When’s the last time you canceled your 10am meeting on a Tuesday because you really needed to catch up on your news? Aside from a few careers that might require this sort of activity, I’d imagine the answer is probably never.
While you’ve probably never disrupted your schedule for content, it probably does live there somewhere, regardless of whether or not it’s on your calendar. Your commute times, your lunch break, or the time you spend sipping your Saturday morning coffee could all be times of the day that you’ve built up a strong content consumption habit.
Content consumption habits are strong, and there’s good reason for marketers to take notice of the time of day their target audience is consuming their content. This is why we use all sorts of targeting tactics to reach an audience.
Where is your audience, when are they reading, and why are they reading? These are all questions marketers need to answer in order to build effective campaigns.
With the Taboola campaign scheduler, you can now determine exactly what times you want your audience to see your campaigns.
When is the best time for you to target your audience?
By-hour targeting is the capability for advertisers to target content campaigns on specific dates or time of day.
This can be useful for a lot of reasons, like the holidays, campaign launches, or just optimization after realizing a specific time your content tends to convert.
It’s effective—according to a study done by Kantar Millward Brown and published by eMarketer, targeting specific time of day for certain age groups can lead to more conversions.
If you’re looking for the best time to target the most amount of people to view your content, we found that in the United States, the best time of day to target your content was between the hours of 11am and 1pm—a lunch break for most.
For the best optimization, the time of day depends on you—test your audience, and your content topics and types, to discover the reading patterns that will make you truly successful.
This is how to get started with hour targeting.
Marketers can run campaigns with different t cost-per-click (CPC) based on their cost per acquisition (CPA) during these different days, or at different times of the day.
For example, if you know you’re up against more competition during certain hours of the day, you can run another campaign with a more competitive CPC to reflect this accordingly, while still staying within your target CPA.
We allow marketers to exclude or include a day completely, or set specific hours for your campaign to run during that day. Timezone targeting is also included.
In order to get started, navigate to the ‘campaign summary’ report, and click on the “By Day of Week” tab. There, you can see how your campaigns are performing on, say, the average Wednesday.
To focus a campaign on one day or parts of the day, navigate to the ‘campaign management’ page in Backstage. From there, use the Custom Campaign Schedule capabilities to target by hour and timezone.
Again though, we really can’t stress this enough—test, test, test. Factors like demographics, timezone, and digital behavior all affect campaign success—you’ll be the most successful responding to insights you gather and you optimize future campaigns.