Bidding & Budgets
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.
In practice
Conversion rate is not flat across the week. A home services business converts calls during working hours and gets form fills at night that nobody answers until morning; an e-commerce store might see its best ROAS on Sunday evenings. Dayparting aligns spend with those patterns.
The method is to build a day-of-week by hour-of-day report over a long enough window, several months for most accounts, identify chronic slots where cost per conversion is far above the account average, and either exclude them or apply negative bid adjustments. Under Smart Bidding, hour-level bid adjustments are largely ignored, but schedules that exclude hours still hold, and the algorithm already weights time as a signal.
One rule we never break: never leave a campaign with no ad schedule criteria after editing, because Google inverts an empty schedule into running all the time. Snapshot the schedule before changing it so it can be restored.
Why it matters
It removes spend from hours that structurally do not convert, which is free efficiency.
RELATED TERMS
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.
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.
Smart Bidding
Smart Bidding is Google's set of automated, conversion-based bid strategies (Target CPA, Target ROAS, Maximize Conversions, Maximize Conversion Value) that set auction-time bids using machine learning signals.
Written by Ilya Bulychev, Founder, Live PPC Ads. Part of the PPC Glossary.
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