Dayparting for Amazon PPC - Limitations and Recommendations

What is Dayparting?

Dayparting is an advanced Amazon advertising technique that allows you to split a day into hourly segments and do precise targeting. This enables advertisers to turn their campaigns on/off for specific hours of the day and specific days of the week. For instance, if you want your Amazon PPC campaigns to be active only on weekends from 9:00 AM to 9:00 PM, you can use dayparting to pause your campaigns automatically for the rest of the period.

Why do Amazon PPC advertisers use Dayparting?

1. To avoid CPC Rush (and thus control ACoS)

Amazon refreshes the budget for all the advertisers at sharp midnight. Due to this, the competition is highest for the initial few hours of the day as none of the advertisers are out-of-budget and thus, CPC (cost-per-click) is also high. This phenomenon of high CPCs during the initial few hours of the day is commonly referred to as CPC rush. As the day progresses, advertisers with limited budgets start running out of budget which in turn brings the CPC down. One of the strategies that Amazon PPC advertisers use is to simply turn their campaigns off for the initial few hours (e.g, midnight – 6:00 AM) and start their ads once the smaller players are out of the race and the CPC has settled down. This gives them an extra advantage to use their spending wisely and control the ACoS for their campaigns.

2. To control Ad Spends (and avoid going Out of Budget)

Advertisers with budget constraints (especially in categories with high CPCs), find it difficult to keep their campaigns active throughout the day. Due to high CPC, their budgets get completely exhausted well before the end of day (usually around 3pm or 4pm). Thus, they tend to miss the period when shoppers are more likely to convert. To avoid this, they use dayparting and turn the campaigns off at low response time-frames – generally the initial few hours of the day (12 AM – 6 AM) and in some cases the core office hours (12 PM – 04 PM) during weekdays.

Dayparting Limitations with Amazon PPC

The limitation with Amazon Ads is that unlike other platforms like Google Ads, Amazon doesn’t provide the necessary data required for Dayparting. With the currently available reports, there is no way for an advertiser to know at which specific hour the ad was clicked which resulted in the order conversion. Even if all the orders are placed in the evening between 5 PM – 8 PM, that doesn’t mean the buyer clicked on the ad during the same time. It depends on the buyer’s shopping behaviors. In the absence of this data, it’s almost impossible to have a fool-proof dayparting strategy that can guarantee success. Having said that, there are other use-cases such as avoiding CPC rush (discussed above) which makes dayparting for amazon PPC so popular.

Dayparting Limitations with Amazon PPC

Adbrew makes it easy to implement dayparting. It provides you with all the levers needed to quickly set up and manage Dayparting for your Amazon PPC campaigns:

Adbrew supports dayparting for all the campaign types – Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, and Sponsored Display.
You can create a single dayparting strategy and associate it with multiple campaigns in bulk across your different accounts. This is extremely helpful for agencies or brands managing a large number of Amazon advertising accounts across a number of marketplaces.
Adbrew allows you to create multiple Dayparting strategies for your Amazon PPC management. You can specify the days and hours on which you want your campaigns to be active.
You can enable/disable a dayparting strategy using a simple toggle without removing the association from all your existing campaigns. This ensures that no changes are made due to this dayparting strategy from that point onwards. It is useful during sales like prime day, etc. where an advertiser just wants to stop dayparting for 3-4 days and resume later for the pre-selected campaigns.
For seller accounts, Adbrew looks at your seller business reports and gives you a heat map of order distribution throughout the selected period. This easy-to-consume information can be used to create an optimal dayparting strategy.

Dayparting for Amazon Ads with Adbrew

Adbrew is one of the earliest adopters of budget rules and our customers are already seeing its benefits. One of our customers saw an ACoS reduction of 30% when they setup a rule that increased their budget on weekends by 20%. We strongly believe this is an indispensable tool for advertisers and those who adopt this early are bound to have an edge over their competitors.

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Recommendation

There is no one size that fits all when it comes to Amazon PPC, and thus we recommend experimenting with different strategies on different campaigns to figure out what works the best for your brand.

If you’ve budget constraints and your budget doesn’t last the entire day for your campaigns, we recommend using dayparting to turn the campaigns off for the initial few hours (12-6 AM).
If the ACOS for your campaigns is high, and even after bid adjustments you’re not able to meet your your target ACOS, try using Dayparting to control the ACOS since dayparting will ensure your ad-spend is optimal.
If you’re a seller, use your business sales and traffic reports and Adbrew’s order distribution heat-map to find the best strategy for your brand.
Keep auditing your Amazon PPC campaigns from time to time to track results and fine-tune the strategy if needed. You can also run experiments by creating identical campaigns – same products, targets, bids, budgets, etc. and running them on different hours or days. Based on the results, you can create an optimal Dayparting strategy.

Shivam Kumar