Google AdWords - Ad scheduling announced

May 25th, 2006

In the neighbourhood of Microsoft at Search Engine Watch Live last week, Google unusually for them announced a service upgrade before it goes live. From June this year AdWords customers will be able to schedule their adverts to run only at weekends, or weekdays.. or in fact on different days of the week. They’ll also be able to narrow their advertising down to displaying at certain times of day.. or to set different maximum bids for different times or days. Mike Mayzel from Google gave the following information to SEW -

• We are releasing this ad scheduling functionality at the request of advertisers and agencies who have asked for greater campaign management control.
• AdWords’ new ad scheduling functionality will enable advertisers to drive greater returns from AdWords by providing them with more granular control over when their ads run and how much they bid.
• 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.
• We are planning to role it out to all advertisers next month.

The move comes shortly after the launch of Microsoft adCenter - which offers this kind of targeting and much more in the way of demographics. It seems that the big G see adCenter enough of a threat to implement some of it’s features into their industry leading offering.