Have you ever wondered if you get more conversions (emails/calls) from PPC during certain times of the day or week? Or if your account spends money at times of day when you’re unlikely to get conversions or cases? And have you ever wondered if your paid advertising account might automatically show your ads more frequently during those peak hours and less frequently or not at all during other off-peak hours? Why bother showing an ad at a time when your customer can’t call?

Well good news. This can be easily found, answered and achieved for free within your Google AdWords account!

The AdWords Dimensions tab

First, start here to find your answers. From your AdWords account, select your time frame, then click the Dimensions tab. Then click the View:Time button and select the time period you want to explore.

Hour 0 means midnight to 1 am, hour 6 means 6 to 7 am, etc.

So, assuming your time horizon is long enough for you to be comfortable with this reliable data, you can give your account a run for its money by turning it off during those hours and reallocating those dollars to better performing times.

AdWords Settings

This is how you do it. Go to the campaign settings page and scroll down to “Advanced settings” and click the Schedule: start date, end date, ad schedule link to expand that section.

Click the ‘Edit’ link next to Ad Schedule: Show ads every day and time to display the programming chart.

By clicking on the running all day links under “Time Period” in any row, a dialog box will appear:

From here, simply change when your ads show (based on the data you found in the Dimension tab report) and voila – now you’ve saved money and lowered the cost per conversion of leads from your PPC account! This could save you hundreds of dollars in wasted clicks.

Take a close look at your overall conversions after making this change to ensure that visitors who didn’t convert during off-peak hours didn’t search then and returned during peak hours. Since your ad isn’t found when you’re in search mode, you may miss them. However, this is far less impactful than the overall account gains you’ll see from making this change.

For the success of your PPC!