Ad Scheduling: it's all about timing

"There's a time for everything." This is something I've been hearing since I was a kid, but today I'm not here to tell you that you shouldn't have your dessert before your meal or play with noisy toys after dark; rather, I'd like to talk to you about whether it's really a good idea to advertise your lunch menu or your toy shop discount when your customers are sleeping.

Advertising, as is the case with most things in life, is all about timing. A lot of businesses have special advertising needs during certain times of day, and they'd like their customers to know about them at the right time.

Let's take the example of a newly opened downtown coffee shop that's looking to let people know about its great selection by advertising with AdWords. What happens when their ad runs at night? Well, people will learn about the menu, but at the wrong time. Since it's now after hours, and the place is closed, they might forget about it overnight and not visit the coffee shop the next day; all of this simply because that was the wrong time to be seeing that ad. Another example would be a toy shop running a special "lunchtime craze" deal to try to increase sales during that time of day; advertising after the event is not very useful and may even be counter-productive, as it's disappointing for people to realize that the promotion hours are over.

Fortunately, there are mechanisms built into AdWords and the AdWords API to allow you to decide when to run your ads, automatically, without requiring you to manually enable and disable them; this is called "Ad Scheduling".

Scheduling works at the campaign level, so it applies to all active ad groups and ads inside it. The AdSchedule object contains two items:

• an "intervals" list, containing any number of SchedulingInterval objects
  
• a "status" field, that enables or disables the AdSchedule
  

Each SchedulingInterval not only allows you to define a number of properties, such as day and starting/ending times, but also, notably, a multiplier. This multiplier is a very useful tool, as it provides a way to enable and disable displaying of the ad (by setting to a non-zero and zero value, respectively), as well as a way to increase or decrease your bids at certain times.

In our coffee shop example, to make sure the ads run mostly during opening hours, we would set displaying of ads to start a bit before opening and to end a little bit before closing:

SchedulingInterval[] days = new SchedulingInterval[6];

days[0].setDay(DayOfWeek.Monday);
days[1].setDay(DayOfWeek.Tuesday);
days[2].setDay(DayOfWeek.Wednesday);
days[3].setDay(DayOfWeek.Thursday);
days[4].setDay(DayOfWeek.Friday);
days[5].setDay(DayOfWeek.Saturday);

// Set weekday and Saturday schedule
for (int i = 0; i < 6; i++) {
// Start at 8:45 am...
days[i].setStartHour(8);
days[i].setStartMinute(45);
// ... and end at 7:45 pm
days[i].setEndHour(19);
days[i].setEndMinute(45);
// Run at normal bid rates
days[i].setMultiplier(1.0);
}

// Closed on Sunday, so we're omitting it from the array

As for our toy shop, in order to give customers fair warning about the special lunchtime deal, advertising would start early in the morning and increase significantly during the promotion hours:

SchedulingInterval early = new SchedulingInterval();
SchedulingInterval peak = new SchedulingInterval();

// Sample schedule for Monday
early.setDay(DayOfWeek.Monday);
peak.setDay(DayOfWeek.Monday);

// Start at 8:00 am...
early.setStartHour(8);
early.setStartMinute(0);
// ... and run until promotion starts
early.setEndHour(12);
early.setEndMinute(0);
// Run at normal bid rates
early.setMultiplier(1.0);

// Start higher bidding at noon...
peak.setStartHour(12);
peak.setStartMinute(0);
// ... and run until promotion ends...
peak.setEndHour(14);
peak.setEndMinute(0);
// ... at double the bid!
peak.setMultiplier(2.0);

(And here's how you can add a campaign with scheduling in your language of choice)

With these small changes to your campaigns, you should be able to make the most out of your ads by having them show at the right time. That likely means better, more focused targeting, with higher returns, all for just a little bit of setup work; that's like eating your cake and keeping it too! Just make sure you don't do it before lunch, otherwise it'll spoil your appetite.

--Sérgio Gomes, AdWords API Team