Day Parting is a growing part of the PPC field, with many systems and tools trying to take advantage of different traffic cycles for particular products and services. There are a lot of misconceptions about what day parting is and how it can be used, but we do believe that it is useful if you keep in mind that the goal for any direct marketing PPC campaign is to lower cost per conversion while increasing or maintaining total traffic.

How might day parting work to do this? Well, consider two scenarios:

Market I:

A market where there is truly different cost per click on keyphrases for different times of day with about the same conversion rates. This is often the case in competitive markets where other advertisers increase the bids of their ads in order to get higher rankings.

Market II:

Markets with very different conversion rates at any given time of day, but with about the same traffic rates.

In market (1), Day Parting allows an advertiser to segment the market and literally put a cost per conversion value on any given period of the day. For example, the cost per click in the morning might be $5 and $20 in the afternoon. In that situation, the first goal is to capture as many of the $5 customers as possible and only go after the $20 customers after all other choices have been expended. As long as the ROI stays above what the client wants, the advertiser can continue to increase visibility during competitive time periods and therefore get more total traffic and sales. But if they start with the cheaper clicks they will ultimately have better margins.In market (2), the same is true except that the advertiser should choose time periods with the highest conversion rates first and then start to work into increasingly low conversion rates.

Usually the real world is a combination of the two, so the best way to measure the value of a given time period is to simply talk about cost per conversion.

At the simplest level, any given time period should have a cpConv that will either be more or less than what the client is willing to pay. Assuming that the client has fewer advertising dollars to spend than total available clicks for a given word market, the model is fairly simple. If all periods are less than what the client is willing to pay, advertise all the time. If not, skip those periods that aren’t profitable and advertise during the time periods in decreasing levels of profitability.

This is the simple model, but in truth one major consideration makes things a little more complicated. Many advertisers have a budget that far exceeds what PPC can actually cost. In other words, they could advertise all the time and not run out of money. What do you tell those folks in terms of their ad spend budget? It is at this point that the decisions about day parting leave the realm of direct sales and enter into branding, which is a discussion for another time.