By DatingFactory Marketing Team

YNOT EUROPE – One of the appealing things about Google AdWords is the ability to control exactly where and when your ads appear. Yet despite that control, most people run their campaigns from midnight to midnight with no changes or variations in between.

They’re missing a trick. By bidding the same amount throughout the day, they may be over-spending when traffic volume is lower and under-bidding — and consequently appearing nowhere — when traffic picks up in their market. (For dating sites, that’s traditionally in the evening.)

In addition, by using the same ad copy throughout the day, they’re assuming search-engine users are at the same point in the buying process throughout the day.

The only way to understand which times of the day work best for your site(s) is to split out your Google AdWords campaigns and test. Here are a couple of ways to start that process.

Schedule existing campaigns
In your AdWords account, select the Campaign you’d like to adjust, and then select Settings. Under Advanced Settings / Ad Scheduling, select Edit. You’ll see a grid for each hour of each day of the week.

Make sure “Mode: Basic” is selected.

Select the time periods in which you would like your ads to run. You can copy this setting for every day of the week or set your ads to run at different times on different days — although that probably would be overkill.

The downside to using the basic mode is that your ads won’t show at any other times, meaning you’ll miss opportunities. The other option available to you is to adjust your bids instead, effectively suppressing your ads in the quiet times of day, but making sure they still show.

To do this, in the same screen, switch to Mode: Bid Adjustment. Then, in the same way as before, adjust your bids through the day and week.

Create new campaigns
You can use the tools explained above to get even more control over your bidding strategy, advertising copy and marketing data, but the techniques require some more up-front work.

Put simply, you must duplicate your existing campaigns and run one during the day and another during the evening.

Say you have a campaign called “Dating Sites Broad.” To accomplish the split-schedule trick, this is what you’d do:

1) Duplicate the campaign and call the new one, for example, “Dating Sites Broad-Day.”

2) Using the Ad Scheduling tool discussed above, schedule your ads to run from 7 a.m. to 5 p.m. and adjust your bid strategy accordingly.

3) Adjust your original campaign, “Dating Sites Broad,” to run from 5 p.m. to 7 a.m., again adjusting your bid strategy.

Once you’ve had the two campaigns running for a couple of days, you’ll be able to see the differences in performance between them. Keep tweaking your bids to find the optimum strategy.

Once you’re comfortable with this setup, try experimenting with different ad copy for different times of the day and see if there are any noticeable differences.

Give it a go and see which method works best for you. Before you start, take note of your average CPC, CPR and CPA, and see how those are affected by splitting your traffic in this way.

Dating Factory gives webmasters the freedom to build their own dating sites on their own domain names, complete with fresh and active profiles from the Dating Factory network. The service is free and allows the creation of mainstream and adult-themed sites, with optional specialty niches. The company’s motto is “We build your brand, not ours.”