A Look at Dayparting and Weekparting in Amazon PPC

January 6, 2021
By The Badger

In the game of Amazon PPC, wasted ad spend is an unavoidable occupational hazard. There will be times and days where you bid on your keywords, but you don’t get clicks and orders because your audience isn’t there. What if there is another way? What if you could see exactly when you get results, and bid only during those times?

Enter dayparting and weekparting. They’re amazing…in theory.

What are Dayparting and Weekparting?

If those words sound familiar to you, it’s because this is a mega-hot topic in certain Amazon PPC circles. In fact, if you say “dayparting and weekparting” three times into a mirror at midnight, a self-proclaimed “PPC guru” will appear and tell you that you need $1 million in budget and a 3% ACOS. Warning: do not try this at home.

Dayparting and weekparting are essentially ways to take a more granular look at your data. Dayparting splits up the day into hours, and weekparting splits the week up into days. This allows you to see how your metrics change hour by hour and day by day and adjust your bidding strategy accordingly. You can bid more when you tend to get clicks and orders and bid less when you tend not to get clicks and orders.

If done correctly, dayparting and weekparting are in theory incredible ways to hyper-optimize your bidding strategy.

Why are we saying these are great in theory and not in reality? Read on.

The Reality of Amazon Dayparting and Weekparting

Now that we’ve talked up dayparting and weekparting, we have to tell you the sad truth. We’ll try to let you down gently.

Unfortunately, there are currently no ways to take a good look at this data in Amazon. The closest thing we have in all of Amazon Advertising is DSP’s audience options.

The whole reason dayparting and weekparting are as revered as they are is because the necessary data does exist in Google Ads. Google Ads presents this data in a grid form, where you can directly compare your KPIs from hour to hour and from day to day. Then, if you get more clicks and conversions during a certain time of day, you can bid more during that time, and vice versa.

This tells us that with the needed information, dayparting and weekparting can be legitimately useful strategies, but that doesn’t change the fact that there’s no way to confidently say exactly when to bid more aggressively in Amazon Advertising.

It sucks, and we have our fingers crossed for dayparting and weekparting data in Amazon in the near future.

We do currently have a bit of a substitute for bona fide dayparting and weekparting: according to the mastermind behind Sponsored Products, dynamic up-and-down only bidding takes variations in time and behavior into account. For example, the more a customer browses, the more likely they are to convert, so dynamic up takes note of that and shows them your ad.

The Perils of Amazon Dayparting and Weekparting

Some try to get around this lack of data by using only their order data to daypart and weekpart, but this is very dangerous. If you were to bid only when you get orders, you could end up shooting yourself in the foot in a major way.

Say you get all of your orders between 5 PM and 7 PM. That might be the result of some people shopping after work and buying your product, while some of your customers shop during their lunch break or their commute, click on your product, and then purchase it after work. By only bidding during that 5 – 7PM slot when you get orders, you’re blocking out that entire latter segment of your consumer base.

Because we don’t have that click-conversion data, diving headfirst into dayparting and weekparting could completely kneecap your entire campaign strategy.

Another tactic used by Amazon sellers who absolutely, positively need their weekparting fix is to download their Amazon Advertising reports and find their average ACOS, conversion rate, etc. for every instance of one particular day of the week.

This takes us right back to that earlier hiccup of assuming your clicks have the same distribution as your orders. You could have a customer that clicks on your ad, puts the product in their cart, but then waits a few days until they have more products in their cart so that they can save on shipping. An Amazon seller would only see the day the order was placed.

Not only can you not be sure that your orders and clicks are in the same time window, you don’t necessarily know that the ad that got the click is the same one that got the order. While there’s a decent chance that it is, it’s not 100%.

For example, let’s say you have a Sponsored Display ad that is an absolute rock star at garnering awareness and clicks, but your Sponsored Products ad is better at generating those actual orders. If you were to focus your ad spend mainly on those Sponsored Products ads, you would be leaving your upper funnel out to dry. You would see fewer conversions as a whole because you wouldn’t be giving your Display ad the resources it needs to garner awareness and move people down the purchasing funnel.

Seasonality can throw a wrench in your dayparting and weekparting efforts as well. Let’s say you had an ad that a lot of people click during their lunch break, then order after work. That information would have become a lot less useful when everyone made the move to working from home in March.

Key Takeaways

In conclusion, while the concept of dayparting and weekparting can get some Amazon sellers frothing at the mouth, it’s not the PPC panacea they make it out to be. The data necessary for dayparting and weekparting is currently not available in any Amazon reports. Even if it was, pulling off dayparting and weekparting successfully is a lot more nuanced than it first appears.

Ultimately, we don’t suggest trying to apply dayparting to your Amazon PPC campaigns. Hours of the day and days of the week are just two of the countless variables that can affect your performance. By putting too much emphasis on those two variables, you wind up possibly ignoring others that could be having a much bigger impact on your metrics.

In short, until Amazon gives us the necessary tools and data to make effective dayparting and weekparting possible, don’t attempt it in your campaigns. There’s just too much room for error, and you could easily end up regretting it. Trust the data and tools you have right now to help make your decisions and you’ll be glad you did.