Continuing the ‘Save PPC Budget by’ series, the next area that is going to be looked at is ad scheduling.

But, before this, the first article in the new series looked at how a PPC campaign can save money by including negative keywords. Not only are negative keywords good at saving your budget by not allowing your advert to appear for low converting keywords, they also help to put more of your money towards the more contextual keywords resulting in a more efficiently running campaign. In this article, we are going to look at what ad scheduling is, why you should use it and, more importantly, how you should use it.

What is Ad Scheduling?

In it’s simplest form, ad scheduling is the term used to allow PPC advertisers to schedule, in terms of time, when they want their PPC campaign to run to allow their adverts to bid for keywords and show up on search engine results/ Adsense publisher pages. You will probably be quite surprised at the low amount of advertisers that utilize negative keywords in their account. However, you will probably be even more surprised at the low amount of campaigns that use ad scheduling.

Why Use Ad Scheduling?

There are many benefits to using ad scheduling in your PPC campaign outlined below:

• Scheduling when your adverts run allows you to only let your adverts run at prime time, when you get the most conversions for your PPC budget.
• It allows you to geo-target without geo-targeting – by allowing your adverts to run at certain times will sync with certain geographical areas around the world so that you can gain more traffic from certain areas of the world, when they are awake.
• It helps to make your whole campaign run more efficiently in general increasing the life span of your budget.

How to Use Ad Scheduling

The first action advertisers will probably do when they introduce ad scheduling is straight away prevent their adverts from running overnight in the area of the world they are targeting – this is a bad move. For PPC, you should never make a change without having sufficient evidence to back up your action.

For this reason, it is a necessity to run your campaign without any ad scheduling for 1-2 months to get an idea of when your peak times are and your drop off times too. once you have this data, you can then use ad scheduling by turning off your adverts during the times when your conversion rate is lowest (and when your budget is not being utilized to it’s fullest). In general, you will most likely find this to be the area of the world between 10pm -6am (when people sleep). However, a good example of ad scheduling is to have your adverts only scheduled for your business hours of work. For example, if you are a flower shop and you can only take orders between 7am-5pm, then it makes sense to only have your adverts scheduled to run at these times too.