Amazon PPC dayparting: find the hours that waste your budget

Amazon PPC dayparting means changing your bids and budgets by hour of day, so spend lands in the hours that convert instead of the ones that don’t. Find those hours in Amazon’s hourly reporting, then use schedule-based bid and budget rules to raise bids and budgets in the hours that sell, keeping base bids at the level that suits the rest of the day.

What is dayparting on Amazon?

Dayparting is the practice of setting different bids or budgets for different times of day. On Amazon, it used to be manual work. Amazon itself describes how Sponsored Products advertisers “used campaign manager to adjust their bids multiple times a day” to capture different performance on different days of the week.

The console can now do part of that for you. Schedule-based bid rules let advertisers increase bids “at specific times of the day, days of the week, and date ranges.” Budget rules can also increase budget at specific times of day for Sponsored Ads campaigns.

Why does your daily budget run out at the wrong time?

Because Amazon doesn’t spread it across the day for you. On Sponsored Products, “Daily budgets are not paced throughout the day, meaning a smaller daily budget could be spent in a few minutes if there are a large number of shoppers interested in your advertised products.”

Once the money is gone, the ads stop. Amazon says that once a campaign is out of budget, its ads won’t be eligible to show until the daily budget resets at midnight. If your budget is spent by mid-morning, you are absent from the evening, however well the evening converts.

Amazon puts a number on the cost. It reports, from its own 2020 data, that advertisers who ran out of budget could have generated 18.7% of additional sales on average had they stayed in budget. Its definition counts Sponsored Products campaigns that were out of budget at least half the time.

There is some flexibility on busy days: Amazon’s daily budgeting policy lets you choose to spend up to 100% more than the average daily budget on any given day. That helps with spikes, but it doesn’t decide which hours the money goes to.

How do you find your best and worst hours?

Read your campaigns by the hour. Amazon points advertisers to hourly performance reporting “to find the times of day that your campaigns are performing best”. There are three ways in:

Source	What it gives you	Access
Unified reporting	Hourly reports extending back two weeks	Ads console, Reporting API
Amazon Marketing Stream	Hourly campaign metrics in near real time	Amazon Ads API
Rapid retail analytics	Hourly sales by product, with dayparting among its listed uses	Selling Partner API

Two weeks of hourly data is enough for a first read. For each campaign, line up four numbers by hour: spend, clicks, orders, and the time the budget ran out. You are looking for three patterns:

• Dead hours. Spend and clicks with few or no orders. These hours take budget from the hours that sell.
• Starved hours. Strong conversion, but little spend because the budget ran out earlier in the day.
• Peak hours. Strong conversion with budget left. These can take a higher bid.

Amazon’s own use case for hourly data is to analyze hourly variations and increase “bids during hours with greater performance”, adjusting budgets and target ASINs through the day. During peak events, its advice is blunt: “Review conversions hourly during peak times.”

Want to see which hours spend your budget without selling? Take the 2-min fit check and we'll send you a $-weighted opportunity map.

What can you schedule in the Amazon Ads console?

Two kinds of rules, both set from the Amazon Ads console or the API:

• Schedule-based bid rules for Sponsored Products raise bids at the times you choose, by time of day, day of week and date range. They are available in the US and several other marketplaces.
• Schedule-based budget rules raise budgets, either for Amazon recommended shopping events or a custom time period with daily or weekly recurrence, and now by hour of day.

Note what the documented rules do: they increase bids and budgets. Amazon’s budget guidance follows the same logic. If a campaign always runs out at the same point, it suggests you apply budget rules to increase the budget during that time period.

How do you build a dayparting plan on Amazon?

Because the rules raise bids rather than cut them, build the plan from the bottom up:

1. Set the base bid for your ordinary hours. Use the bid that earns an acceptable ACoS outside your peaks. Our guide on how to lower ACoS on Amazon covers the levers.
2. Add bid rules for peak hours. Raise bids only in the hours where conversion is strong and budget is left.
3. Protect starved hours with budget. Where a campaign runs out before its best hours, add an hours-of-day budget rule that raises the budget in those hours.
4. Fix dead hours at the source. If the same hours waste spend day after day, look at which search terms spend in them. Negating or moving those terms fixes the cause; a schedule only works around it.
5. Re-read after two weeks. Compare the new hourly pattern with the old one before you add more rules.

Keep a log of every rule you add and when. Without it, you can’t tell whether a change in results came from your schedule, a price change or a stock problem. If sales fall in hours that used to convert, check stock and the Buy Box before you touch bids; we covered why your Amazon ads stop when you lose the Buy Box.

How does ShelfRadar handle dayparting?

ShelfRadar’s Amazon Ads audit reads spend, clicks and orders by hour, and when budgets run out, to find the hours that don’t convert. Its dayparting tracker puts every change on the timeline. A person approves every recommendation.

Frequently asked questions

Does Amazon Ads have dayparting?

Amazon offers schedule-based bid rules for Sponsored Products that raise bids at specific times of day, days of the week and date ranges, and schedule-based budget rules that can raise budgets by hour of day for Sponsored Ads campaigns. Both are set in the Amazon Ads console or the API.

Where can I see Amazon ad performance by hour?

Unified reporting in the ads console offers hourly reports going back two weeks. Amazon Marketing Stream delivers hourly campaign metrics through the Amazon Ads API, and rapid retail analytics gives hourly sales through the Selling Partner API.

Why does my Amazon campaign run out of budget in the morning?

Amazon doesn’t pace daily budgets through the day, so a small budget can be spent in minutes when many shoppers are interested in your products. Once a campaign is out of budget, its ads can’t show until the budget resets at midnight.

Can I pause Amazon ads at night?

The schedule-based rules Amazon documents raise bids and budgets at the times you choose. A practical approach is to set base bids for your ordinary hours and use rules to raise them in the hours that convert.