When is the Best Time to Run Digital Ads?
In time ages past, businesses that wanted to advertise had very few options and virtually no control over how their messages would be delivered. You’d take out an ad in a newspaper or magazine in the area where you operate, crossing your fingers and waiting eagerly for your beeper to go off.
Today, things are a lot different thanks to digital advertising. One of the biggest differences between classic advertising and digital advertising is the incredible level of control you have over every aspect of your campaign. Digital advertising allows you to fine-tune your message and manage your target audience so you can dial in your campaign and maximize its ROI.
One of the key aspects that digital advertising gives you is direct control over timing. While timing is something that can go overlooked by many new advertisers, it is an essential piece of the advertising puzzle that can drastically impact the optimization of your ad spend. This begs the question:
What is the Best Time to Run Digital Ads?
The short answer: it depends. There is no single ideal time for digital advertising that will work for everyone. Unfortunately, advertising isn’t all that simple. As such, it’s imperative that you perform your due diligence to analyze your audience and discover when your optimal timing windows are.
Google Analytics is an excellent tool for diving into the stats of your website’s performance, but making the most of it requires a smidge of expertise and some effort. This post provides a walkthrough on how to use Google Analytics to create a timing “heatmap” that shows your website’s hourly and daily activity levels.
Tracking site activity is great for seeing when the majority of your audience is on your site, but looking at things like conversion timing will also help you better understand how your site is performing in any given time period. However, it’s important to realize that not all traffic acts the same, and a key differentiator is often from where that traffic originated.
If 10AM to 2 PM on Wednesday is your best conversion window, you might want to double down and time your ads to coincide with your peak performance hours. But traffic that comes from ads might not act the same as your organic traffic, and if you only time ads for those peak windows, you’ll never know if a different timing window might be better for ad traffic.
This is why testing is such an important aspect of managing your marketing campaigns. While your ads may seem like they’re performing well enough, it’s impossible to know for sure that a different timing window or a tweak to your ad’s copy might make a bigger impact overall.
Testing is Key for Marketing Success
Your optimal ad timing windows might be completely different depending on the ad itself or where it’s being served. For instance, optimal Facebook and Google advertising timings could vary drastically depending on your niche and your target audience. This is where things like A/B testing come into play, so you can analyze the performance of your digital ads with a broader perspective that takes the whole picture into account.
At Cardinal Marketing, we employ our marketing expertise to help organizations maximize their ROI for their ad spend so they can find the audience they deserve. Making the most of digital advertising is a process of trial and error, but expert guidance can drastically speed up the process and improve the final results. Get in touch with us to learn more about how digital ads can help your business grow.
