When hoping to optimize a Google Ads account we all face the same question, “what next?”. There are unlimited different tests and ways you can go about optimizing your account to drive better performance of your desired KPIs.
One of the changes I immediately test is adjusting ad schedules within Google Ads. First, obviously, you want to check and see how different your peak times are within your account.
Deciding Which Bid Modifications Are Needed
For one brand, our goal was to drive more revenue to specific campaigns that have been underperforming over the past few months. I pulled revenue data for each hour over the past 3 months and found significant peaks and valleys of performance during this time.
After going through the data and speaking with the client we got approval to test this during the following times.
- 2AM – 5AM
- +50%
- 8AM – 9AM
- -20%
- 6PM – 9PM
- -10%
- 10PM – 12AM
- +10%
- Saturday – Sunday
- -100%
We are keeping the other times running with no extra bid modifications attached due to them being our sort of median time frames.
Setting Up Your Bid Modifications
Step 1
Choose you campaign you are implementing the bid adjustments to then click on the ad schedule tab on the left. If there are no bid adjustments set up it should look like the image below.
Step 2
Once you have planned your time frames you click the “edit ad schedule” button and fill out the appropriate times. Keep in mind that Google recently updated the settings; you can only have a maximum of 6 time periods in one day. Before saving your new ad schedule, it should look like the image below. Hit save.
Step 3
Once you have this saved, create your reporting plan for your test. How I like to measure this test is by looking at the results week over week and report on the desired metrics. After 1-2 months, we compile the results and decide if the time of day bid strategy is worth continuing.
For this report below, our goal is to become more effective with our spend, so we focused on revenue, cost, and ROAS as our KPI’s during this test. Here, we are looking at the past four weeks over the four weeks prior to the test. What we found was one campaign performed extremely well with the time of day bidding in every single metric. There is one caveat to consider; this test ran during holidays. Due to that, we decided to continue the test for another month before concluding and making a final decision.
I have found that time of day bid modifiers are a great place to start testing within a Google Ads account and they can improve overall account performance dramatically. This is obviously just one possible test. You should consider the brand/business you’re managing and how large of a factor time of day is when it comes to the KPIs you have.
