What Is Time Targeting?
Time targeting, which is also known as dayparting, is a form of targeting on Google Ads where advertisers specify when their ads should be displayed. This includes times during the day as well as particular days of the week.
When setting up your campaign on Google Ads, the default setting is for your ads to be “turned on,” so to speak, all day, every day. Naturally, this might not be in your best interests as it’s not optimized to squeeze the most value out of your ads, which means that you might be paying for clicks that aren’t converting.
This is where time targeting comes in, which gives you the ability to do either of 2 things:
- Specify When Your Ads Run: you can tell Google Ads when and at what time you’d like your ads to be displayed. For instance, you can specify that you want your ads displayed only during the weekdays and during your office hours.
- Adjust Keyword Bids by Time: you can adjust how much your bid during certain times of the day, so that you optimize your ad budget by increasing or decreasing your bids depending on when your target audience is most and least active.
Naturally, you can use a combination of either of these, and a clever, well-planned use of time targeting will make use of both. If you choose to use our Google Ads services, we’ll use a mixture of these options to optimize your ads to the full.
Why Use Time Targeting?
You might wonder what the use of this option could possibly be. And we don’t blame you, as it’s easy to consider it as superfluous: after all, if you let your ads run all the time, then you’re going to attract more people, right?
Well, yes, and no. Consider this: if you run a business that can only respond to clients’ queries from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., what’s the use of having your ads run at 10 p.m. when none of your employees are working? Or at one in the morning when you and your staff are asleep?
Or let’s say that you seem to hit peak traffic and conversions during certain times of the day, such as 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. Wouldn’t it make more sense to increase your bids during these times in order to secure more clients and hence more conversions?
The same can be said for days during the week. Let’s say, for instance, that you’ve been allowing your ads to be displayed every day and noticed that during the weekend you gain more traffic but less people are willing to convert in spite of that. You might want to limit or stop displaying your ads on the weekends.
And we haven’t even discussed the fact that Google Ads runs on money: yours specifically. If you allow your ads to be displayed all day long, every day, then you’re continuously paying the platform for that to happen. If you’re trying to optimize your ad budget or cut costs, time targeting is a very useful means of doing so.
Not only because you’re saving up ad budget for the times and days that are most fruitful for your business, but you could also avoid times when your CPC and CPA (cost-per-click and cost-per-acquisition respectively) have risen to almost unaffordable amounts, further optimizing your ad budget.
Moreover, we don’t want to run into the danger of running out of your daily ad budget in the middle of a peak! You’ll be missing out on a lot of potential acquisitions that way, which is obviously bad for business.
Finally, if you run an international business that has clients in multiple geographical zones, you might have run into the issue of dealing with clients living in different time zones. With time targeting, you could effectively deal with this issue by targeting the best times for each time zone.
What Is the Best Time to Run Google Ads?
As we’ve already said, there are ways that you figure out what the best time of day to run Google Ads is, as well as the best days of the week to run them on. The key method, however, is through the time of day report in Google Analytics.
This provides you with useful insights of when your website gains the most traffic and acquisitions during the day and week. Understanding this data is imperative if you want to optimize your ad spend as much as possible, especially if you run Google Ads on a tight budget.
If you use time targeting to focus on the days and time when you’re most likely to gain new customers and acquisitions, you could effectively squeeze more value out of your budget. This is because you’re reducing ad spend on days and times that aren’t particularly fruitful and increasing it whenever your ads have proven most effective.
This results in higher ad rank on those times and days, which means higher visibility and more effective ads.
How to Determine the Best Time for Google Ads
In order to be able to determine the best time to run Google Ads in the morning, afternoon, etc., we highly recommend that we let the campaign run continuously for the first few weeks (more or less 4 weeks). This is where the power of Google Analytics comes in.
By using Google Analytics, Google’s free data analytics tool, we’ll be able to easily gather the adequate amount of data in order to establish trends and patterns of when your target audience is most active. Once we’ve gathered enough data, we’ll plot out the results in a form that’s easier to understand (a graph or table, for instance), and explain the trends to you.
With all of this data, we’ll then consult you on whether you’d like to proceed with time targeting by restricting the days and time of when your ads are displayed. If you agree, we’ll go ahead and set up dayparting in a way that maximizes the opportunities presented in the data.
Best Time of Day to Run Google Ads
Always bearing in mind that the best times to run paid ad campaigns will differ according to your circumstances, we can still understand what times are best thanks to the use of Google Analytics. Following the data is the key to making smart strategic choices when it comes to paid advertising.
After identifying the peak hours thanks to Google Analytics, we’ll increase keyword bids during the times of the day when you gain more traffic and acquisitions in order to increase your ad rank and thus receive even more visibility. We’ll also decrease your bids or stop your ads from appearing during the rest of the time.
Other than Google Analytics, we might also depend on the use of certain keyword tools, such as Google Trends, Semrush, and Keyword Tool, in order to identify trends in keyword search volume. This is to double check that there aren’t any holes in the data we’ve gathered with Google Analytics.
After all, you might be getting outbid by a competitor and thus not be able to see when a keyword is reaching its peak search volume in the data!
Best Day to Run Google Ads
On the other hand, once we have collected the data, we’ll also inspect the days of the week where you’re receiving the most acquisitions and traffic. With that information, we’ll minimize your ad spend on quieter days and increase it on days where you see more activity in order to make the most out of your budget.
Otherwise, if your unique circumstances dictate otherwise, we can completely disable ads from appearing during days that don’t seem to be quite as fruitful and instead show them exclusively on the days that seem to gain you the most acquisitions. This might prove beneficial for optimizing your ad budget.
What Is the Best Time to Run YouTube Ads?
If you’re running YouTube Ad or Google video ad campaigns instead, we’ll be able to use similar data that identifies when your videos seem to have the highest engagement and work our way from there. We’ll work according to the data, identifying what the best time to run Google Ad videos is for you, and displaying your video ads when engagement has been reported as high and remove during the other times.
How to Set Up Ad Scheduling in Google Ads
If you happen to be a budding PPC marketer yourself and you’re learning how to become a Google Ads specialist, then this section is for you. Naturally, you don’t need to understand how to schedule ads if you’re only going to hire a Google Ads agency like us; we’ll take care of that for you.
The steps to setting up ad scheduling in Google Ads are the following:
- On the menu on the left-hand side of the page, select the “Ad Schedule” option.
- Click on “Edit”, which gives you a list of campaigns that you manage.
- From your list of campaigns, select the one that you want to implement time targeting on.
- Simply select the times and days of when you’d like your ad to appear.
- Save your changes!
That’s all there is to it.
How to Change Ad Schedule in Google Ads
To change ad schedule on Google Ads, you simply need to follow the same steps on you’re setting up the schedule. Simply edit the days and/or times that you had previously set up to your new preferred days and/or times, and you’re good to go.
Conclusion: What Time Is Best to Advertise?
Sadly, we cannot give you a concrete figure of what time or day is the best to run your Google Ads, as this is something that fluctuates depending on the circumstances of your business. So, things like your industry, location, target audience, and other such factors will play a role in determining what the best time is.
If you contract us to manage your campaigns for you, we’ll track this data and optimize your paid ads and budget accordingly. As we’ve said before, time targeting can help in squeezing more value out of your budget, cutting costs, and delivering better results.
Before we conclude, it’s worth noting that time targeting is not recommended for every client. For instance, if you run a business that offers services around the clock, receives traffic throughout the day, operates in multiple time zones, etc., it might not be the best idea to limit when you display your ads.
Moreover, if you’re not on a tight budget, using dayparting might not even be worth the trouble for you.
FAQs
What is the best time of day for Google Ads?
There is no specific time that we can provide you with as the best time to display your paid ads will differ depending on a number of factors, all of which are unique to each business. The recommended course of action is to first allow your ads to be displayed at all times of the day, every day, and then assess what the best times are through the data you’ve gathered.
What time do Google Ads run?
By default, Google Ads run continuously, that is, during all times of the day and every day of the week. You can adjust this using the time targeting option on Google Ads, allowing you to specify when you’d like your ads to run.
Do Google Ads get better with time?
Yes, the longer you allow Google Ads to run, the better they become. This is because Google requires around 90 days in order to gather enough data for your campaigns to reach maturity.
Should I run Google Ads on weekends?
The standard advice given is to avoid running Google Ads on the weekends as they are quieter than weekdays. This, however, will depend on your business; if your business thrives on weekend activities because, let’s say, you run a hotel or a resort, marketing on the weekend might make more sense for you.
Furthermore, if you have the budget for it, you can definitely allow your ads to run on the weekend in case you might pick up a few acquisitions even when it’s quiet.