Efficient dayparting strategy for Amazon Advertisers

In this post, we will discuss the following:

1. Introduction

2. What is dayparting

3. Why dayparting

4. How to daypart on the Amazon console

5. Dayparting with atom11

6. Best practices

7. Case studies

As an amazon advertiser, you work with limited budgets. Your objective is to maximize results from those budgets. For ex. you have $8,000 to spend on Amazon advertising in a month and 500 products to advertise it on. How will you ensure that all your products are getting enough budgets to last through a day. Well, let me present to you one of the MOST effective strategies to rationalize your advertising budgets through a month, week and day: Dayparting.

If you do not want to read this complete blog, feel free to watch our video: Dayparting Framework

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. In simple words, this strategy allows you to optimize your campaigns by delivering ads when your target audience is most likely to be active and engaged.

In dayparting, you have to analyze historical data and patterns to identify specific hours or time ranges when your ads are most effective. You, then have to schedule ad campaigns to run during these high-performing time periods, while reducing or pausing ads during less active times.

For instance, if a company sells breakfast cereals, dayparting might involve increasing ad spend during the early morning hours when customers are searching for breakfast options. Not only that, customers order groceries over the weekends and skewed more towards the first weekend of the month (it being a salary day). Similarly, if a business targets working professionals, they might focus their ad delivery 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 on atom11 advertising dashboard.

Dayparting can be applied across all digital advertising platforms including google 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.

Why do Amazon Advertisers use Dayparting:

In these times of high CPC’s and low advertising efficiencies on Amazon, if you are not using dayparting, you are losing a chance to save minimum 10-15% of your budgets/d. There are various reasons why advertisers prefer to daypart their campaigns:

1. To manage competition: Amazon refreshes or resets budgets for all advertisers at midnight every day. Hence, during initial hours of the day, competition is highest for all campaigns, hence CPCs are also the highest. This behavior of high CPC during initial hours of the day is called CPC Rush. As the day progresses, and campaigns from competition start going out of budget, competition comes down, and CPCs rationalize.

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

2. To optimize Budget Allocation through the day: Advertisers with high CPC’s struggle to keep their campaigns in budget through the day. Different times of the day might see variations in customer behavior. By using dayparting, advertisers can target their ads when their audience is most active and engaged, increasing the likelihood of conversions. This way, advertisers can be in budget at the times that give them better ACOS.

For ex. a breakfast cereal company, high converting customers are on Amazon (lets assume) in mornings and evenings. Hence the advertiser could keep their campaigns off during afternoons, and ensure that they are in budget when their customers come back to Amazon in the evenings.

Limitations in setting up dayparting on Amazon Advertising Console

Setting up dayparting on Amazon Advertising console is difficult. Let me explain. To set up dayparting, you need 2 things:

(1) data to evaluate and analyze when to pause/ lower budgets or bids) and

(2) functionality to automatically take the action of pausing/ lowering budgets or bids at hour or day level.

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

It however does give you the option of setting up dayparting at day level. The feature that enables you to do the same is 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: To find out best time to set up dayparting, download last 3 months daily sales data from Seller Central and find out which days of the week gives you max sales.

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

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

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

Now, let’s go through schedule rules that help you increase/ decrease bids at certain times:

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

Dayparting with atom11:

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 dayparting for your Amazon PPC campaigns:

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

(b) You can set up one single rule for multiple campaigns, eliminating any repetitive work

(c) You can create different type of dayparting strategies for different campaigns: you can set up different dayparts for each day of the week and each hour of the day.

(d) You can easily switch a rule off or on when required

(e) You can evaluate the performance of each Dayparting rule

Setting up Dayparting with atom11:

At atom11, we have tested our dayparting strategy multiple times over and have predictably seen better ROAS and better ad sales while using dayparting. We have covered it here in “Dayparting is not only about reducing budgets: 3 secret dayparting strategies that no one will tell you”. As you would have read above, atom11 gives you the opportunity to set up dayparting at 3 levels: (a) Budgets, (b) Bids and (c) Top of Share Bidding Multiplier.

And the process of setting up dayparting on Amazon advertising campaigns is as simple as 1,2, 3. 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:

Ex.

· 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 campaigns that you want to run the rule on. You can either select all campaigns, OR select 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 it up different rules for different days of the week. See Example:

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

Dayparting doesn’t end here. The most important work comes after setting up of 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:

Best Practices:

1. The most predictable time to reduce campaign bids and budgets through dayparting is midnight to early morning hours (12 midnight – 6 am).

2. 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.

Here's some Basic Dayparting in Your Amazon Advertising Strategy.