Show your ad when people are more likely to buy (eCommerce)
Show your ad when your office is actually open (for small businesses)

Generate new businesses only when you want more business

Stop wasting your internet marketing dollars by showing your ad 24/7. Is your businesses open 24/7? If yes, then by all means show your ad 24/7. However, are there times of the day or week when businesses is slower than normal? Are you a business with regular 9-6 hours, but late Thursday night and Friday afternoon the phone just stops ringing? There is a solution…

Time sensitive offers.

PPC is often thought of as a direct marketing vehicle used to reach consumers when they are searching for your business, products or services. For many small businesses, their PPC campaign runs all day, all night, and all weekend. The dollars tick by as visitors come their website, and hopefully call.

There is a solution to only showing your ad when you want business. In Google AdWords, this is called Ad Scheduling. In Microsoft adCenter, it’s called day parting. Basically, you choose what hours you want to display your ad, and it’s only shown during those hours.

Implementing this can be either a one or two step process depending on how complicated you wish your marketing campaign to be.

The simple solution is to change the campaign settings so that your ad is only shown during your business hours.

For Google AdWords, this is a quick process.

However, first check you time zone settings. The time zone your ad campaign is in determines the time that is used to show your ads. So, if you’re time zone is in reality CST, however, your account is in PST, you will need to take that into account when you choose what hours to run your ads.

• Log into your AdWords account
• Check your time zone settings: This can be found under My Account > Account Preferences
• Next, navigate to the campaign settings page
• Click ‘Turn on Ad Scheduling’ and follow the link to the set up page.
• For each day, you can choose to pause your ad, or only run it during select times
• Edit each day you don’t want the campaign to run for 24 hours
• Save the new settings - quick and easy.

Google AdWords Ad Scheduling Screen shot

For Microsoft adCenter, please follow this process:

• Log into your Microsoft adCenter account
• Navigate to the order settings page (equivalent to an AdGroup)
• Go to the ‘order settings’ tab
• You will want to expand the days of the week and hours of the day forms (the last two on the page before the save button)
• Add your desired days and times to the right column
• Save your settings

While the above is the simplified way of ensuring your phone is only ringing while there is someone at the office to answer it - one can also implement time based offers.

Time Based Offers

If there are times of the week/day that your phone doesn’t ring very often and you wish to help incentive the audience to click and call you during these time period, there are some simple steps to follow.

First, determine an offer that is unique from the rest of the field. Second, determine the time frame you wish to include in your ad copy.

Next, create ads based upon the above parameters.

For example, if you are a plumber who doesn’t have much business on Friday’s between 12p-5p on Friday, you could use an ad such as:

25% Off Plumbing Services
If you call between 12-5p on Friday
Serving the Greater Chicago Area.

While your services may be discounted during this time period - discounted business is better than no business. Of course, offers are only limited by your imagination. The next step is seeing if the phone actually rings (or people click on your ad). Based upon performance, you can change offers as often as you desire.

Next, follow these steps to create the time based offer:

• Create a new campaign
• Duplicate the AdGroups, keywords, and campaign settings into this new campaign (you may wish to change the budget since this is a small campaign)
• Use the new time sensitive ad copies with the just moved keywords in the new campaign
• Enable Ad Scheduling and follow the above steps for either adCenter or AdWords to schedule the new campaign to run during the times specified in the just created ad copy
• Change the original campaign to not show during the time of the newly created campaign (i.e. We don’t want both ads to run simultaneously)
• All done.

The above steps should result in two campaigns running:

1. The first campaign is running when there is someone to answer the phone - call a typical day parting campaign
2. The Time Based Offer campaign is running when business is slow, or when you want to run time sensitive ad copy to bolster your business

Take control of your pay per click marketing and your business by utilizing time sensitive offers.

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