Does scheduling of ads affect Google Adwords rankings

[Bastien]

Hi,

We recently decided to schedule our ads so that they appear, for each country, between 5:00 am and midnight local time and only on week days.

In this aim, we used the Google Scheduling tools and de-activated the campaign for nights and week-ends. This was last week.

Since we did that scheduling, though, it looks like our best keywords are not ranking as high as they used to. One of our main keywords for the french market, for example, dropped from position 1 (where it stood since weeks) to position 6.

The question is : Is the scheduling of ads so that hey appear at some times only likely to penalize us in terms of relevance or in any other ways? Or shall we look for explanation elsewhere?

Thank for your help.

Bastien

[bateman_ap]

One thing I could think is that when your ads are paused some of your competitors are building up a better clickthrough rate and quality score and therefore ranking above you for the remainder of the day?

[nakita_dog]

Is the United States targeted under this campaign? If so, how are you accounting for the multiple time zones within the US? Did you setup new campaigns to deal with this? If so, those new campaigns may need some more time to work and prove themselves.

[Bastien]

Hi,

Bateman,

this sounds like a very likely possibility to me, I'll try to dig this way for more informations. Thanks

Nakita,

We have campaign in the United States, indeed, but the part I take care of is mainly focused to Europe and extends to Africa and Middle East and Western part of Asia. We have indeed, some areas with different time zones and tried to sort the ad-scheduling a bit differently in these (ex: Africa is focused on South Africa with a slightly extended time both way to adapt to time from Senegal to Ethiopia).

However, the quoted example here is France where we obviously have an unique time zone and dropping results for some of our main keywords. Like you said, let's wait and see if anything happens eitherway...

Thanks for your answers

[briggidere]

It looks like you may be running your ads when the competition are all running their ads too. If you are only running during peak time, this is more than likely what your competitors are doing as well.

Think about it. If they are all doing the same as you, it may be better to run them from midnight to 5am when there is less competition for the positions as your competitors have paused their ads.

The only thing to do is test different times and measure the results.

Bateman, if you ad is not showing you are not affecting your CTR. It's based on historical CTR, not on the day when the ad goes live. The only reason they may be able to get a better CTR is that if some ads aren't showing there could be less competition for the spots letting their ads appear higher until the other ads become active. It's possible.