Boost your Adwords conversions based on times of best performance
Posted: Wed Jan 22, 2025 6:04 am
1. Why do we propose making hourly bid adjustments?
Although Google today allows many bidding strategies and automations so that you don't have to "worry" about scheduling ads, because in principle it can automatically and based on data, choose the best options for hours, days and bid adjustments to show your ads, we cannot deny that Google's business is based on advertising revenue and this, in a way, means that the more your business invests (or spends) on Google Ads, the better...
This is why we want to offer you a way for you to be the one in control of scheduling your ads based on results. So if you are interested in learning how to do it or at least how to tell your agency to do it, we will explain it to you step by step.
2. How to look at the days and hours with the most and cheapest conversions
The first thing you need to do is access the Google Ads account with which you manage your business campaigns.
There you will have to access the Statistics and Reports panel and from there to the Report Editor and create a new report by clicking on the + Create report button :
Measure with us!
We will need 2 custom reports:
1 – To see the days with the highest conversions and the cheapest conversions.
2 – To see the hours of the day with the most conversions and the cheapest conversions.
2.1. Report by day
We are going to create this report by accessing the Report Editor as we already electrical contractors email lists mentioned and from there, we are going to select the type of graph or table that we want to generate from the drop-down menu, making sure that the chosen format allows us to show 1 dimension and 2 metrics. I have chosen this column graph so that the example is very visual, but the ideal would be to create it with a table and export it to manage it from Excel or Google Sheets:
Once we have chosen the type of graph, we must add as a dimension: Day of the week on the X axis and as metrics: Cost/Conv. and Conversions on the Y axis , as can be seen in the following image:
This allows us to have a graph, which once we have selected the campaigns in which we want to apply it and the time interval, will show us the days with a lower Cost per conversion (in blue in the graph) and the number of conversions (in red).
As quick conclusions, we can see that Mondays and Saturdays are the days with the highest conversion costs, followed by Sunday. We can also see that the days with the fewest conversions are Saturdays, followed by Fridays and Sundays. And finally, we can see that Wednesdays are the days with the most conversions and also with the lowest cost per conversion. That is, based on this data, we could adjust the bids to increase by x% on Wednesdays (and thus gain a higher share of impressions on a day of cheap conversions) and reduce them on Saturdays, when the cost per conversion is the highest and the number of conversions is the lowest.
In this same report, we could play with metrics such as conversion % for example or make a table with the metrics: Impressions, Clicks, Conversion Cost, and export everything to an Excel that allows us to make the complete funnel from the impression of the ad to the conversion, with its % and see the variations per day. I'll leave this for you to experiment with on your own.
2.1. Hourly Report
Let's create a second report that will look like this:
Measure with us!
We will select the table to see the data and add the dimension: Hour of day as a Row and the metrics: Impressions, Clicks, CTR and Conversions (by conversion time) as columns .
This allows us to obtain a table that shows us the hours of the day and all the metrics segmented for each hour. Here is a small screenshot of some hours of the day in the table:
It is more than clear that the hours between 3am and 7am in this example, although they have a high CTR (probably due to the low competition at that time), have very few conversions, and the hours between 9am and 1pm, although they considerably lower the CTR, have a greater number of conversions.
If we add cost per conversion and conversion % data to this table, we can have a very powerful tool that allows us to select the times of day to adjust bids up or down.
3. Adjust bids based on reporting data
Now that you have created your reports and played with the data from the different metrics, exported the tables and filtered them in Excel, you will surely have a very clear image of possible bid adjustments that can be made on different days and times.
To do this, simply access the ad scheduling:
And from there make the % adjustments based on how much you want to increase in certain hours/days and how much you want to reduce:
We won't go into much detail in this section because it's very simple. We'll just say that you have to first think about the blocks of hours in which you want to make adjustments for each day, then group the days and generate them at the ad scheduling level. For example, if on a Wednesday I want to do the following: – From 00:00 to 07:00 do not place ads – From 07:00 to 09:00 leave the normal bid – From 9:00 to 15:00 increase the bid – From 15:00 to 00:00 leave the normal bid
Although Google today allows many bidding strategies and automations so that you don't have to "worry" about scheduling ads, because in principle it can automatically and based on data, choose the best options for hours, days and bid adjustments to show your ads, we cannot deny that Google's business is based on advertising revenue and this, in a way, means that the more your business invests (or spends) on Google Ads, the better...
This is why we want to offer you a way for you to be the one in control of scheduling your ads based on results. So if you are interested in learning how to do it or at least how to tell your agency to do it, we will explain it to you step by step.
2. How to look at the days and hours with the most and cheapest conversions
The first thing you need to do is access the Google Ads account with which you manage your business campaigns.
There you will have to access the Statistics and Reports panel and from there to the Report Editor and create a new report by clicking on the + Create report button :
Measure with us!
We will need 2 custom reports:
1 – To see the days with the highest conversions and the cheapest conversions.
2 – To see the hours of the day with the most conversions and the cheapest conversions.
2.1. Report by day
We are going to create this report by accessing the Report Editor as we already electrical contractors email lists mentioned and from there, we are going to select the type of graph or table that we want to generate from the drop-down menu, making sure that the chosen format allows us to show 1 dimension and 2 metrics. I have chosen this column graph so that the example is very visual, but the ideal would be to create it with a table and export it to manage it from Excel or Google Sheets:
Once we have chosen the type of graph, we must add as a dimension: Day of the week on the X axis and as metrics: Cost/Conv. and Conversions on the Y axis , as can be seen in the following image:
This allows us to have a graph, which once we have selected the campaigns in which we want to apply it and the time interval, will show us the days with a lower Cost per conversion (in blue in the graph) and the number of conversions (in red).
As quick conclusions, we can see that Mondays and Saturdays are the days with the highest conversion costs, followed by Sunday. We can also see that the days with the fewest conversions are Saturdays, followed by Fridays and Sundays. And finally, we can see that Wednesdays are the days with the most conversions and also with the lowest cost per conversion. That is, based on this data, we could adjust the bids to increase by x% on Wednesdays (and thus gain a higher share of impressions on a day of cheap conversions) and reduce them on Saturdays, when the cost per conversion is the highest and the number of conversions is the lowest.
In this same report, we could play with metrics such as conversion % for example or make a table with the metrics: Impressions, Clicks, Conversion Cost, and export everything to an Excel that allows us to make the complete funnel from the impression of the ad to the conversion, with its % and see the variations per day. I'll leave this for you to experiment with on your own.
2.1. Hourly Report
Let's create a second report that will look like this:
Measure with us!
We will select the table to see the data and add the dimension: Hour of day as a Row and the metrics: Impressions, Clicks, CTR and Conversions (by conversion time) as columns .
This allows us to obtain a table that shows us the hours of the day and all the metrics segmented for each hour. Here is a small screenshot of some hours of the day in the table:
It is more than clear that the hours between 3am and 7am in this example, although they have a high CTR (probably due to the low competition at that time), have very few conversions, and the hours between 9am and 1pm, although they considerably lower the CTR, have a greater number of conversions.
If we add cost per conversion and conversion % data to this table, we can have a very powerful tool that allows us to select the times of day to adjust bids up or down.
3. Adjust bids based on reporting data
Now that you have created your reports and played with the data from the different metrics, exported the tables and filtered them in Excel, you will surely have a very clear image of possible bid adjustments that can be made on different days and times.
To do this, simply access the ad scheduling:
And from there make the % adjustments based on how much you want to increase in certain hours/days and how much you want to reduce:
We won't go into much detail in this section because it's very simple. We'll just say that you have to first think about the blocks of hours in which you want to make adjustments for each day, then group the days and generate them at the ad scheduling level. For example, if on a Wednesday I want to do the following: – From 00:00 to 07:00 do not place ads – From 07:00 to 09:00 leave the normal bid – From 9:00 to 15:00 increase the bid – From 15:00 to 00:00 leave the normal bid