Buying traffic · also called ad scheduling, time-of-day targeting
Dayparting
Dayparting is scheduling ads to run, pause or bid differently at particular hours of the day or days of the week.
People behave differently at 3 a.m. than at 3 p.m., and so do advertisers. Dayparting lets a buyer switch campaigns off, or lower bids, in the hours that do not pay.
In search arbitrage both sides of the spread move through the day. Traffic can be cheap overnight, but the feed often pays less then too: many advertisers pause or cap their budgets outside business hours, so fewer and cheaper ads compete for each search. Late in the day and late in the month, advertiser budgets may run dry. Weekends behave differently from weekdays, especially in business-oriented verticals.
The practical method is to build an hour-by-hour table of CPC against RPC in the visitor's own time zone and act only on patterns that repeat over several weeks. Two cautions: hourly revenue from feeds is an estimate and can arrive late (see revenue reporting delay), and heavy schedule edits can push automated campaigns back into the learning phase. Many operators implement dayparting through automation rules.
An example
Say between 01:00 and 05:00 a campaign pays $0.15 per click and earns $0.12, losing $0.03 a click. Over 2,000 night clicks a week that is $60 lost. Pausing those hours lifts weekly profit by $60 with no other change.
Related terms
Geo-targeting
Geo-targeting is restricting an ad campaign to people in chosen countries, regions or cities, and excluding everyone else.
Automation rules
Automation rules are if-then instructions that pause, restart or adjust ad campaigns automatically when chosen metrics cross set thresholds.
Seasonality
Seasonality is the predictable rise and fall of traffic costs, advertiser bids and user interest at different times of the year, month or week.
RPC (revenue per click)
RPC is the average revenue earned per monetised (paid ad) click: the "sell" price in search arbitrage. Convert it to revenue per visitor (RPV) before comparing it with CPC.
Bid strategy
A bid strategy is the rule an advertiser gives an ad platform for how much to pay in each auction, from a fixed manual bid to fully automated goals.