I would like to target a certain time period of the day, say from evening to midnight. What's the best way to go about doing it? I had the idea of setting a very high budget and manually pausing the campaign when the cost exceeds my real budget. However, I read in another forum that "tampering" with the budget may get oneself banned. Is my idea considered "tampering" with the budget? What other ways can I target a certain timeframe, and make Adwords spend as much of my real budget as possible only during that timeframe?
as AdWords do not supports this feature I can see 3 options: 1 - Pause/resume your self everyday your campaigns - or - 2 - Learn and use AdWords API to do the job for you - or - 3 - Give up from this idea and left the campaign run during the entire day What kind of product are you running? Why do want it running just part of the day? No, they will not kick you - Could you point this post? You're not doing something that will give you any advantage. you can set $10000 a day and pause after $20 and resume another day - is this what you mean? will not be banned for that but what you want with that? this do not makes sense. this value $10000 or $20 is the threshold value, when reached your campaign will run slow/pause automatically- why you want to set a high value and pause it manually? Why do you think that your campaign is so especial that need this pause/resume thing? just run it the same model as anyone here is running - probably you have some wrong concept in mind - explain better your problem.
It all boils down to targeting a certain time period. Why such targeting? Well, the statistics I collected tell me that certain time periods are simply not profitable. As for setting a high daily budget, I need to do this so that Google will send more impressions for my targeted time period. I want my real budget to be spent only during my targeted time period (e.g. only a few hours per day).
Right now all you can do is track coversions and ROI by time and adjust manually. The vision I have for the PPC software I'm building is the ability to track conversion by time, so you could look at a graph and determine when the most covnersions come in and when you are most profitable. You woul dbe able to adjust bids based on that info. Beta roll out (hopefully in a month or so, fingers crossed) won't have push into providers, but in the future I envision being able to set temporal bidding in my app and having it adjust bids automatically.... pie in the sky now, but hey, there it is...
I've heard rumors that dayparting via AdWords isn't too far off. That's the primary reason I've held off on using a 3rd part solution to accomplish it.
I imagine that is very easy to implement it nowadays a simple campaign pause/resume scheduler via api: just 1 command to stop, other to resume and a scheduler using your own webserver crontab.
I see the same in my markets - time of day does not seem to have an impact. I've been testing that theory with AdCenter.
It may be that you are not necessarily be time sensitive but region sensitive. I separated out the US and Europe from India and run separate campaigns for each as my conversion from India is good as a percentage they don't pay as well. Targeting by country might be a better approach and you can do it now in the Adwords admin system.