Timing is Everything – How Ad Scheduling Can Save Your Money

Updated January 10, 2023

Tick, Tock, Tick Tock

An important aspect of advertising is being in the right place, at the right time. If you’re running PPC Ads you need to make sure they’re showing at the right times. But how do you work out what the right time is? And once you have, how do you set up Ad Scheduling on Google Ads? In this post we’ll explain why you need to set up Ad Scheduling and how to do it.

The Best Time Was Yesterday

The timing of when you want to reach your customers differs depending on your industry and product. But here are some things to consider before starting  ad scheduling:

• Where are your customers located? If you’re only selling to people on the East Coast, make sure your ads aren’t running on PST. It seems obvious, but the default setting on your Google Ads account might not match with where you want your ads to show. So double check!
• What are you selling?If you’re selling printer toner, it’s unlikely that many of your customers are going to be purchasing it at 3am. Conversely, if you’re delivering pizzas, you probably have peak hours throughout the day. Know your audience and their buying habits.
• When are you open? If you’re running an online store, this might not be an issue. But if your ads are directing foot traffic to a physical location or asking people to call, you need to factor that in. Running call ads when there’s no one is available to answer the phone is a surefire way to annoy potential customers. Also, be sure to reflect the correct hours over any holidays or special events. 

The above points, to varying extents, are based on assumptions. Over time these assumptions need to be tested. Maybe people are interested in buying toner at 3am. After you’ve run your ads for a few weeks (or less depending on how many ad impressions you’re getting) take a look at the data and see how they’re been performing. Then make changes accordingly.

What is Ad Scheduling?

Ad Scheduling is the name for Google Ad’s scheduling tool. It allows you to choose which days of the week your ads are shown, as well as deciding at what time of the day they appear. You can change the time in 15-minute increments, which gives you a lot of flexibility to when your ads are displayed.  As we’ve already mentioned, you can use this feature to match your ads to your opening hours. Another option is to use Ad Scheduling in conjunction with Bid Adjustments, and then optimize your bidding strategy.

Bid Adjustments in a Nutshell

Bid adjustments offer you a way of increasing your bids in certain situations. For example, suppose you run a popular Chinese restaurant in San Francisco. You are open from 11:30 am to 10 pm, Monday through Thursday, and 11:30 to 10:30 on Fridays and Saturdays. 

As an observant owner, you’ve noticed the restaurant is usually twice as busy on Thursday and Friday nights, and is usually packed throughoutSaturdays. You decide to adjust your ad schedule so that your ads only appear during your business hours. You also set up a 20% bid increase for weeknights, hoping to attract more customers when it’s not so busy.

Defaulting

By default, your Google Ads campaigns are set to show ads “All Day,” which means your ads are eligible to appear throughout each calendar day. Depending on how broad your keywords are and how high your budget, this could become pretty costly. However, keep in mind if no one searches for your keywords at the specified time or day, your scheduled ads will still not be shown. So it’s not like you’re leaving the lights on at home.

If you have no idea when to schedule your ads, there’s no harm in leaving the default setting turned on for the first few weeks of advertising. Then once the account has gathered some performance data, go back to see at which times the ads are most successful. 

Setting up Scheduling

If you’ve not set up an ad schedule before, you can see how to do so by watching this video.

Step by Step

Want to skip directly to the step-by-step instructions? Here you go: 

1. First, sign in to your Google Ads account.
2. From the page menu on the left, click “Ad Schedule”.
3. Next click the pencil icon, then select the campaign you’d like to create an ad schedule.
4. Select the days and times you’d like your ads to show. Remember to keep in mind that the ad schedule is based on your account’s time zone. So, adjust the schedule accordingly if your Google Ads account has a different timezone than your target customers.
5. Then, click “Save” to apply your changes.

To edit your ad schedule:

1. Select the campaign you’d like to change. 
2. And enter your new bid adjustment.
3. To remove a time period, click the pencil icon. Hover over that time period and click the exit button.
4. To adjust dates and times, click the dates or times you’d like to change, and then select new ones.
5. To add a new date and time to your ad schedule, click “Add”. 
6. Click “Save” to make sure all your changes are applied.

To review your ad schedule:

1. First, go to the “Ad Schedule” tab from the page menu on the left.
2. Then, click on a specific campaign to see the details of its ad schedule, performance, and cost, during its scheduled time slots.
3. Choose a subtab to review your ad schedule and performance by “Day and Hour,” by “Day,” or just by “Hour.”

Schedule Some Time

As always, there’s more than one way to set something up in Google Ads. If you find an easier way of setting up Ad Scheduling, feel free to leave a comment below! 

If you’ve enjoyed this video, you might also want to check out our other Google Ads tutorials on our AdBytes YouTube channel.

Photo credit – Top: Pexels
Photo credit – Bottom: Pexels