The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

If you’re a Clickable user, you may have noticed a new feature in the Manage section called "Ad Scheduling." So what is it?

Ad Scheduling is a powerful tool that allows you to pause your campaigns on certain days of the week (known as "week-parting") or times of the day (known as "day-parting"). The most common way to use this functionality is to pause campaigns on weekends. (Many businesses do considerably more business on weekdays and find it very hard to convert on weekends, so pausing their campaigns on Saturday and Sunday is a great way to save money.) However, Ad Scheduling allows you much more precision than this: you can choose to turn off ads for half-hour intervals throughout the week. To do so effectively, you need solid data about when your campaigns are performing and when they aren't. You can find this information using the AdWords Hourly Report View.

Building an hourly report in AdWords is fairly simple. After running your campaign for a few weeks to generate usage data, follow these steps:

1) Log into your Google AdWords account.
2) Click on the Reports tab.
3) Click Create Report.
4) From the Report Type options, select Campaign Performance.
5) In the Settings, set the "View (Unit of Time)" to "Hourly (regardless of date)"; set the Date Range to "All Time"; and, for Campaigns, press the radio button for "Manually select from a list" and choose the relevant campaign from the list that appears.
6) Finally, select a name for your report at the head of the "Templates, Scheduling and Email" section, and click "Create Report."

The new Hourly Report will now appear in your AdWords Report Center. Click on the report to view it, and you will see your campaign's average performance at various hours of the day for a number of metrics, including Impressions, Clicks, CTR, Avg CPC and Cost.

Using this information, you can determine when your campaign is underperforming and pause it at those times using the graphical Ad Scheduling tool in Clickable's Manage section. Just go to the campaign you want to manage, click on "Campaign Settings," then click on "Ad Scheduling & Serving."

Using the "Ad Scheduling" tool, you'll be able to activate or deactivate your campaigns at half-hour intervals to maximize returns.

Good luck!

Tony, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. “Clickable Gurus” participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.

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After we first introduced the Ad Scheduling tool last summer, Tony wrote a post on our Blog detailing