Are you ready to discover an incredibly simple, yet amazingly profitable Google Adwords secret?

This is not something that Google wants to you know because it is costing advertisers literally millions of dollars a year – unnecessarily!

The secret is this – Ad Scheduling

Ok – so the element of ad scheduling in your Google Adwords campaign isn’t something that’s a secret.  But from my experience in working with advertisers, and the lack of knowing that this feature even exists, is something that I’m defining as a secret!

So how do you leverage the power of ad scheduling for your campaign?

1)  Your Google Adwords campaign CANNOT be on the budget optimizer.  To determine if your campaign is utilizing the budget optimizer, go to “your campaign” > edit campaign settings (link toward top of campaign screen) > scroll down to “Networks and bidding” > under “All network types:” you should see your bidding settings.  If budget optimizer is on, you will see “Budget Optimizer”, if it’s not on, you’ll see “Maximum CPC Bidding” << this is what you want to see.  If your Budget Optimizer is on, then please read more about how to turn it on and off, and read more here to learn more about what the budget optimizer does.  However, in order to utilize ad scheduling, budget optimizer cannot be on.

2)  Below are instructions from Google for proceeding with the remainder of your ad scheduling set up:

Two steps are needed to set up ad scheduling for an AdWords campaign. First you must enable ad scheduling for that campaign. (That means you tell us you want to run ad scheduling in your account.)

Once ad scheduling is enabled, you can then choose the days and times when you want your ad to run.

Here’s how to enable ad scheduling:

• Sign in to your AdWords account.
• From the Campaign Summary page, click the name of the campaign you want to work with.
• Near the top of the page, click the Edit campaign settings link.
• Find the section titled Scheduling and serving. Click Turn on ad scheduling.

Ad scheduling is now enabled for this campaign. You’ll be taken to the Ad Scheduling page, where you can set your schedule. When you return to the All Campaigns page, a small clock icon will appear next to the campaign name to indicate that ad scheduling is enabled for that campaign.

Here’s how to set or edit your schedule for a campaign with ad scheduling enabled:

• Sign in to your AdWords account (if you aren’t already signed in).
• From the All Campaigns page, click the name of the campaign you want to work with.
• Near the top of the page, click the Edit campaign settings link.
• Under Scheduling and serving, find Ad scheduling. You should see a box with a check mark to indicate that ad scheduling is running. Click Edit times and bids.

On the Ad Scheduling page you’ll see the seven days of the week with 24 hourly blocks for each day. Green blocks indicate that your ad is scheduled to run during that hour. Gray blocks mean your ad will not run during that hour.

Now you can choose the times when you want your ad to run. You can do this in two ways:

By individual days. Click Edit next to any day of the week, then use the pull-down menus to select start and finish times by quarter-hour. You may also use the radio button to pause your campaign for the entire day.

Bulk edit. On the line marked Bulk edit, select all days. Next, use the pull-down menu to edit the times your ad will run on all days. For instance, if you select 1:00 to 4:00 pm, your ad will run at that time on all seven days of the week.

Users in some areas will also be offered weekday and weekend bulk editing. A weekend includes Saturday and Sunday; weekdays are all other days. If you select ‘weekdays’ and then select 1:00 to 4:00 pm, your ad will run at that time from Monday through Friday. If these options are available in your area, you’ll see ‘weekdays’ and ‘weekends’ listed next to ‘all days’ next to the words Bulk Edit near the top of the page. If bulk editing is not available in your area, you can still achieve the same goal by manually scheduling your ads for only those days that you prefer.

When using pull-down menus, click Add another time period to create multiple running time periods in a single day. (This is useful if, for instance, you want your ad to run from 10:00-11:00 in the morning and then again from 2:00-3:00 in the afternoon.) You may create up to six separate time periods for any given day.

When you are satisfied with the time schedule for your campaign, click Save Changes at the bottom of the page. Your new ad schedule should take effect almost immediately. (The system may need up to an hour to adjust to new changes.)

For an example, let’s suppose you want your ads to run from 6:00 pm until 10:00 pm on Monday through Wednesday, from 4:00 pm to 8:00 pm on Thursday, and not at all on Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Here’s how you’d set it up:

• Follow the instructions above to enable ad scheduling and get to the Ad scheduling page for your campaign.
• Next to “Monday,” click the link reading Edit.
• Use the pull-down menus to choose “6:00 pm” and “10:00 pm” as the start and stop times for your ad.
• Click Add to finalize those times for Monday.
• Repeat the same process for Tuesday and Wednesday.
• Next to “Thursday,” click the Edit link and use the pull-down menus to choose “4:00 pm” and “8:00 pm” as the start and stop times. Click Add.
• Next to “Friday,” click the Edit link.
• Click the radio button reading Pause on Friday. Click Add.
• Repeat the process for Saturday and Sunday.
• Finally, click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page.

Your campaign will now begin to run only on the hours you set, and not at all on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

When using ad scheduling, you may also wish to enable the advanced mode, which includes a bid multiplier you can use to bid more or less for your campaign during certain time periods. Learn about the advanced mode of ad scheduling.

Summary

As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, ad scheduling is a one of those “secrets” of Google Adwords that very few advertisers know about, let alone know how effectively set up and utilize within a campaign.

For example, one of our clients has a shop in New York City that is open 7 days a week, but only has someone answering phones from 10:30 am – 9:30 pm.  However, when I began consulting the client, their campaigns were running on the default 24 hour period.

Plus, this client’s campaign has geographic targeting set to only show ads to the metro NYC area (I will discuss geo targeting later).

So as you can imagine, this client was getting clicks nearly 50% of time when his business wasn’t open, and Google was spreading his daily budget throughout the 24 hours, as opposed to concentrating the daily ad spend throughout the set number of hours the client’s business is actually open.

Once the client realized, and understood, the concept of ad scheduling, he was excited (to say the least) with the fact that he is now only spending his daily budget during the hours of which his business is open.