Maximizing ROAS With Dayparting Strategies
There are always some campaigns that just seem stuck. They are barely profitable, struggling, and you are on the fence whether to turn them off or leave them. Their daily ROAS is hovering around break-even even and you know you should do something to fix it, but you are clueless about what.
The problem is often simpler than you think. Most marketers set a daily budget, turn the campaign on, and let it run 24/7. This is the default setting on every ad platform, but it's also one of the laziest things you can do. With this setting, it is assumed that your customers are interested in your product at every part of the day equally.
We all know that's not true, especially not at 4 am on a Wednesday. People have lives, schedules, and real-world patterns. Running ads is all about finding the right customers for your offer, and dayparting is one way of achieving that!
What Is Dayparting, and Why Should You Care?
Dayparting is also known as ad scheduling. This is when you turn on and off your ads during the day, depending on the time of the day and week. So let's say, instead of running 24/7, you only run Monday to Friday from 7 AM to 9 PM.
It's one of the simplest, yet most effective ways of boosting your ROAS for a few key reasons:
- It Kills Wasted Spend
This is the biggest reason for doing this. You stop burning your budget during dead hours of the night. You might get some clicks during it, but intent is way lower at night. So stop paying for the 2 AM sleepless scrollers!
- It Focuses Your Budget on “Golden Hours”
By not spending money during dead hours, you have more budget to spend while interest is peaking. This means your ads can run longer and be more competitive during peak shopping times.
- It Aligns With Your Customer’s Life
It’s just common sense. If you are selling stuff for businesses, you will get most conversions during work hours. If you are a food delivery service, you will make most conversions during lunch and dinner times. You need to find what the ideal time is for your campaigns, and luckily, if you have already run 24/7 campaigns, then you should have info on it. Just check when most of your conversions happen during the day and days of the week, and you should be fine!
How To Set It Up Properly
If you are ready to implement dayparting in your camps, you need to know a few things before you start. Here is how to do it properly!
1. Find Your Golden Hours
To know when to daypart, you first need to do some research and find when it's best for your offers. There are multiple ways to find this out, and likely, you already have all of the data!
If you have already run things on your account 24/7, then you should have all of the info already. You can find details if you check your preferred tracker to see what time of the day gives you the most clicks and conversions. If you don't use a tracker, you can also do this directly on most ad platforms.
On Google Ads, you can click on a specific campaign. In the left-hand menu, you should be able to find “Ad Schedule”. Inside this report, you can see data and segment it by day, hour, and day & hour. The same goes for platforms like Meta or TikTok. If you go inside your ad managers, you should be able to find a report table where you can see when the ads were running and how they performed.
It's important not to get distracted by things like clicks and impressions. You might be getting a lot more impressions at times when ads are cheaper and the intent is lower. The same goes for clicks. But in reality, even though there are more clicks, the quality of them is far lower, so you get fewer conversions.
Focus on Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), Cost Per Conversion (CPC), Return on Ad Spend (ROAS), and Conversion Rate (CVR). Look for clear patterns. It should be clear right from the start where things are working and how they are working.
2. Build Your Custom Ad Schedule
Once you have your best and worst performing times determined, it's time to use that information.
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Cut Dead Weight
This is the simplest thing you can do. Just cut the things that are not working. You should see an immediate impact on your revenues. For most businesses, this is between midnight and 6 AM, but it might be different for you! Setting this should be super simple, as every ad platform supports dayparting. Some platforms make it a bit more complicated than expected, like Meta, where you have to do things like “Lifetime Budget” to even get a chance to schedule ads.
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Use Bid Adjustment
This method offers way more control, but it's harder to set up (some platforms support it natively, others don’t, and with them, you will have to create multiple campaigns or find workarounds). Instead of just turning campaigns on and off, you can set it up so that they do run during the entire day, but you adjust your bid to be more or less aggressive during certain times.
This means you could set it up so that during golden hours, you make the bid a few % higher to better compete, but lower the bid a lot during off hours.
3. Monitor, Learn, and Adjust
Dayparting is not a “set and forget” strategy. You will need to check if the customer behavior changes and if you even hit the correct targeting the first time around.
After you implement your new schedule, let it run for a bit and then review the performance. After the performance has stabilized, check if your overall ROAS has improved. Did your CPA go down? The results should be obvious.
Be mindful of seasons and events. Some regular patterns will change depending on the seasons and maybe even events and holidays like Black Friday. Make sure to double-check the results during those times and tweak your ad schedule every now and then to keep things running perfectly.
4. Avoid Mistakes
While dayparting can be powerful, it can also be awful if you mess it up!
- Not using enough data: When making these bigger decisions, you shouldn't just base them on a few days of performance. A few random sales in the middle of the night don’t mean you should run your ads then. Make sure you have enough data to make decisions; don’t just guess.
- Forgetting about time zones: If you are an international advertiser, then this can be a serious problem for your campaigns. Sometimes ad accounts are based in different time zones than the audiences, and that can cause issues. Make sure you read everything and make sure you are targeting the right time for your audiences.
- Ignoring the customer journey: For big-ticket items that are hard to sell, it's worth taking a look at the customer journey as well. Sometimes it happens that you get a click from a person at 10 AM, and a conversion once they have “slept on it” the next day. Without the initial 10 PM click, you wouldn't get the conversion. So make sure that you do your research and find what leads to the final conversion.
Conclusion
Most of us run campaigns 24/7, and for the most part, that is OK. If you are having trouble optimizing and getting the most out of your campaigns, it might be worth spending some time figuring out if you should daypart them.
With the proper settings, you can easily boost your ROAS and spend less on useless clicks. To do this properly, you will need to do some research beforehand and ensure that your targeting is on point. Playing with dayparting without first looking at the data can ruin your momentum and confuse the algorithm. Implement a smart dayparting strategy, and you should be fine!
Have you done dayparting for your campaigns? How did it work out? Share your experience with us in the comments below!
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