Traffic, CPC, and conversion rates fluctuate throughout the day across many categories, so some hours and days outperform others. With Amazon PPC dayparting, you can adjust your ad budgets and bids during these periods to boost sales and lower ACoS.
This guide will show you how to pinpoint when your ads are most likely to deliver a higher ROI and how to set up dayparting to maximize sales while minimizing wasted ad spend.
How Amazon PPC Dayparting Works
Amazon PPC dayparting allows you to optimize your ads by adjusting bids and budgets based on hourly or daily performance. You can increase bids and budgets during high-conversion hours, reduce them during off-peak hours, or turn off campaigns when ACoS is too high.
In the screenshot below, the product’s ACoS (green line) increases over the weekend while sales (orange line) drop. This is a good example of when dayparting could help reduce costs and improve ad efficiency.
Key Benefits of Dayparting for Amazon PPC
Dayparting optimizes your Amazon PPC campaigns by focusing ad spend on the hours that matter most. Here are two key ways it can enhance your performance:
1. Lowering ACoS & TACoS
Dayparting helps you focus your ad spend on peak hours when your CVR is highest. By scheduling ads for these high-conversion periods, you’ll get more sales per click which means you have to pay for fewer clicks for each unit sold.
Additionally, lowering bids and budgets during off-peak periods reduces wasted ad spend which helps decrease ACoS and TACoS.
2. Boosting Sales
You can also use dayparting to boost sales by aligning your ads with the times shoppers are most likely to buy.
For instance, if your product sells best in the evening, you can increase bids and budget during those hours to capture top ad placements, driving more clicks and conversions.
How to Implement Dayparting for Amazon Ads
To optimize your Amazon ads with dayparting, you can manually modify campaigns or use automation tools. Let’s break down both methods.
Manual Dayparting
To daypart manually, you can create schedule-based rules, adjust bids via bulk sheets, or pause and unpause your campaigns.
But regardless of the method you choose, you need to know when your ads perform best. This requires tracking your ad spend, ACoS, sales, and CVR via Amazon Marketing Stream.
Collect this data for 7 to 14 days to ensure accuracy.
Your peak periods are hours when you have a higher conversion rate than others or a below-average CPC. These hours will generally have a lower ACoS or higher sales than usual.
In the screenshot above, the hours in red are non-peak periods, while those in green are when ads perform best.
Once you’ve identified your peak hours, you can daypart using the three manual approaches below:
1. Using Schedule-based Rules
This method involves setting rules that allow Amazon’s system to automatically increase your budget during high-conversion periods.
To get started, go to the Campaign Manager in your Amazon Ads account.
Here, choose the campaign you want to optimize and head to the “budget rules” section.
Then, set up a schedule-based rule to increase your budget during the high-conversion periods you’ve identified.
While schedule-based rules allow you to increase your budget during peak hours, you can not automatically reduce your budget during non-peak hours using this method.
2. Adjusting Bids Using Bulk Sheets
Instead of only increasing your budget, this method allows you to increase and decrease your bids based on ad performance. Here’s how you can do this:
Start by downloading a bulk operations file from your Campaign Manager.
This file will contain all of your campaigns, ad groups, keywords, and bids, along with their current statuses and performance metrics.
To daypart during a peak period, open the spreadsheet in Excel or Google Sheets. Then, increase the bids in the bid column.
If you want to conserve your budget during a low-performance period, you can lower your bids instead.
After making these adjustments, save the updated file as a .xlsx and upload it back into the Bulk Operations tab in the Campaign Manager. Amazon will then implement the modifications across all campaigns.
When the high-performance or low-performance period ends, re-upload the original bulk sheet.
3. Change Campaign Statuses Using Bulk Sheets
Instead of adjusting bids and ad budgets, you can completely pause your campaigns during low-conversion periods using bulk sheets.
To do this, simply change the state columns of the campaigns you want to daypart to “paused”.
Next, save the updated file as a .xlsx and upload it back into the Bulk Operations tab in the Campaign Manager. Amazon will implement the modifications across all campaigns.
When the low-performance period ends, return your campaign statuses to their regular settings by re-uploading the original bulk sheet.
| Method | Pros | Cons |
| 1. Schedule-Based Rules | Easy to implement; set directly in Campaign Manager | Limited flexibility; can only increase budget, not decrease |
| No need for bulk file downloads | No bid adjustment control | |
| Automates budget increases during peak hours | Less control over non-peak hours, potentially leading to overspending | |
| 2. Adjusting Bids via Bulk Sheets | Full control over bid increases and decreases | Time-consuming; requires regular bulk file downloads and uploads |
| Highly flexible; optimizes bids during both peak and non-peak hours | Complex setup; requires thorough data analysis | |
| Cost-efficient; avoids overspending in low-performance periods | Must be manually repeated for continued optimization | |
| 3. Pausing Campaigns via Bulk Sheets | Full control over campaign activity | Time-intensive; bulk file management needed |
| Completely avoids spending during non-peak periods | Lacks granularity; might miss out on moderate performance opportunities | |
| Highly flexible; can pause campaigns during low-conversion hours | Requires frequent manual updates to keep campaigns optimized |
Another big challenge with manual dayparting is that accessing Amazon Marketing Stream requires either developing your own software to integrate the Amazon Ads API or using third-party tools with that capability.
Dayparting with Automation Software
To address the limitations of manual dayparting, automating Amazon ads dayparting with AI tools has become a necessity.
Tools like AiHello use data from Amazon Marketing Stream, which tracks ACoS, CPC, and CVR hourly. This allows the AI to identify trends and automatically adjust your bids throughout the day.
You don’t need to spend hours sifting through sales history or manually creating rules. Instead, the AI adjusts your bids intra-day based on the most profitable times for each product, ensuring that your budget is allocated efficiently.
By automating dayparting, you eliminate the manual workload, save time, and get better performance from your ads.
We used this method to decrease a client’s ACoS from 30% to 22.66% in 4 months.
Wrapping Up
Dayparting ensures your ads show up when they’re likely to perform best, reducing your ACoS and CPC while avoiding wasted ad spend.
If you want to keep your campaigns profitable without spending all your time analyzing reports and creating schedule-based rules, you should check out AiHello.
