Time of day = reality

https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=33227&hl=en_US

The bidding is very similar to MSN's demographics "base +" bidding, only its a multiplier instead of a straight increment allowing you to lower the bid during certain time periods.

Here's an example: If your default bid for a campaign is $1.00 CPC, and your custom bid multiplier entry for Tuesdays is 1.2, your CPC bid for Tuesdays only would be $1.00 * 1.2 = $1.20. By contrast, a bid multiplier entry of 0.5 would lead to a $0.50 bid during that time period. The bid multiplier may be as little as 0.1 and as much as 10.0.

It took them long enough, got to love a little competition. Their implementation is nice; we used to turn our ads off on the weekend to avoid unwanted traffic and then resume them first thing Monday morning. This is exactly what we need, although I would still like to eliminate show ads based on various questionable IP addresses. Let's see which provider gives us that first!

Nice Feature! It does seem to be a total rip off of MSN. Goog is good at ripping off and improving.

Is this accessible in the API?

Time of day = reality Glad to see this has been noticed. :) It has to be one of the most requested features in my memory, so I'm really jazzed that it has been implemented.

I'll pass your comments on (whether they are negative or positive) later this evening - and next week as well. So I hope some of you will weigh in on how ad scheduling is working for you once you've had a chance to get acquainted with it.

Thanks!

AWR

In regards to the time zones we previously established, and the now customizable timing of day parting I have to ask and confirm-

All ad scheduling is based off local times for your adwords account(s) correct?
I am on the west coast so if I wanted to make sure that everyone on the east coast could see my ads at 7am EST, it would also mean that at 4am PST my ads would be showing here. OR do the ads display local time no matter where the search is occuring?

What are ways to make this better for me as noted that specific blocks of time are more beneficial to advertise at and it might not be desirable to have ads running PST so early, or EST so late.

What are ways to make this better for me as noted that specific blocks of time are more beneficial to advertise at and it might not be desirable to have ads running PST so early, or EST so late.

I'll venture a guess and say your campaign runs in "real time" with nothing going on behind the scenes. If you want your ads live for 7PM EST, then when its 7PM EST your campaign needs to be running.

And your question--to "play down" your campaigns just use the multiplier with a .1 so your bids are lowered to a non-competitive value.

Yay!

Now my Ad's won't show up when people are looking for smutty material handling equipment at 3 in the morning! FINALLY!

NiV23

Keep in mind, when to shut your ads on/off is not cut and dry. For Example, People may be searching for your products during the week and clicking on your ads, then making their purchases on the weekend. Looking at these stats, it would show to shut your ads off during the week because many analysitcs programs will show the actual sale date not when the ad was initially clicked.

Its about time they added a scheduler! :)

Does anyone have an idea when this will be available in the UK?

Anyone had good feedback from the system in the US yet?

Does anyone have an idea when this will be available in the UK?You should have it now, scrubs. :) Check in the "Advanced Options" section of the "Edit Campaign Settings" page for any of your campaigns.

Here's the Inside AdWords blog post from a few days back:

Introducing ad scheduling:
http://adwords.blogspot.com/2006/06/introducing-ad-scheduling.html

More info from the AdWords Help Center:

How do I set up ad scheduling for an AdWords campaign?
http://adwords.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=33407

AWR

Great, Thanks AdWordsRep. Just been scheduling some accounts and quite impressed with the layout and options, pretty straight forward. :)

...quite impressed with the layout and options, pretty straight forward. Glad it's looking as if it'll be useful, scrubs.

By the way, I may have been unclear in my previous post, and inadvertently left the impression that ad scheduling was available only in the US and UK. In actual fact, it has launched globally - and should be available to all advertisers wherever they may be. :)

AWR

I'm glad to see day parting/ad scheduling included in my native Google Adwords account. But my question is this: How would one know what times of day to lower or raise bids unless we can see actual sales conversion data for various times of the day? Whatever that curve is (based on a nice solid month of data or so) I would like to match in Ad Scheduling. But I don't see anything under Reports in Analytics that will show me sales conversion data based on times of the day. Which leaves me to believe that anyone using Ad Scheduling is essentially guessing.

Any advice on this?

Brad Switzer
Sites & Sounds
http://www.sitesandsounds.com

How would one know what times of day to lower or raise bids unless we can see actual sales conversion data for various times of the day?

My company doesn't sell direct, all we are trying to obtain is leads from our AdWords campaign which our sent to a email address via a form script. So all I did was went back into our email 6 months and compiled a set of data as to when a lead came in, time and day of the week.

Then I graphed everything and figured out the best times in which our Ad's should be running at all and when we should be bidding high/low. Roughly speaking, I reduced our ability to generate leads about 9% while saving 23% of our campaign budget by simply cutting out Saturday and Sunday. Did a lot more tweaking than that, but going to have to wait a couple months until I have some hard data until I know the exact effects but preliminary findings show a drop in cost/conversion from $22 to $13 although its really too early to say that trend will continue.

I'm sure there's a much easier way to figure out when to run your Ad's and how high/low to bid at certain times, but that's what I did.

Anyways, so far so good with Schedualing - yay!

NiV23