The ability to set up an Ad Scheduling / Day-Part bidding schedule within Yahoo was long overdue – but last April it was finally delivered to its advertisers.  Months have gone by and as it did, so did the number of accounts which we audited for errors and areas for improvement; (a complementary Engine Ready service).  Eventually I started to see a pattern which may be costing numerous Yahoo! Search Marketing advertisers big.

If you use Ad Scheduling in Yahoo! Please continue to read…

When you setup the daily schedule for each of your campaigns you may or may not notice the extremely grayed out text stating:  <<Display ads based on: The audience’s time zone (default) Edit>>

If you click on the <<Edit>> button you can change this default setting to: Your Account Time Zone

Think about what this setting means and how it is going to affect your traffic.

Most of the clients where I noticed this as a problem were those who valued calls or leads submitted during normal business hours (9am-5pm).  Calls before or after this time go to an answering machine, leads sit until the next shift starts.  These inbound “Hot Leads” can not sit for long before they have no value.

Take a look at this hypothetical client and situation:

* Office Location: California (PST)
* Geo-Targeting: Entire USA
* Ad Scheduling: M-F 9am-5pm

If a Yahoo! advertiser sets up their campaign’s Ad Scheduling as listed above, they will soon start to realize that they are getting leads/Calls beginning at 7am (PST) and ending 8pm (PST)

Take a look the chart below.  It shows you in green when the office is open and in red when it is not.

Your account will be active in some part of the country for an additional 5 hours outside of your 9-5 office hours.  Up to 3 hours after you close, the entire Eastern Seaboard is still seeing your ads on Yahoo.com and their partner sites.

I can not stress enough how important it is to ensure that your Ad Scheduling settings correctly.

It is interesting that Yahoo! elected to default this setting to “Audience Time Zone” as opposed to “Account Time Zone” – A power user can certainly see how you could leverage this feature and test strategies which you are unable to do in Google nor MSN, but the vast majority of advertisers will neither take advantage of this feature nor see (in the faded gray text) that it is set up to run this way.

Did Yahoo! do it this way to maxamize their advertisers spending – by showing ads during the prime time for each time zone? Who knows…

Does anyone else have comments they wish to share about this feature?

Ad Scheduling, Yahoo