Dayparting

How dayparting works

You set a schedule at campaign level: which days, which hours, and optionally a bid or budget modifier per slot. Ads simply do not serve outside the window. The clock is the account's time zone, which is worth checking before you blame a drop on the market. A campaign set to Eastern time will cut the wrong hours for a plumber in Phoenix.

Let's take a plumbing company as an example. The plumbing company buys Google ads so homeowners fill a "book a visit" form, then a dispatcher calls back and sends a truck. The office works 8am to 6pm on weekdays. A form fill at 2am sits until Monday, and by then the homeowner has moved on.

When dayparting is worth it

When conversions depend on a human being available. Call-driven businesses, booking desks, and a plumbing company that only answers the phone during work hours all lose leads that arrive at 2am. Dayparting is also useful when a limited budget would otherwise be spent overnight, before your best hours arrive. That is a budget allocation problem dressed up as a targeting problem.

Pair dayparting with geo targeting (restricting ads by location) if you serve several time zones. Otherwise a single schedule cuts the wrong hours for half your audience. Let's take a plumbing company as an example. If that plumbing company serves customers across more than one time zone, it should schedule in the customer's local time, not from the office clock in one city.

How to read the data before you cut hours

Let's take a plumbing company as an example. The plumbing company pulls eight weeks of Google Ads data by hour. Weekday 8am to 6pm: 200 clicks, 32 form fills, $4,800 spend. That is $150 per form fill ($4,800 / 32 form fills). Evenings and weekends: 180 clicks, 8 form fills, $3,200 spend. That is $400 per form fill. The dispatcher reached 28 of the 32 daytime form fills, and only 3 of the 8 evening ones. The plumbing company pauses 7pm to 7am and all weekend. Weekly spend falls from $8,000 to $4,800. The plumbing company keeps the 32 daytime form fills and stops buying the $400 evening ones that the office could not reach.

Pull at least a few weeks, and look at conversions (the action you want, here a form fill), not clicks. Small slices are noisy, so a single bad Tuesday afternoon is not a pattern. Check whether the weak hours are weak everywhere or only in one campaign.

Remember that the conversion is stamped at a different time than the click. An evening click that converts the next morning can make evenings look worse than they are. And if you chop the schedule so tightly that pacing (spending the daily budget evenly) breaks, the budget never spends, which is a different failure.

Common dayparting mistakes

• Cutting hours based on clicks or cost, with no conversion volume behind the decision. A plumbing company's evenings can get plenty of clicks. Those evenings did not get form fills the office could close.
• Forgetting the account time zone differs from the customer's.
• Chopping the schedule so tightly that pacing (whether spend is landing evenly) breaks and the daily budget never spends.