What is a Day Parting Rule?
A Day Parting rule defines when during the week a campaign should be active, and how its budget should be controlled at different times.
You create a rule once and then assign it to one or more campaigns. If different campaigns need different schedules, you can create additional rules and assign them as required. Each campaign can have only one Day Parting rule assigned at a time.
The On/Off Style checkbox determines how the rule operates. When On/Off Style is enabled, each scheduled period simply switches the campaign on or off. This is useful when you want the campaign to run normally during certain hours and not run at all during others.
When On/Off Style is disabled, the rule operates in ratio mode instead. Rather than simply switching the campaign on or off, you can specify what percentage of its daily budget should be available during different periods of the day. For example, you might allow only a small proportion of the daily budget between 5am and 8am, then allow 100% from 8am until 6pm.
The best schedule will depend on the marketplace and customer behaviour you are targeting, allowing you to fine-tune campaign activity and preserve more of your budget for the periods that matter most.
For example, you may choose to assign one Day Parting Rule to campaigns matching one set of criteria, and a different rule to other campaigns for other criteria:
- Campaign A – Day Parting Rule 1
- Campaign B – Day Parting Rule 1
- Campaign C – Day Parting Rule 2
- Campaign D – Day Parting Rule 2
Why Do We Need Day Parting Rules?
Day Parting helps you control when your advertising budget is spent, so more of it is available during the hours that matter most.
When you create an Amazon Ads campaign and assign it a daily budget, Amazon can begin serving your ads throughout the day. Your keywords and targets enter Amazon’s advertising auctions based on their bids, and each click consumes part of that budget.
The problem is that Amazon decides when those opportunities occur. A campaign may spend heavily during lower-value hours and become Budget Constrained later in the day. Once the daily budget has been exhausted, your ads may stop appearing – even during periods when customers are more likely to convert.
Day Parting allows you to prevent or reduce advertising activity during selected hours. By avoiding spend at times that are less valuable to your business, you can preserve more of your daily budget for the periods when you are most likely to reach valuable customers.
Amazon Ads provides some built-in scheduling and budget-management features, but these have limitations. For example, it is not always straightforward to express a rule such as “do not spend any budget between these hours”, or to apply a consistent scheduling strategy across many campaigns, marketplaces and regions.
AdPartner Suite Day Parting rules give you more direct control. You can define when campaigns should and should not run, manage those rules consistently across your advertising account, and make sure your budget is available when you actually want it to be spent.
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. If already assigned to campaigns, 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.