Amazon PPC Dayparting in 2022

In the last few years, the retail industry has been inundated with practitioners offering new methods of digital advertising. Since every marketer reaches a different consumer audience at different times of the day, sellers delved into the world of dayparting. And different times of the day can mean very different merchandising and ad campaigns. Learn the best time to target your audience and be confident in your campaigns.

In this article, you will find out what Amazon dayparting is and how you can efficiently use it in your PPC ad campaigns.

What is Dayparting?

Dayparting is an advertising technique that divides the time of the day into specific periods for targeting specific audiences helping you understand the most receptive time slots. Dayparting gives you more precise targeting, sales, and ensures your marketing is cost-effective.

In the past few years, dayparting has been on the rise, particularly among Google AdWords advertisers. If you spend your day thinking about enhancing your ad strategy, you’re missing out on one of the most powerful tactics for improving your campaign’s results.

Here’s the deal: dayparting divides your marketing channels into unique marketing moments. You can then create unique ad copy and commercial images for each group of consumers and display those at the right moment.

Dayparting provides sellers with the opportunity to optimize sales through PPC as efficiently as possible, being particularly useful for lightning-fast plannings. Sellers can also track the product sales peaks and set up ads exclusively on an hourly basis to optimize costs. The graph below portrays when a product (on what day of the week and at what time) is sold the best.

Why is Dayparting Important?

A big challenge in e-commerce marketing is how to make the most of your marketing dollars across the week. Unfortunately, ad scheduling to target distinct customer demographics at a particular time of the day can be time-consuming. Why not just try different tactics?

If you’re looking for ways to increase your paid search ad ROI, dayparting might be the answer. When an ad campaign is segmented by dayparts it is optimized and set to capture the biggest, most relevant leads at a given time. It works well with demand audiences, which is a huge exception to the timeless rule of advertising: the only people you want to show your ad to are the ones already in the market for what you’re selling.

Reasons to Use Dayparting

One important thing to keep in mind when dayparting your advertising is that if implemented effectively, it translates to higher ad delivery and lower costs. This means you can reach more buyers making fewer investments. But there are other convincing reasons to use dayparting in your ad strategy. For instance, sellers can use it in order to:

• pause advertising at low-response timeframes
• ensure ad visibility during at the highest traffic time peaks
• reach high conversion rates during high bid periods
• fine-tune bidding depending on location
• increase brand awareness across most active social media.

Amazon Dayparting

Which is the top marketplace in the US with regards to shop traffic on the internet these days? That’s right, it is Amazon. And it is popular behind the US, with more than 200 million Prime members around the globe. So what does dayparting mean for this large-scale eCommerce platform?

The majority of advertising on Amazon is not dayparted. Because of the new and evolving nature of Amazon Advertising, it does not yet have dayparting functionality. Yet, Amazon advertisers are still able to recognize sales changes based on the timing of day or day of the week, which gives a chance to apply a keyword bid multiplier. They can use tools that automate bid change strategies, depending on conversion data, which helps them generate the right bid at the right time.

How to Efficiently Use Dayparting in PPC Ad Campaigns

Most digital marketers have favorite daypart tactics. This is where they excel. Why? Because dayparting highly depends on ad networks.

Not all networks perform well enough to work well with certain dayparts. For example, you might not be able to run PPC ads on Facebook during the weekday.

Conventional wisdom is that you only use dayparting when you are running PPC ads. The truth is that you can also single-handedly target different dayparts with other marketing initiatives.

Consider the following before you start to use dayparting in your ad campaigns:

1. What are you trying to achieve by employing the use of dayparting? Whether you want to increase clicks and overall traffic, drive traffic that is more likely to lead to conversions, or increase brand awareness, you need to know your goals.
2. How long does your customer’s buying process last? Do your online shoppers typically conduct extensive research before making a purchase or are major parts of sales spontaneous?
3. Where are the demographics of your targeted audience located? What time zone do they live in?
4. Have you gathered enough data to evaluate the benefit of dayparting? Have natural statistical variations been accounted for? Has a long enough timeframe been considered?

By answering these questions, you can discover which days of the week and at what time of day bring in the most clicks and conversions.

Three Strategies for Implementing Dayparting

There are three primary usage scenarios for dayparting.

The first is when a seller time-scopes the day and identifies a period of time during the day when sales of products reach their peak. It is when the seller wants their ad to show. And vice versa: during the rest of the day, when sales rates reach their minimum, the seller turns off their ads to be as efficient as possible with Ad Spend.

Another way to use dayparting is to reduce the cost-per-click. Sellers that promote competitive items and target highly competitive keywords should withhold till midday or later in the day to bid. Why wait? Because the number of participants in the ad auction could be reduced. If this happens, the seller will probably get a higher CPC in the later hours of the day.

Another way for retailers to use dayparting in their marketing strategy is to decrease “browsing” traffic, which rises when shoppers are window-shopping but are not making a purchase. The major part of a seller’s ad spend is typically allocated near the beginning of the day. This time period is for customers to browse, since they may be considering multiple alternatives.

So it’s a good decision to turn off ads until later hours of the day when, as the data imply, shoppers are more inclined to buy.

Dayparting Best Practices

What are the secrets to implementing dayparting effectively? Well, while there’s no universal instruction, there are certain methods you can use for best results. For instance:

• Avoid CPC bid race: being new to dayparting, you might want to avoid the CPC bid rush completely. Instead, you should pause the ad campaign from 12 a.m. to 6 a.m. This way, you can decrease ad spending while reaching a good ROAS.
• Monitor performance on the basis of day of the week: track your sales history and define during which days of the week the highest conversion occurs. Prioritize those days, allocating more budget for them.
• Follow lightning deals. Popular and effective promotions that run for a short period of time are Amazon lightning deals. You have the option of using day-parting to focus on your promotions on a particular keyword, which will increase their visibility.
• Utilize ARA Premium: take advantage of Amazon Retail Analytics Reporting and its detailed breakdown. Distinguish the performance opportunities for your products by day of the week. This data will unveil the behavior of your customers and provide you with insights about the best dayparting strategies.

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The Hazards of Amazon Dayparting

When dealing with a lack of data, some sellers use only their order data to daypart. But this is quite dangerous. If you only place bids when you get orders, you will find yourself harming the entire ad campaign.

Let’s say you get orders mostly from 6 to 7 PM. Perhaps this is because most people shop after work.

But what about those that are browsing the Internet during their lunch break? What about those who shop on the commute? And there goes the first pitfall of dayparting: if you only bid during 6-7 PM, you’re neglecting another huge part of shoppers that tend to buy before or after that time slot.

Many consider dayparting to be unnecessary because users’ digital habits are pretty steady. This is what Nielsen study found out:

Another tactic applied by Amazon sellers is downloading their Amazon Advertising reports and finding their average metrics like ACOS, conversion rate, etc. for one specific day. This leads us back to the false assumption that your clicks have the same distribution as your orders. You cannot be certain that your orders and clicks happen in the same time slot. You also cannot be certain that the ad that generated the click is the one that generated the order.

Final Word

While the idea behind dayparting can get some Amazon sellers rushing to implement it, it’s not the PPC magic pill. The data essential for dayparting is currently unavailable in any Amazon reports. Even if there was any, it’s not as easy as it appears to achieve success in the dayparting. In fine, until Amazon equips us with the necessary tools and data to compose efficient dayparting strategies, we don’t recommend attempting it in your campaigns.

Optimizing your keywords and bids more effectively, and having a solid budgeting strategy in place will ultimately have a beneficial effect on your Amazon advertising success.

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