What is a Day Parting Rule?

A Day Parting rule defines what time periods through the week a campaign should be active. You first create the rule, and then assign it to as many campaigns as you need. If you need a slightly different rule for different campaigns, you can create multiple rules and assign them where you need them.

A rule can either be “On/Off style” or “Ratio style”, allowing a percentage of the daily budget allowance to be allowed to the campaign at different periods of the day. For example, a small portion of the daily budget can be scheduled between 5am and 8am, and 100% from 8am through 6pm. These rules will depend on the marketplace activity you are targeting, so you can fine tune the behaviour for the customers you are targeting.

Why Do We Need Day Parting Rules?

Day Parting rules exist to help save your budget. It’s both about saving your money, and also spending your money when you want it to be spent. When you set up an advertising campaign in Amazon Ads and assign a daily budget to it, Amazon will start showing your ad to users. Keywords that you have assigned a bid value to will enter the auction logic and start to use up your daily budget. Amazon decides when this will be, and you may run into scenarios where your campaign stopped functioning because it ran out of budget (“Budget Constrained”, see the Campaigns documentation), so you miss out on potential audience share later in the day because there was no budget left in your campaign’s daily limit. With Day Parting we aim to ensure budget is not spent at useless hours of the day, and therefore more budget is available to show your ads to higher value customers who are more likely to convert throughout the day.

Amazon Ads does have a form of day parting built in, but it has certain limits. It is currently not possible to simply say “0% of budget should be spent between hours X and Y”. It is also much harder to configure a global strategy across many campaigns and regions. Our Day Parting rules put you truly in control of your budget spend in a more flexible and easier to configure way.

How is time calculated across Amazon Advertising Regions and Timezones?

Day Parting rules are calculated in the local time zone of the campaign they are associated with, so it is safe to assign a rule to campaigns from different regions all around the world. We do all of the complicated time zone arithmetic for you.]

For example, you can specify a time such as 6am in the rule, and if associated with a campaign running in North America it will execute at 6am PDT, or 13:00 UTC (when PDT is aligned with DST), and if associated with a campaign running in Tokyo it will execute at 6am JST, or 21:00 UTC the previous day.

It’s perfectly possible to create a single Day Parting rule and assign it to every campaign in your account, and in each time zone around the world it will act exactly as you would expect it to.

Reviewing and Creating Day Parting Rules

You may only need one or two Day Parting rules in your account, and you can edit them at any time. There is no need to go back into the Campaigns screen and re-assign them, any changes you make to a rule will have immediate effect.