Spreading out ad delivery in AdWords

Posted by Josh on Tuesday, May 16th, 2006.

AdWords has recently added a new method for ad rotation that spreads ad impressions out over the course of a day.

Previously your ads would be shown until your daily budget ran out. If your daily budget wasn’t high enough to cover the entire day, the ads would stop running. Among other problems, this resulted in west coast markets being exposed less to advertisements due to earlier exposure to the east coast and corresponding depletion of the ad budget part way through the west coast day.

AdWords now provides an option to spread the budget over the course of the day, showing your ad intermittently to try and preserve your budget while still keeping some impressions running at all hours. This new method is presumably based upon past campaign performance, which means it may take some time for the system to “figure out” the proper spacing for new campaigns or after significant changes.

We are just starting to implement the new ad placement strategy, so we don’t know yet how effective it is at hitting the daily target by the end of the day, or if ad spacing really is as even as we’d like (it may need to “catch up” on slow days with many impressions late). If we see notable behavior, we’ll write about it here in the blog.