How Your Ad Schedule Can Affect Conversions

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While an ad schedule is not necessary for your Google Ads, they can greatly improve your reach to potential customers. However, using your ad schedules incorrectly can cause more harm than good. Understanding how an ad schedule can affect your conversions is crucial to make your campaign as successful as possible.

Understanding How an Ad Schedule Can Affect Your Conversions

How to create an ad schedule
Why you should create an ad schedule
How ad schedules can affect your conversions

Before you can properly understand how ad schedules affect conversions and can help or hurt your campaigns, you must first understand what ad schedules are and how to implement them. This article will give you all of the information you need to effectively implement an ad schedule that will help rather than harm your ad campaign.

How to create an ad schedule

Creating an ad schedule is surprisingly easy, creating an effective and optimizing ad schedule is slightly harder. To create an ad schedule, you just need to log in to your Google Ad account and under the campaign that you are wanting to create an ad schedule for, scroll down towards the bottom of the left hand page menu and click on the button that says +More. You can then click on Ad Schedule and from there can click on the pencil icon to create a new ad schedule.

Keep in mind that your ad schedule is created around the time zone that you are in, so if you are marketing to individuals in other time zones or in other countries it is important to keep in mind when your ads will be shown in their time zone as well. You can also create your ad schedule on a 12-hour time clock or on a 24-hour time clock.

When reviewing your ad schedules, you can go into Ad Schedule from the left-hand page menu and then select the campaign that you would like to view. This will show you the ad schedule for that campaign and will give you data on when your ads are shown, when your ads were clicked on, and even when conversions were made. This data can be very useful when determining if your ad schedule is effective or is harming your campaign.

Why you should create an ad schedule

Ad schedules are not always necessary, in fact many campaigns can be completely successful without having an ad schedule. However, when used correctly an ad schedule can optimize your conversions, lower your spend, and increase your reach with potential customers. Understanding when your target customers are most likely to search for and then purchase your product is crucial to determine when you may want to schedule your ads. Let’s say that your target audience is working mothers or teenagers that spend all day in school, those customers are far more likely to search for your products early in the morning or in the afternoon/evening. You could just show your ads all day but focusing in on those target areas with your ad schedule will ensure that when your ads are being shown they are being shown to the most interested prospective customers.

You may also be missing your customer completely depending on who your target audience is. If your target audience is in a different country or time zone or maybe you’re targeting an energy drink to college students and individuals who work the night shift, you may be showing your ads during times that those customers are asleep or are simply not thinking about your product. Understanding your customer base and then determining when your target audience will be searching for your product is not always an easy formula to crack, but when done correctly you could see an incredible improvement.

How ad schedules can affect your conversions

Going back to your target audience, imagine you are showing your ads during times that your customers just aren’t as interested. Maybe they’re working or in school or simply not thinking about the problem that your product could solve. You’ll probably still get some conversions doing it this way, but the potential that your campaign could reach is much greater. Now imagine that you take that same campaign and change the ad schedule to show your ads during times when your target audience have more free time or are being more effected by the problem your product solves. Your conversions could triple. People are less likely to search for a coffee shop or for sunscreen later in the day or at night, while people wanting to buy beer are not likely to do so early in the morning.

Understanding what your customers want, but more importantly when they will want it, is the key to having the most successful ad campaigns. This process may be trial and error and remember that being too specific with your ad schedule can exclude potential customers and harm your business. It’s possible that your ad schedule is already showing during times that your target audience will be searching for it, which is amazing! However, understanding your audience and how that will affect the times that they will be searching for your product is an invaluable piece of information.

Commonly Asked Questions:

What should my budget be?

While it greatly varies between different business and different campaigns, I tend to set most of my campaigns at a starting budget of $5. I watch my new campaigns closely and if they perform well, I might raise the budget. However, if they do not perform well, I make sure to quickly fix the problem or lower the budget if the campaign is hurting the overall account.

How do I know if my campaign is performing well?

While what is considered “good performance” greatly varies from business to business, there are a few things to look for when you’re first getting started. A CTR (click-through-rate) of 2% or higher is considered a good interaction rate with your website, and anything below a 1% is very bad. When looking at conversions, the best tool to use is the Conversion Value/Cost. This calculates your ROAS (return on ad investment) and a ROAS higher than 4 is generally considered good.

How many campaigns should I set up?

Start small, especially if you’re new to Google Ads. Set up one campaign at a time and then give that campaign a week or two to find its feet. If it’s performing well, great! If not, you know that it’s time to go back to the drawing board. From there you can start to determine which ads work for you and which ones don’t, the most effective way to market your brand, and which products or services to pay more attention to based on what your customers are actually purchasing.