Dayparting – How to Get More ROI Out of Your Marketing Budget

If you’re like most marketers today, you rely almost entirely on algorithms.

But like they say: Timing is everything.

That’s why radio and TV advertisers have served their messages at specific times of the day for years in a practice known as “dayparting.”

Below we cover how and when dayparting can save your advertising budget, along with a simple system for optimizing your campaigns based on time ranges.

Three quick caveats:

First, dayparting is not for everybody

E-commerce vendors, for example, might not find dayparting useful because people buy at every time of the day.

But if you’re a B2B company, you might want to target times of the day when your audience is in the office. Especially if you’re trying to generate calls.

Second, you need traffic

Most businesses don’t have enough conversion data per day, or per hour, to run statistically significant tests.

Finally, dayparting can still drive up costs

The more targeted your campaign, the less room for optimization the algorithm has, so your costs go up.

And now, with the caveats out of the way…

Here’s a tactic you can apply to see if dayparting works for you

• Download performance by the hour of the day (or by day of the week) into a spreadsheet.
• Identify the range of times where most of your campaign conversions seem to happen.
• Put that data in a pivot table.
• Move the high-converting hours into one group; put the other hours into a separate group.

You’ll probably see that one-time range drives most of the conversions at a lower cost per acquisition (CPA), while the other time ranges have fewer conversions and a higher CPA.

You know what to do next

Focus on the time frames that generate conversions at a lower CPA, and reduce the ad spend on expensive time blocks.

Meg also shows how to do this in Google or Facebook’s advertising dashboards too.

Try it out and see if dayparting works for your business.