1 - Find out when your peak traffic times will be

Assuming you know your business sector fairly well you’ll probably have a good idea as to when the popular times of the year are for sales / leads. However, when people actually search for your offering may be different. Either way, take the guesswork out of the situation by visiting Google Insights for Search. This tool lets you view historical search trends for a particular keyword in a chosen geographical region. This enables you to see patterns of search behaviour & ultimately helps you to plan your bidding & budget strategies more effectively.

2 - Work out your budget

Now you’ve worked out when the peak traffic times are you’ll need to establish a budget. To help you work this out visit the Traffic Estimator tool which can be found in the Reporting and Tools tab within your AdWords account. Type in the most general keywords you are targeting, a maximum cost per click, and an ideal budget and then you’ll see how much traffic you are likely to receive. You can then decide if this is more or less than what you would like and you can adjust your budget & strategy accordingly.

3 - Automate Changes

If you find out from the research above that you need to start advertising or indeed pushing your ads harder during on a given day in the near future, don’t wait to make the changes because you may forget or not be able to make the changes at that point in time. Instead setup some automated rules using Google’s Automate function (it can be found to the right of the New Campaign button). This lets you create rules such as ‘Activate campaign on given date’ or ‘Change max. CPC bids on given date’.

4 - Make sure you’re not ‘Limited by budget’

After you’ve launched your keywords & they start to generate traffic you may find that Google labels a campaign as being ‘Limited by budget’. If this does happen it means you don’t have your daily budget set high enough for your ads to appear for a whole day.  Google therefore limit the number of times your adverts are shown so you don’t overspend. This then means you’re giving Google’s systems ultimate control over when your adverts are displayed which can be really inefficient. To take back control, consider scheduling your campaigns manually so your ads only show during the most profitable times of the day /week.

To find out when the best times of the day / week are for you visit the Dimensions tab in your AdWords account, select the ‘time’ or ‘day’ view from the drop down menu (below the Campaigns tab) & then select a large enough date range so you have enough data to make an informed decision. You can then see which times of day / days of week generate the largest volume of revenue / leads. You can then visit the Settings tab for the given campaign & adjust the ad scheduling accordingly. 

5 - Keep up to date with the weather

Finally, there are some products & services that are so weather dependant that you will need to keep a close eye on the forecasts. For this reason I suggest signing up to a weather service such as Met Office Alerts which will email you daily updates and will tell you if there are any warnings. This is something that has proved to be very useful for our client Dandy’s Garden Centre who provide rock salt during the winter months & topsoil during the spring & summer, both of which are subject to huge changes in demand.

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