Campaign Planning Strategies
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Hi, I am Jessica, a senior client success manager at AdOmni, and today I’m going to go over day parting—what day parting is, how to use day parting, and why you should be using day parting.
To start, once you are logged into your account, you can see your campaign dashboard, and while editing a campaign, we do encourage you to use day parting in most scenarios. Day parting lets you control when your ads will appear for a specific venue type and helps you reach your audience during the most relevant time of day for that venue type or for your campaign purpose. For example, if you are promoting a lunch special, you may only want your ads to run during the hours leading up to lunchtime across all of the venue types in your campaign. Or if you have a limited budget and want higher frequency, adding day parting to only play ads during specific times of the day can increase your frequency throughout your campaign flight, rather than spending freely at times like three in the morning when fewer people are out to see it.
To get to day parting, we’re going to open up a campaign that we are editing. Let’s start a new campaign real quick for this example. To illustrate day parting, I’m going to put in a basic location—let’s say Las Vegas—and a couple venue types: bar restaurants, bar restaurant TV, digital billboards, and gyms. Once we add our venue types, we’ll see our key metrics bar adjust to those specific venue types and that location. Then we can put in a schedule of a week and a budget of a thousand dollars. This is where day parting really comes into play, and we’ll be able to edit it on the campaign details tab. Looking at the key metrics bar, if we did not include day parting, we can see our screen utilization is pretty low since we have a limited budget for a week across a ton of devices. We can also remove devices that are unable to play during our dates, which may help screen utilization a bit.
Now, to illustrate the difference between day parting and the start and end time: the start time of a campaign only applies to the first day of the campaign, and the end time only applies to the very last day. So if you needed your campaign to start at 9:00 AM on the 10th for a specific announcement, you would change the start time to 9:00 AM. And if you needed your campaign to end by 6:00 PM on the last day because something begins later that night, you would set the end time to 6:00 PM. But if you want your ad to play at specific times each day across the full flight, that’s where day parting rules come into effect. We have a handy tool called Apply Peak Hours, where you can click a button and automatically apply the most common hours based on our historical data for each venue type. For example, bar restaurants may default to 5:00 PM to 10:00 PM only. For digital billboards, common day parting times often include rush hour windows—like weekdays from 7:00 AM to 9:00 AM and 5:00 PM to 9:00 PM, and weekends from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM. You can always edit these rules. For instance, you could extend a digital billboard window to 3:00 PM to 9:00 PM, or choose to run every day from 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM and remove other settings. As you adjust day parting, the key metrics bar updates based on your campaign selections. You’ll also see your screen utilization improve because you’re prioritizing the times of day when your ads are more likely to be seen, helping your budget go further.
Day parting is fully optional and ultimately depends on your client’s preferences, but if they don’t have a specific request, we still encourage using it to save time and money. Day parting helps align with your audience’s daily routines, improve engagement, and maximize your budget by focusing spend during the most impactful hours. One last thing to note: day parting is enacted in each device’s local time zone. So if your campaign spans multiple time zones, a device in California will follow the 7:00 AM to 10:00 PM window in Pacific Time, while a device in Miami will follow that same window in Eastern Time. The schedule start and end times, however, follow the specific time zone you selected for the campaign. So if you’re located in Central Time but running a campaign in California, you would want to change the selected time zone to Pacific Time. Please reach out to your CSM if you have any questions.