Amazon PPC Dayparting: An Expert's Guide

What is Amazon PPC Dayparting? 

Dayparting is an advertising strategy that allows you to enhance your performance based on specific times of day and/or days of the week. 

Dayparting allows you to bid higher during high-performing times and lower during low-performing periods. 

Dayparting enables you to optimize your ACOS on an hourly basis. After all, CPCs swing all day. We discovered that CPCs are generally lower at night. So, if your ACOS remains low at night, it may be worthwhile to bid higher by the evening. If you want to to implement Amazon PPC Dayparting in your business then you should take this service from a professional amazon marketing agency. 

Amazon PPC Dayparting

What does Amazon Marketing Stream have to do with this? 

Dayparting has gained respect since 2022, when Amazon introduced an API called Amazon Marketing Stream. Amazon Marketing Stream provided hourly data on advertisers' performance. This makes it much easier to track how your advertisements worked throughout the day. 

But what are the most effective tactics for Amazon PPC dayparting? How can you daypart on a larger scale? How can issues like attribution windows affect your data?

If you're ready to become an Amazon dayparting strategy master, continue reading.

When is the optimum time of day to conduct a PPC ad on Amazon? 

Spoiler: There is no single answer. The best time of day to run PPC advertising on Amazon depends heavily on the goods you sell and the target audience. 

Let us consider some possible examples. Coffee brands will generally have the best success advertising in the morning, when consumers are most inclined to think about coffee. 

Let's pretend you sell coffee beans. Shoppers are more inclined to reorder a new bag in the early morning hours. That might make 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. an ideal time for your advertising. 

Similarly, suppose you market sleep aids or sleep-related supplements. The biggest conversion rates are likely to occur late at night. This is when shoppers are most likely to experience sleepiness. Some people may vent their aggravation into a late-night purchase. 

However, these are just hypotheticals. The only method to determine the best time to bid on Amazon PPC advertisements is to analyze the Amazon Marketing Stream data. When you use Intentwise Ad Optimizer to control your bids, you can easily monitor your ACOS and other metrics by hour and day of the week. 

At a glance, you can discover when your advertising expenditure is most effective. 

Then, if you discover a time when your ACOS is at its peak, you can easily set up an automated rule to bid higher during those hours. The best part is that you can do everything straight on our site. 

What PPC dayparting blunders do I make? 

The most common mistake we see: don't overspend. 

For years, we at Intentwise have been analyzing Amazon Marketing Stream data. We discovered that CPCs tend to decrease toward the end of the day. This is because advertising squander their daily money by the evening. 

Bidding on keywords becomes less competitive—and less expensive—at night. 

The good news is that knowing how to stay within budget during the day can offer up a lot of chances for your brand. Lower CPCs at night do not necessarily indicate that shoppers are not making purchases at night. If you're intelligent, you can reach your customers for significantly less money at night by using dayparting. You simply need to be strategic while reviewing Amazon Marketing Stream data. 

You must also keep your daily spending inside your budget. How do you do this? Either increase your daily budget or lower your bids. If you want someone to implement PPC dayparting in your business then you can take these amazon advertising services from a professional PPC agency.

Can I daypart directly through Amazon? 

Initially, dayparting tactics could only be used if you worked with an API partner who had access to Amazon Marketing Stream. That changed in 2023, when Amazon added dayparting functionality directly to the Amazon Ad Console. 

Amazon now allows you to daypart using a tool called "With Schedule Rules." Basically, the "Schedule Rules" option allows you to automatically alter your bids based on the time of day. If you decide that 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. on Wednesday is your peak time, you can automatically bid higher during those two hours. 

What are the limits of Amazon's native dayparting tool? 

However, Amazon's native dayparting tool is limited in many ways. One of the most significant constraints is that you can only bid up using Amazon's "Schedule Rules" function. 

Let me repeat: you can only utilize Amazon's native dayparting feature to increase your bid during peak hours. If you detect periods when your advertisements perform poorly, you cannot bid down via the Ad Console. 

The inability to bid down reduces the utility of Amazon's Ad Console dayparting technology. A smart dayparting approach, after all, is dynamic: you bid higher during high-performing times of the day and lower during low-performing times. 

The only way to bid dynamically is through an API provider such as Intentwise. In our Ad Optimizer tool, you can easily design automatic rules to optimize your bids based on the time of day.

Another disadvantage of Amazon's native dayparting tool is that it is tough to view your hourly results. You can see this real-time performance statistics by going to the Sponsored Products Campaign Report and selecting "Hourly" as your time unit. However, in order to observe this in real time, you must download reports regularly. 

A tidy dashboard makes it much easier to view hourly performance data. You will need to collaborate with a partner such as Intentwise to accomplish this.

Does PPC dayparting take attribution windows into consideration? 

We adore Amazon Marketing Stream. However, we believe that all marketers should understand exactly what Amazon Marketing Stream is tracking so that they may appropriately execute dayparting. 

We see this most clearly when it comes to advertising attribution windows. Amazon Marketing Stream displays the exact time of day and week when a shopper interacted with your ad. Conversions, on the other hand, are reported according to the hour when the credited click happened. 

Let's imagine a customer viewed your melatonin advertisement at 11 p.m. on Tuesday. Perhaps they bought from you right then and there. But perhaps they waited a day and a half, until Thursday morning, to make their buy. 

Amazon Marketing Stream will not show you such details. Conversion data is updated daily, weekly, and monthly, therefore there may be a delay in reporting credited ad sales when analyzing Amazon Marketing Stream data.

How does Time to Conversion impact PPC dayparting? 

The disparity between ad view and actual purchase is more significant for some brands than others. Snack brands, for example, tend to have a fairly short time to conversion. In other words, individuals likely to purchase those items immediately after seeing an advertisement. 

In comparison, luxury companies have a longer time to conversion. Shoppers may wait days after seeing an advertisement before making a buy, partly because it is much more expensive. 

Understanding your Time To Conversion is crucial to any dayparting strategy. If your product has a long Time to Conversion, hourly ad performance data will not capture all of the nuances at play. 

Big picture: While hourly-level data is useful, you should still examine numerous days or weeks of data at the hourly grain to detect patterns in ACOS. Looking at a single day may bias the results due to delayed attribution.

Do you want to know the time to conversion for your products? Intentwise Explore, our platform that powers Amazon Marketing Cloud, makes it simple to gain access to these insights and many others. Choose our pre-written Time to Conversion query, choose the ASINs of interest, and watch as your results load instantly, with no SQL required.