Pay Per Click Advertising Tip #13 - Ad Scheduling

Yahoo! is still the little kid on the block when it comes to Ad Scheduling - they simply don’t do it.

Google is definitely the rich kid. Very flexible scheduling in 15 minute increments all day with the ability to split your schedule like mad. You could set your ads to run every other 15 minutes for hours at a time!

MSN simply looks up to Google with gaga eyes and says weakly “Anything you can do we can do…not better.” Semi-flexible ad scheduling with blocks of 3 or 4 hours at a time. I like to think MSN is simply a poser on the playground.

Anyways, mild humor aside - here is how you schedule ads in Google and MSN:

Google Ad Scheduling

Get into any of your campaign settings (yes, each campaign can have a different ad schedule).

Look down the left side of the Edit Campaign Settings page for your “Advanced Options” and click on “Turn on ad scheduling” or if you already have ad scheduling on it should say “edit times and bids”.

You should see a page that has this schedule on it -

Now you can edit each day however you want using the edit button next to each day or you can edit clumps of days using the links located in the upper left of the image above.

For example, we have our ads turned off on weekends and all weekdays are scheduled to run from 8 am to 3 pm.

When you are editing a clump of days like “weekdays” - simply click the “add another time period” link to run split schedules for your ads…for example, I want to run my ads from 1am to 1:15am and 5pm to 5:15pm so I would start with the 1am schedule and add another time period of 5-5:15pm.

Click Add when you’re done then save your schedule and you’re off to scheduling another campaign! It’s that easy!

MSN Ad Scheduling

MSN, being the usual culprit with usability, takes a few more clicks to find your ad scheduling…

Click the campaign tab (or click on your account), Click your campaign, click your ad group, click Settings, scroll down to the bottom and you will see your scheduling options -

Simply click on “Select specific…” radio buttons and MSN will load the scheduling options you see in the image - and that’s the total flexibility of MSN. You CAN select more than one option so you can still run a split schedule, turn off ads on the weekend, turn the ads of every other day, run the ads at midday and in the evening…etc.

Remember to SAVE your changes when you’re done and you’re set to schedule ads for another campaign in MSN!

Sometimes click costs are cheaper in the early evening or at another time of the day so we will run a schedule that takes advantages of the times that cost the least. At other times that doesn’t matter to a client but the business hours do matter - you only want to run the campaign while you can answer the phone and email…there are a variety of reasons to use scheduling.

That’s a wrap for Pay Per Click Advertising Tip #13 - Ad Scheduling. Enjoy!

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One Response to “Pay Per Click Advertising Tip #13 - Ad Scheduling”

1. (EMP) E-Marketing Performance » : » Team Reading List 1.28.08 Says:
   January 28th, 2008 at 7:57 am

   [...] Pay Per Click Advertising Tip #13 - Ad Scheduling [...]

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