Bidding & Budgets
Ad Schedule
An ad schedule is the set of day and hour blocks during which a campaign is eligible to serve, optionally with bid adjustments per block, defined at the campaign level.
In practice
The ad schedule is the mechanism behind dayparting. A campaign with no schedule runs all day every day. Adding schedule criteria restricts serving to the blocks you define, and each block can carry a bid adjustment. Schedules run in the account's time zone, which matters for national campaigns and for accounts imported to Microsoft, where the time zone setting may differ.
Build schedules from a long window of hour-by-day performance data, not from when the office is open, unless the campaign depends on someone answering the phone. Lead generation with phone conversions usually deserves a business-hours schedule with after-hours form campaigns separated; e-commerce usually runs around the clock with adjustments.
A specific warning: when editing, never remove every schedule block from a campaign that had one. Google treats an empty schedule as no restriction, and the campaign silently goes to 24/7. Snapshot before editing and confirm the criteria after saving.
Why it matters
It decides when your budget can be spent, and a mistaken edit can quietly reopen every hour of the week.
RELATED TERMS
Dayparting
Dayparting is scheduling ads to run, or bidding differently, during specific hours of the day and days of the week based on when conversions actually happen.
Bid Modifiers (Bid Adjustments)
Bid modifiers are percentage adjustments applied to bids for specific dimensions such as device, location, ad schedule, audience, or demographic, raising or lowering what you pay in those segments.
Budget Pacing
Budget pacing is the practice of planning and controlling how ad spend is distributed across days, weeks, and months so that a monthly budget is spent evenly, front-loaded, or concentrated according to demand.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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