Yahoo! has been making progress in updating their paid search platform. They have recently added some additional reporting functions that give you greater visibility into where you ads are appearing within their partner network. Today, we’ll discuss Yahoo!’s ad scheduling feature and how to best utilize it to enhance your PPC performance.
You may have noticed the relatively new column within your Yahoo! account titled, “Targeting.” Within this column you can adjust your demographic and geographic targeting, as well as your ad scheduling preferences. Here is a quick screen shot:
Within this screen shot, the little clock emblem indicates where you can adjust your ad scheduling for each campaign.
To turn your ads completely on or off, you can adjust the times for which they show. Within the screen shot below, you can see that I have selected to run my ads from 5am-10pm on Monday through Friday, and we’re not showing ads at all on the weekends.
So, that strategy isn’t too complicated to implement. With this feature you also have the option of increasing your bids during certain times of the day. However, of course, leave it to Yahoo to only allow you the option to increase your bids, but you can’t decrease them during certain times of the day. But there is a work-around to this shortcoming.
I want to adjust my bid automatically within the screen shot below. You can see that I can either increase my bid by per a certain percentage, or I can increase it by an actual dollar. amount.
If you want to solely increase bids during certain times of the day, then you’re all set! However, if you want to have higher bids in the morning and lower bids in the evening, then you have a little bit more work ahead of you. One way to work around this limitation of only being able to increase bids is this:
- Determine what your bids should be during your high-bid time of the day. Determine what your bids should be during your low-bid time of the day.
- Within your campaign, set your keyword bids to the lowest price that you’d like them to be during the day.
- Adjust your ad scheduling settings to increase your keywords to your highest bids during those high-traffic, great ROI times of the day.
With this method, you set your bids to the lowest point and then use ad scheduling to increase them automatically. This way, in a sense, you are increasing and lowering your bids to improve your performance.
Ad scheduling can be a great way to improve your PPC campaign’s performance by targeting the best time of day, while shifting focus away from those times of the day that don’t generate a great ROI. You just got to know how to work the system.
