Dayparting Done Right
Soren | 9 February, 2009
A typical mistake that we see involves dayparting, a method of controlling ad exposure or pricing by time of day, or day of the week. This can be a powerful tool for making a campaign more efficient, but it’s amazing how often people get this wrong.
Dayparting needs to be analyzed based on when the initial clickthrough from the ad occurred, not when the conversion happens. Probably the best example of why this is important came up recently with one of our clients. The client wanted to pause his marketing during non-business hours, the seemingly reasonable explanation being that his sales people couldn’t respond to leads during off hours. We pointed out that his audience is made up of executives and high-net-worth individuals who do research off-hours when they have the time, but finalize the sale during business hours. We showed him that a whopping 60% of his business comes from leads where the first visit (research phase) happened at the very times he wanted his advertising to go dark: nights and weekends. Needless to say, his marketing has stayed on during those times.
Unfortunately, it is all too common for this type of logic to be used in creating dayparting rules, and many of the tools out there simply can’t tie the conversion back to the initial visit. We expect this to change as the market, tools, and understanding of user behavior continue to improve.
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