Experiment scheduling

[#1]

This is a pretty tall order, but here goes -

It would be great if we could schedule experiments to only run at certain hours much in the way within the adwords platform you can specify campaigns to only run for a set block of hours each day.

One example where this would be useful would be for companies with normal business hours could test call to actions encouraging website visitors to telephone the company with questions or inquiries.

After normal business hours, this experiment would no longer run. 

[#2]

You could target the specific time periods using a custom JavaScript that only actions your specific test criteria between a specific time period. You would keep the experiment "running" in a technical sense, but the JavaScript would action your variations where the time is greater than X and less than Y - does that make sense?

I actually  use this tactic for a couple of clients whose main lead generation tactic is through Call Centres - 1 set of numbers in the morning another after 7pm. Similar to your business case infact.

Without supplying you the code itself, does that help?

[#3]

That's really helpful, siherron! Thanks a ton for taking the time to reply, I really appreciate it!

[#4 · Accepted solution]

Thanks @siherron ! 

There was a new Audience released recently called "Time of Day". You can find more details about it here, but it allows you to target your experiment to run during certain time frames based on the viewer's local timezone. In this feature, you can also choose days of the week.  That being said, you could feasibly choose for your experiment to run from only 9am - 5pm M-F if you were targeting people at work, for example.  You could also combine this with geo-targeting for very specific audienecs.

If you are looking to target the experiment to run for only hours during a specfic time zone (for example PST), rather than the visitor's local timezone, then you can use custom JavaScript to accomplish this (just as @siherron suggested). I like to use www.worldtimebuddy.com to figure out UTC times. If you want, I can send over a sample snippet of code to accomplish targeting based on time blocks. Let me know! 

Does it sound like either of these options will work, or am I missing something? 

[#5]

That's terrific, Amanda. Thanks for the help with this. Much appreciated as usual!

[#6]

Just had an interesting conversation with another Community member through a support ticket. We were able to develop some code to run an experiment based on UTC rather than a user's time zone.

//instantiate Date Object
var dateObj = new Date();

//returns the hour of day in UTC
var hourOfDay = dateObj.getUTCHours();

//The experiment should run 2pm - 2am UTC
//Which is equivalent to 14 - 23; 0-2
var timeMatch = true;
if (hourOfDay >= 14 || hourOfDay <=2) {
	timeMatch = true;
} else {
	timeMatch = false;
}

timeMatch;

 The if statement would need to be adjusted to fit the UTC time of day you are looking to target.