An ad schedule is the Google Ads setting that controls which days of the week and hours of the day your ads are allowed to show. It can also adjust bids up or down for particular times, a practice often called dayparting. Without a schedule, ads are eligible to run all day, every day.
How ad schedules work
You set a schedule at campaign level by choosing days and time ranges, such as Monday to Friday, 8:00 to 18:00. Each day can have several time slots, up to six. Outside those times the campaign’s ads do not enter auctions.
Schedules run on the account’s time zone, not the searcher’s. A UK account should be set to the London time zone, which follows GMT in winter and British Summer Time in summer, so your hours move with the clocks automatically. Check the currency and time zone settings when the account is created; they are much easier to get right at the start than to correct once reports have built up.
With manual bidding, you can add a bid adjustment for each slot, for example +20% on weekday mornings. With Smart Bidding, these adjustments are ignored because the system already weighs time of day in every bid; the schedule then only controls when ads can run at all.
Call assets and some other assets have their own schedules, separate from the campaign’s.
Schedules also interact with budgets. Google can spend up to twice your average daily budget on a busy day, then balances it over the month. If ads only run for eight hours, the whole daily budget is concentrated into those hours, so budget pacing changes too. Check spend in the first week after adding or tightening a schedule.
Why it matters
For many UK businesses, a click at the wrong time is a wasted click. A locksmith who answers 24 hours a day benefits from running overnight; a solicitor’s office with no one to answer calls after 17:30 does not, at least for campaigns built around phone enquiries. Scheduling stops you paying for clicks that cannot be turned into business.
It also matters for budgets. If a daily budget runs out by mid-afternoon, you may be missing evening searches that could convert well. A schedule, used with the day and hour report, helps you see where the money actually goes.
That said, people research online at all hours and often fill in a form late at night. Cutting ads to office hours can remove good leads, so base decisions on data rather than assumptions about when customers search.
Common mistakes
- Leaving the account on the wrong time zone, so the schedule is hours out.
- Restricting ads to office hours without checking when form enquiries arrive.
- Setting bid adjustments on a Smart Bidding campaign and expecting them to work.
- Making decisions from a few weeks of hour-by-hour data, where each slot has too few conversions to mean anything.
- Forgetting bank holidays and the Christmas closure, when a schedule set for normal weeks keeps running.
How to act on it
Start with a schedule that matches when you can respond: phone-led campaigns follow your opening hours, form-led campaigns can usually run longer. After a month or two, review the day and hour report for conversions and cost per conversion, grouping hours into blocks if the data is thin. Adjust the schedule or bids where the difference is clear and consistent.
Plan ahead for bank holidays and seasonal closures. Setting and reviewing schedules is part of how I run PPC management for UK accounts.