Adwords Conversion Optimization Series – Part 2: Hour Of Day

By looking at which times of the day your conversions receive the most ROI, you can eliminate the hours that don’t convert well.

1. Start by going to the campaign that you want to improve. Don’t go into any ad groups though (you can check it ad group by ad group later).
2. Click the “Dimensions” tab.
3. Click “View > Time > Hour of Day”.
4. At this point you should see all the hours listed from 0 (midnight) to 23 (11pm).

Just like part 1 of this series, you want to look at your conversions for each hour. Are there any hours that don’t convert (or convert poorly)?

Pay attention to your “cost per conversion” as well. If you have some hours that have a very high cost per conversion, you’ll want to pay attention to that and adjust accordingly (possibly removing that hour from your schedule).

Let’s take a look at an account and see which hours work well, and which haven’t. The identity of the advertiser has been hidden for their privacy.

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• Although many of the early morning hours (1am, 3-5am) don’t have conversions, they also don’t spend very much. It’s simply a lack of traffic, so we don’t have to worry too much about limiting them.
• Conversions at 3pm (1500 hours) cost quite a bit, around $342/conversion. It might be a good idea to remove ads at this time to help lower cost per conversion. The same goes for 1700 hours and 2100 hours, though they only have 1 conversion so it might be worth waiting for more data on all of these fronts.
• 1800 hours (6pm) has VERY cheap conversions at only $68/conversion. This could be a lucrative time to increase the bid using an automated rule, and then decrease the bid afterwards. You might even increase your budget just for that hour of the day.

You can also pay attention to CTR if you’re wanting to increase your quality score (QS). By eliminating hours that have a very low CTR, you can increase your overall campaign CTR, which helps to optimize your campaign even further and get a better QS.

From there you’ll want to modify your ad schedule so that it excludes certain hours of the day. This will be on top of the “day of week” schedule that you did in part 1. If you’re not sure how to make an ad schedule, start with this Google support tutorial on custom ad scheduling.

<p”>This post is a shorty, so why don’t you spend the remaining 3 minutes you would have spent reading a longer article on analyzing your “time of day” data? In part 3 we’ll be covering the search terms dimensions report.