytics is free and can be integrated with your adwords account) and see if it help understand traffic a little more.