Yes, I know this is my third post tonight, but I can't resist because this is big news for Google especially if you are in the financial services category. According to Search Engine Watch, New Google AdWords Dayparting and Ad Scheduling Coming. It seems that the author of the post Jennifer Slegg caught up with Google's Michael Mayzel at a conference and asked him to give her a rundown of new features (BTW - I'm pretty sure I worked with Michael on a number of Google PR initiatives while I was at Harridirect). Google is expected to roll out in the next month, the following key changes (there are others, but this is what I care about):
- Ad scheduling allows advertisers to run their ads and modify their bids based on time of day as well as intra-day and intra-week cycles in campaign performance.
- Small business and local advertisers can now schedule their ads to run only during business hours.
- More sophisticated advertisers can now better capture & exploit intra-day and intra-week cycles of buyer behavior.
Ok, why is this BIG news, especially for financial services advertisers? Simple, the traffic dies down during the weekend and slows down considerably after hours during the week. That pattern was one of the reasons I could not see paying millions of dollars to AOL to market in their rainman platform to customers that could not access AOL during the work day (how many offices let users access AOL via their old platform). You see if you were an active trader, why would you wait to the end of the day when you got home to monitor your investments? The answer is you wouldn't and were elsewhere during the workday. So, that's why this announcement by Google is so critical.
Any financial services advertiser should turn this functionality on the minute Google does. That way, they heavy up between Monday and Friday during the work day to capture the customer when they are engaged the most. You should have a small window of opportunity to take advantage of this change before your competitors do. I'd also assume that several other industries would experience the opposite effect.
Don't wait very long to implement this. I can guarantee you that any of my clients, especially the financial services, will implement this feature ASAP. Thank you Google and PardonMyFrench,
Eric
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