Obviously this answer depends upon the product or service you're trying to market, but I was just curious if anyone here regularly schedules their ads to run at certain times...like maybe only from 9 am to 11 pm. If memory serves, Google doesn't allow you to put in times you want to show your ad but one can always pause their campaign and then start up again. For instance, if you had a dating campaign...is there any reason to try to control when the ad will be shown? I'm doing one right now and it struck me that someone at work might not take the time to sign up during working hours since it's somewhat a private matter and most people work in an open cubicle. Maybe something like this is better shown at night? Does anyone do this?
I personally keep mine running all the time. Good thing too, because I seem to get more people viewing the site between 5pm and Midnight for some reason (at the beginning there was more of a majority at 11pm and 12midnight). One thing to remember though, I'm not sure if this works with pausing or not, but it will take some time. that is to say, if you pause it at 5pm, it might not actually pause until a few minutes later, and vice versa.
it means prices may vary according to the schedule where I want to be on google adwords? If so, it may be a hard decision…
I schedule all my ads to run around business hours. I use analytics to find the times that most people visit my website, then use that to approximate when the ads will run. It depends on your product. We sell commercial and residential solar electric systems, so business hours work well for that.
good info. actually I’d like to know if there is site where I can check prices according to schedules? I know business hours may work well for me too but I guess high prices may restrict my decisions (unfortunately)
If its "Pay per click" why would you want to not run all the time? Weather its 10 people you get from 1am to 3am its 10 people interested in your product. I would say let it run all the time unless you have a limited budget.
You can use time parsing in your campaign settings. Check the box next to the campaign, click on "edit setting." Scroll about 3/4 the way down and look for "Ad scheduling" the click on the link that says "turn on ad scheduling." You can select days, time and separate times on separate days. One nice feature is you can adjust bids during certain times. Such as, to increase your bids by 15% from 5pm to 7pm, etc. But to answer your question, yes I use ad scheduling a lot. If your tracking conversions, unfortunately it will only show on a day so you have to use 3rd party tracking to find times conversions took place. With that, you can then find the best times to run your campaign.
cost me per day? You pay per click, so one day you could get 1, or you could get 20 clicks. Also, I just got rid of a keyword that was costing me a lot because it wasnt too related to what I was doing. Anyhoo, I'd say I get a few clicks per day, each click costing around .35 cents (for my niche anyway).
Usually I make tests few days to see in which hours most of the traffic comes. In some cases I had really big surprises.
I run my ad after lunch around 2pm till around 10pm this is because (well in my opinion) the people visiting my site will be able to take the time to look at my site as they wont be too tired or too busy.
for me it is not that evident how to set a schedule for my company. In fact, I wonder how you run this tool once you’ve decided when. Could you explain more about ppc steps?