How important is time of day for Google Ads?

Time of day – Google Ads

This is a question that I have been asked quite a few times and I can safely say that it depends on your individual business.  Think about it, would Pizza Hut have more conversions between 9am and 11am or 5pm to 7pm?  The answer is obvious, but what about less cut and dry businesses like typical B2B businesses.

As with any problem in the land of online the first step to figuring out the problem is solid data analysis.  So crack open your favourite tool, mine is Google Analytics, and start crunching.  Some fancy SEM tools such as Kenshoo run this analysis for you on the fly, whereas Google Adwords / Google Analaytics need a little bit of massaging.

Start off by creating an advanced segment for paid traffic.  Then go to the visitors tab and select a date range that will be large enough to give you heaps of data for each of the 24 separate hour blocks.  I tend to do this over a 3 month period, but if you have more or less traffic you can do shorter, or longer periods.  The caveat here is that your website hasn’t changed considerably over the time period as this would impact the results.

In the visitors tab change the view to ‘by hour’. and export.

Next create another advanced segment, but this time do paid traffic + Converting traffic.  Go back into the visitors tab and select ‘by hour’ and export.

Now match up these 2 charts and you have paid visits by hour of the day, and conversions by hour of the day.  The chart below is what you receive and if the visits and the conversion rate are not lining up then you have a problem.  This client received about a 200% increase in productivity from this change alone.