• by Shankar Gupta , June 16, 2006

Search giant Google today will upgrade AdWords by allowing advertisers to change bids or deactivate campaigns at different times during the day.

Richard Holden, director of product management for Google, said that the feature would allow advertisers to more granularly target advertisements at their audience. "You could think of a major apparel maker for professional sports wanting to target 4 p.m.-7 p.m. on Sundays when people are watching football--wanting to boost their bids during that time of day," he said.

In addition, Holden said, advertisers can use the data from Google Analytics to optimize their campaigns for different times of day. "We see good connections here with tools like Google analytics, where an advertiser can be gathering very detailed statistics from their Web site and can take that data and turn around to a tool like ad scheduling to maximize their ROI."

David Berkowitz, director of strategic planning for search engine marketing firm 360i, said that dayparting will likely prove useful for search marketers. "Dayparting can help marketers better align their campaigns with their overall marketing strategy," he said. "For instance, if a marketer's running a major TV campaign in prime time, and they want to make sure they don't burn through their search budget first thing in the morning."

MSN already offers ad scheduling in its paid search platform, adCenter, while Yahoo is expected to soon include the feature.