Hourly Optimization: What’s the best time to advertise on Amazon?
The simple answer to when to advertise is when your buyers are shopping. Today, advertisers buy ads by the time they think their buyers are tuned in to media, a common tactic across TV and the web called dayparting. Quartile helps online sellers, who live or die by in the moment sales, optimize when campaigns buy ads with powerful algorithms and machine learning based on historical and real-time sales data.
In this post, we’ll describe how Quartile leverages exclusive Amazon capabilities and data to automate bid strategies for pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to optimize spend on the times that your account sees the highest conversion rates and sales.
What is Dayparting?
Dayparting is a pay-per-click (PPC) advertising tactic by which you schedule ads for certain times of the day or certain days of the week to more effectively target audiences. (Source: Wordstream) For example, a coffee brand schedules ads in the morning, while a supplement company may schedule ads for a sleep aid before bedtime.
Why is automatic hourly optimization better than dayparting for e-commerce sellers?
With online and mobile e-commerce, shoppers can buy at the drop of a hat. Many of these situations are predictable and depend on your product catalog. Modern tools like digital advertising allow sellers to put their products in front of shoppers during those critical moments. However, most of the Amazon Advertising tools require a heavily manual process of updating ad groups and bid strategies to win more impressions during crucial times versus other parts of the day.
Most Amazon Advertising guides for manual optimization recommend checking and updating your bid strategies every week. Those weekly updates don’t account for daily changes, let alone hourly, and may be leaving an enormous amount of sales on the table. Most sellers don’t have time to manage their Amazon Advertising PPC campaigns once they are selling many products, which is where automatic optimization powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning really shines.
How do dayparting and hourly optimization work with Quartile?
Quartile’s advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning platform connects and optimizes our clients’ PPC campaigns based on both historical and real-time sales data direct from your account. With enough sales and ad volume, the platform can learn when your customers are most likely to buy, 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, and automatically bids on and wins more ads during high conversion rate periods to increase your total sales.
To revisit our coffee advertiser, dayparting would dictate an increase in their bid amounts during the morning hours, when their shoppers are having their morning coffee and might need to re-up coffee supplies. However, Quartile’s machine learning platform might find a significant bump in organic coffee sales on Thursday at 3 pm. The system would automatically redistribute bids and spend to this new high converting time period, doubling down on organic sales and increasing their advertising attributed sales. In addition to the increased sales, the ads are purchased when other coffee advertisers may be bidding down, meaning that Quartile’s client wins the afternoon inventory at a discount compared to its morning bids.
Hourly conversion rates can also vary by day of the week. For example, on weekends, conversion rates lag behind weekdays by about two hours, peak toward mid-day, and remain elevated until about 8 pm. One retailer, focusing on grilling and barbecue accessories, relies on Quartile to find pockets of times with high sales volumes by the hour to increase both the value and the frequency of their bids in the lead up to the weekend to ensure they don’t miss out on any potential sales.
Quartile’s hourly optimization technology works seamlessly with the platform’s best-in-class artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to improve your sales and hit your advertising cost of sales (ACoS) targets. This feature is now available to all Quartile clients, empowering higher sales and more efficiency with advertising spend.
Think your sales could be missing opportunities at peak hours? Reach out to a Quartile expert and schedule a demo today!
Originally published at http://www.quartile.com.
