Adwords Conversion Optimization Series – Part 1: Day Of Week Testing

When designing this adwords series, we put a bit of thought into what would be the biggest focus.

We could have focused on click-through rate or Quality Score, which both indirectly contribute to your ROI (return on investment).  We decided to focus on ways to directly increase your ROI from your Google Adwords campaigns instead.

That’s why this whole optimization series will be focused directly on conversions, although you will be able to use these lesser-known skills to get yourself boosts in CTR (click-through-rate) and Quality Score too.

Check Your Day Of Week Dimension

By checking which days of the week provide the cheapest conversions, you may spot an opportunity to eliminate a day or two from your schedule, and spend more of your money on the remaining, more profitable days of the week.

1. Start by going to a search campaign that you want to focus on.
2. Once you’re in the campaign (you should be seeing the names of each ad group), click the “Dimensions” tab.
3. Click “View > Time > Day of Week”.
4. At this point you should see Monday through Sunday listed. They may not be in the right order, so sort them by the “Day of the Week” column.
5. Check the date range and make sure it’s the times you want to measure. If you have a large account with hundreds of thousands of impressions a month, try to keep it at the last 30 days. Otherwise you may need to reach further back in time for useful data.

Now it’s time to evaluate. Do you notice any trends? What is the cost per conversion for each day? Do you notice any particular days that cost far more than the others?

In the sample account above, we can see that Monday, Friday, and Saturday all yield no conversions, yet cost a similar amount as every other day.

We also can see that Tuesday’s conversions cost a particularly large amount ($145/conversion) compared to the other days (approx $50/conversion). It might even be worth it to turn off ads on tuesday as well if the client doesn’t mind receiving a few less conversions. This will give more budget to the cheaper days of the week.

This type of analysis is a “quick win”.  In the above example, we were able to lower the cost per conversion from $103 down to $59/conversion. That’s a 42% savings, just from this simple 5 minute fix!

By making a quick change to your ad schedule, you can eliminate days that are costly to your conversions, and increase your ROI by quite a bit. The bigger your account, the bigger the waves you’ll make with this.

Next week we’ll talk about another dimension that’s almost as exciting as the day of week! It’s a secret, so you’ll have to wait until next week to find out!