AdSense Earnings and the Time of Day

A reader asked me yesterday to comment on a ProBlogger guest post that asserts that AdSense publishers can get higher click values by posting to their blogs earlier in the day. In this context “earlier” refers to the early morning hours — the writer being in the Eastern (GMT-5) time zone. The idea posting time is therefore sometime between midnight and 6 am.

Is it true that click values are higher in that time period? Maybe. Let's look at the variables involved:

• AdWords advertisers (remember, all the money comes from AdWords) set a daily budget for their ad campaigns.
• The AdWords “day” defaults to Pacific time (GMT-8).
• The AdSense “day” is also Pacific time.
• AdWords advertisers can optionally set their day to be
  their own time zone.
• Ad campaigns can be spread evenly across the entire AdWords “day” (the default) or else accelerated so that ads are shown as quickly as possible.
• Ad campaigns can be limited to specific time periods.
• Ad campaigns can be limited to specific regions by geography and/or language.
• Ad campaigns can specifically target either the search network (Google's search pages) or the content network (AdSense) or both and pay different prices for each.

As you can see, there are quite a few variables involved. Because of this, I don't think there's one answer that applies to everyone. Ultimately, your blog's earnings are based on the traffic to your site and when your readers typically read your postings. If your readers are mostly in EST, for example, then posting early in the “AdSense day” means you'll catch the readers who start their day with their favorite blogs. If the advertisers in your niche target the EST crowd, then yes, there would be more ads available overall early in the morning. I can see that happening.

But it all depends on the blog. This one you're reading right now gets a lot of clicks late in the AdSense day.

In other words, you need to do some experiments to see if there's an optimal time to post your blog entries. Try posting at a specific time for a week or two and see if makes a difference. Then try posting at a different time and see what happens then. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all answer for this one.

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Eric Giguere wrote Make Easy Money with Google, which is not the spammy get-rich book you might think it is, and is about to release (finally) Uncommon AdSense, a book aimed at more experienced AdSense publishers. And no, it won't be overpriced.

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