The 'graveyard hours' that quietly ate 30% of a pop campaign

The 'graveyard hours' that quietly ate 30% of a pop campaign

Pop traffic at scale lives or dies on dayparting, and I ignored it for two weeks.

— The setup: pop/redirect traffic, pin-submit offer, GEO Brazil, $50/day, running 24/7.
— The move: I broke the conversion report down by hour-of-day in local time after noticing my mornings looked fine and something was off at night.
— The numbers: 2am-6am local was 31% of my spend and converted at one-third the rate of daytime — $0.21 EPC vs $0.68 daytime, against a $0.40 cost. Those hours were a guaranteed loss every single night. Blocked 2am-6am. Before: $50/day, $48 revenue, -4%. After: $34/day effective spend, $51 revenue, +50%.

— The lesson: 24/7 is a default, not a strategy. On pop especially, certain hours are structurally unprofitable because the cheap inventory at 3am is cheap for a reason.

What I'd do differently: Pull the hour-of-day report after the first 1,000 conversions, not after two weeks. Those graveyard hours cost me roughly $170 in dead spend. Figures illustrative; the dead-hours pattern shows up in nearly every pop GEO.