Dayparting on Amazon: The What, Why, and How

As an Amazon advertiser, you work with limited budgets. Your objective is to maximize results from those budgets. 

Let’s say you have $8,000 to spend on Amazon advertising in a month and 500 products to advertise. How will you ensure that all your products have enough budgets to last a day?

Well, let us present one of the MOST effective strategies to rationalize your advertising budgets through a month, week, and day: Dayparting.

Dayparting, or ad scheduling, allows you to show ads only at specific times of the day when your target audience is most likely to engage. This improves ad performance and ensures the best results. 

In this post, we will discuss the following: 

• What is dayparting?

• Why use dayparting for Amazon advertising?

• How to daypart on the Amazon Console?

• How can atom11 help you with dayparting?

• Dayparting best practices and case studies 

What is Dayparting?

Dayparting is a digital marketing strategy that allows you to (a) divide a day into multiple time frames (or “parts”) and then (b) adjust your advertising budget differently as per performance trends in each time frame. Simply put, this strategy allows you to optimize campaigns by delivering ads at peak hours when your target audience is most likely to be active and engaged.

In dayparting or ad scheduling, you must analyze historical data and patterns to identify specific hours or peak times when your PPC ads could be the most effective. You must then schedule ad campaigns to run during these high-performing business hours while reducing or pausing ads during less active times.

Suppose a company selling breakfast cereals launches a new flavored cereal range for younger audiences. Their dayparting might involve increasing ad spend during Sunday mornings when potential customers browse Amazon for breakfast options. Moreover, customers order groceries over the weekends and are skewed more towards the first weekend of the month (it being a salary day). So, scheduling your ads on Saturdays and Sundays would be a good idea. Similarly, if a business targets working professionals, they might focus their ad schedule during lunch breaks or evenings. 

With the launch of Amazon Marketing Stream, this data is now available to Amazon advertisers through APIs. You can easily access this data and track user behaviors on the atom11 advertising dashboard.

Dayparting can be applied across all digital advertising platforms, including Google ads campaigns, Facebook ads, Instagram ads, and Amazon ads. It helps advertisers make the most of their budgets by ensuring that their ads are seen by the right audience at the right time, thus increasing the chances of conversions and maximizing return on investment.

Want to learn more about dayparting? Feel free to watch our video on ADvantage with atom11: Dayparting framework that will reduce your ACoS by 15%.

Why Do Amazon Advertisers Use Dayparting?

In times of high CPC (Cost Per Click) and low advertising efficiency on Amazon, if you are not using dayparting, you are losing a chance to save a minimum of 10-15% of your ad budget. There are various reasons why advertisers prefer to daypart their campaigns:

To manage competition

Amazon refreshes or resets budgets for all advertisers at midnight every day. Hence, during the initial hours of the day, competition and CPC are the highest for all campaigns. This high CPC during the initial time of day is called CPC Rush. 

As the day progresses, competitor campaigns start going out of budget, the competition comes down, and CPCs rationalize.

To avoid CPC rush and paying a high price per click during such hours, you can turn off the campaigns from midnight till 6 am, which is when shopping hours resume. This saves you from paying unreasonably high cost per click during CPC rush hours.

To optimize budget allocation throughout the day

Advertisers with high CPC struggle to keep their campaigns within budget throughout the day. As different times of the day might see variations in customer behavior, using dayparting, you can target the ads when you have the most active users, thus increasing the likelihood of conversions. This way, you can be within budget, thus reducing ACoS and achieving better results.

Suppose a breakfast cereal company’s high-converting customers are on Amazon in the mornings and evenings. The advertiser can then turn off their campaigns during afternoons to reduce ad costs and ensure on-budget campaigns. They can turn on the campaigns when the specific audience returns to Amazon in the evenings.

Limitations in Setting up Dayparting on Amazon Advertising Console

Setting up dayparting on the Amazon Advertising Console comes with its set of challenges. To set up dayparting, you need two things:

1. Data to evaluate and analyze when to pause/lower budgets or bids. 

2. Functionality to automate the action of pausing/lowering budgets or bids at an hour or day level.

There are limitations on both the above when you use the Amazon Advertising Console to set up dayparting. This is because Amazon neither gives you the hourly data to evaluate dayparting options nor has the functionality to set up dayparting at the hourly level.

However, it does give you the option of setting up dayparting at the day level with a feature called “Budget Rule.” But the difficult part is that you have to set up budget rules for each campaign individually.

Let’s go through the steps to enable budget rules:

Step 1: Download the last three months’ daily sales data from Seller Central to find out the best time to set up dayparting, i.e., which days of the week give you maximum sales.

Step 2: Select the campaign for which you want to set up dayparting.

Step 3: Specify the time you want to run dayparting rules.

Step 4: Set up the same rule for all campaigns that perform well on given days.

Step 5: You can then set up schedule rules that help you increase/decrease bids at certain times.

This process is manually taxing, error-prone, and repetitive and can be automated easily through atom11.

Benefits of Dayparting with atom11

A retail aware Amazon ads automation software, atom11 makes it really easy to set up dayparting in bulk for all or selected campaigns. Let’s look at the benefits of using atom11 to set up custom ad schedule for your Amazon PPC campaigns:

• You can set up one rule for all types of campaigns (Sponsored Products, Sponsored Brands, Sponsored Display).

• You can set up the same rule for multiple campaigns in bulk, eliminating any repetitive work.

• You can create different types of dayparting strategies for different campaigns, i.e., you can set up different dayparts for each day of the week and each hour of the day.

• You can easily switch a rule off or on when required.

• You can evaluate the performance of each dayparting rule.

Setting up Dayparting with atom11

At atom11, we have tested our dayparting framework multiple times and predictably seen better ROAS and ad sales. There is a need to understand that dayparting is not only about reducing budgets, atom11 allows you to set up dayparting at three levels: (a) Budgets, (b) Bids, and (c) Top of Share Bidding Multiplier. The process of setting up dayparting on Amazon advertising campaigns is quite simple. Let’s go through the steps:

Step 1: On your atom11 dashboard, go to Automation > Dayparting

Step 2: Click on “Create Rule”. Create a unique name for the rule you want to create. We suggest that your rule name be an easy peek into the rule parameters:

Example:

• Campaign_type = All campaigns, OR SP campaigns OR “Product A” Campaigns

• Dayparting for = Bids/ Budgets/ TOS

• Dayparting parameters = 10%_Midnight_40%_0900_80%_1800

Step 3: Select whether you want to run the dayparting rule on bids or budgets.

Step 4: Select a time range for the dayparting rule.

Step 5: Next, select the campaigns that you want to run the rule on. You can select all campaigns, choose campaigns manually, or upload campaigns that you want to set the rule on.

Step 6: Set up the dayparting parameters. You can set up the same parameters for all days of the week or you can set up different rules for different days. Here’s an example:

Step 7: Hit “Create Rule” and your rule is ready.

Dayparting doesn’t end here. The most important work comes after setting up dayparting. Track ROAS pre-and-post dayparting era to ensure you are not losing ad sales due to pausing campaigns at a specific time. You can do this in one click using atom11's exclusive Dayparting Evaluation feature:

Dayparting Best Practices

Here are a few best practices you can implement when setting up your dayparting rules:

• Remember that the most predictable time to reduce campaign bids and budgets through dayparting is midnight to early morning (12 midnight – 6 am).

• Use dayparting when the ACoS for your campaigns is high or even after bid adjustments if you are unable to meet your target ACoS. This is because dayparting ensures optimal ad spend.

Summing Up

Optimizing campaigns is something you put a lot of effort into. But, if you haven’t yet tried dayparting, it’s a loss. Just selecting the right hour to show your ads can hit the sweet spot and propel your campaign forward, significantly benefitting your CRO (Conversion Rate Optimization).

Tools like atom11 make it even easier to get started with dayparting. You can set up custom rules for each campaign, update rules in bulk, and automate ad scheduling. So, if you’re ready to boost your campaign results, book a demo with atom11 today!

FAQs

What is dayparting in digital marketing?

In digital marketing, dayparting is scheduling ad campaigns to appear at specific times of the day or week when the target audience is the most active. This strategy allows advertisers to optimize their ad spend by delivering ads at the right time when the target audience is most likely to engage and convert rather than displaying the ads throughout the day and increasing ad costs.

What is an example of dayparting?

An example of dayparting can be a café running ad campaigns for weekend breakfast specials between 6 to 10 AM to ensure their ads reach the target audience at times when they’re most likely to be active. This helps advertisers get the best results from campaigns without exceeding their ad budgets.

What is the meaning of dayparts?

Dayparts are specific timeframes or different time slots within a day that advertisers use to divide the advertising schedule. Each time segment or daypart is targeted to different audiences based on their browsing and purchase behaviors.

Why should I use dayparting?

Dayparting is a strategy used in marketing and advertising to optimize campaigns by targeting specific times of the day when your audience is most active or responsive. By using dayparting, you can maximize the effectiveness of your ads and reach your target audience when they are most likely to engage with your content. This approach can help improve the return on investment (ROI) of your campaigns by focusing your resources on high-impact periods. Dayparting can help you tailor your messaging to different segments of your audience based on their behavior patterns throughout the day.

What dayparting timeframes work best?

The effectiveness of dayparting timeframes varies depending on the target audience and industry. Generally, morning hours (6-10 AM) and evening hours (6-10 PM) tend to work well for reaching a broad audience. However, it's crucial to analyze your specific audience's behavior patterns and adjust the dayparting timeframes accordingly to achieve optimal results in your advertising campaigns.