Online Money Dot.com

I have talked a lot about Adwords over the last few months, and have mentioned how it is one of the quickest ways of getting the word out, be it on a global basis, or just to your local city. Today I want to share with you a way of saving some money with your Adwords campaigns, or at least how to get more bang for your buck. Before I get to it though, I what to go over three principal that make this work.

1. Although I never spend much time checking my Adsense stats, if you check the value of each click, you will notice that it gets lower at night. You might also have noticed that at night your Adsense ads advertise some of Google´s products (like advertisements for Adwords). This obviously all depends on your country of residence, and the budgets of the advertisers in your niche.
2. Up until recently, an advertiser had two options of spending the daily Adwords ad budget. One was to run it out as quickly as possible, the other was spread out evenly during the day. I honestly think that a vast majority of advertisers opted to spend the daily budget out evenly during the entire day. Today this is still the default Adwords setting.
3. The last thing I want you to keep in mind is that most people have daily limits on their advertising budgets, and that most likely they do not last the entire day. Depending on our niche, and on our budgets, the money might actually be spent very quickly.

Keeping in mind the points I have just made, it´s easy to see that most companie´s daily Adwords budgets are spent until they run out. Depending on the advertisers budgets, there comes a certain time in the day when there is less competition among advertisers. This will lead to lower click values towards the end of the day.

Now, assuming you have a limited budget, it makes sense that you run your campaign at night, when there is less competition among advertisers. While it is not the only factor in calculating per click costs, the competition among advertisers is undoutably one of the most important ones.

Less advertisers = Less competition = Lower click costs

Until recently, to run your ads only at night you had to “manual” pause and activate your campaigns. Today these setting can be preset, for your ads to run at specific times of the day, and you can even have different setting for each day of the week.

To do this go to your Adwords account and choose “edit campaign settings”, followed by “advanced options”, and “Turn on Ad scheduling”. After you have chosen your local time zone, all you need to do is select at which time you want your ads to run. As you can see form the screenshot, my ads are scheduled to run between 7 PM and midnight.

I have used this technique with very good results in some instances, but ultimately it depends who your advertising competitors are. This is influenced by where you live, your niche, and of course the daily ad budget of your competitors.