The best time to run Google Ads: How to optimize your ads campaigns for time of day

Google Ad Grant

With so many nonprofit working with limited advertising dollars, it’s essential to find strategic optimization techniques that make the most of the budget. Identifying higher converting times of day allows you to spend more during those time periods to maximize your conversions.

The best time to run Google Ads is when your audience is most engaged. Instead of using loose industry benchmarks, you can use the Hour of Day report in Google Ads and a custom GA4 Explore report to identify “best” times for your specific nonprofit and target audience. Here is a step by step guide to determine and optimize your campaigns to run during the best time of day.

How to See When Your Google Ads Are Converting

Once you have collected enough data (for example, 30-50 conversions), you can segment your campaign data to determine when your campaign drives the most desired actions (conversions). 

To segment by time of day:

1. Navigate to your ad account. 
2. Use the left navigation to select the Campaigns view.
3. Ensure your filters are set correctly to see your desired data. In this case, we’re only viewing campaign data of enabled campaigns, for the time period between 6/1/25 – 6/26/25. 
4. Above the header row of the data table, click on Segment, Time, Hour of the day. Make sure you also have the conversions column turned on.
5. Filter by conversions in the above line chart. Hover over the line chart to get an overview of what times people convert.

In this example, we see conversions spike mid-week. We might consider increasing bids during mid-week (high points) and decreasing bids during the weekend (low points).

You can also segment by other time units, like day of the week, to determine which days of the week get more conversions.

Online Course

Social Media for Social Impact

Become your own social media marketing expert!

Take the Course

How to See When Website Visitors Convert Using GA4 Explore Reports

The first Google Ads report allowed us to see what times people were most likely to convert from campaigns. GA4 allows us to see conversion patterns from all traffic sources. We can use those patterns to inform how we approach our ads strategy. If we know our larger audience is most likely to donate on weekend mornings, for example, we can use that to inform our ads strategy. For more on GA4, see here. 

To set up a Custom Explore Report that shows all website visits per hour:

1. Navigate to Explore. Create a new exploration. 
2. Import the Hour dimension. 
3. Import Session metrics (visits to our website). 
4. Under rows, add the Hour dimension. This gives us data split by hour in the rows of our table. 
5. Under show rows, show at least 25 rows to see all hours of the day. 
6. Under values, add Sessions. This shows us the total number of sessions for a given hour.
7. Then, sort by top sessions by clicking on the sessions header in the table until you see a down arrow. We can now see the top hours with the most number of sessions. 

In the example below, Hour 21 has 13 sessions, the most number of sessions. However, in this scenario, we don’t want to limit campaigns to specific hours because we are getting sessions across different hours. 

With explore reports, not only do we get session (visit) data, we can also get granular and get data on other user actions (events), which indicates deeper engagement. This is important because at the end of the day, we want to prioritize actions that are important to our organization, not chase big visit numbers that don’t lead to further engagement. For example, if your organization set up event tracking for donations with the name “donations”, you can use GA4 to see when people are most likely to donate, which can help inform your fundraising strategy.

To set up a Custom Explore Report to show event data by hour:

1. Navigate to Explore. Create a new exploration. 
2. Import the Hour dimension. 
3. Import the event name dimension. 
4. Under rows, add the Hour dimension. This gives us data split by hour in the rows of our table. 
5. Under show rows, show at least 25 rows to see all hours of the day. 
6. Under values, add the event count metric. This shows us the number of events on our website for a given hour.
7. If you want to see only a specific event (ex. email sign up, resource downloads, or donations), under the Filters section, add a filter called Event name, Conditions contains, then in the input box type your event name that you use to track your event. 

In the next screenshot, Hour 22 has the most number of new account signups. If most conversions happen toward the end of the day (10PM), we want to make sure that the organization isn’t running out of budget early in the day and missing out on this high-converting hour. We can set a custom ad schedule to start running our campaign later in the day to ensure that some budget is conserved for these audiences.

Optimize Google Ads Campaigns for Time of Day

Unless your campaign requires specific times or hours, start by running campaigns for all days and times. This allows you to collect data and understand when your target audience is most engaged. In the event that you do see higher conversion rates at certain times of the day, below are some options to optimize your campaigns.

Set an Ad Schedule

If you are certain that you only want to run a campaign during certain times:

1. Go to your Google Ads account.
2. Select a Campaign or Ad Group.
3. Go to Audiences, keywords, and content. 
4. Click Ad schedule. 
5. Create an ad schedule to specify what times and days of the week your selected campaign or ad group is allowed to run.

Segment Your Campaigns and Budgets

If there are specific times your ads receive more engagement and you want to increase budget there, but also keep ads running during other times, it may be worth creating separate campaigns with distinct ad schedules, and giving each a dedicated budget. 

For example, Campaign A is your original campaign, with a $100/day budget, running at all times and days. However, you find out that your campaign has higher conversion rates during the week (Monday – Friday). To optimize your performance, you might adjust Campaign A to only run Monday – Friday. Then, create a separate but identical Campaign B, with a lower daily budget, that runs on weekends (Saturday – Sunday). This allows you to maximize campaign spend during high-converting weekdays, and free up budget for other campaign initiatives on lower-converting weekend days.

Use Bid Adjustments

If you are using manual bidding, you can add bid adjustments to bid higher during high performance times and bid lower during low-performing times. 

If you are using automated bidding (Maximize Clicks, Target CPC, Maximize Conversions, Target CPA, Maximize Conversion Value, Target ROAS, Target Impressions, Target CPM), Google will automatically optimize bids based on time. However, the Maximize Clicks automated bid strategy allows you to make device, location, ad schedule, audiences, calls, and demographics bid adjustments. 

To create an ad schedule bid adjustment: 

1. Select a specific campaign. 
2. Go to Audiences, keywords, and content.
3. Click Ad schedule. 
4. Create an ad schedule first. Once your ad schedule populates in the table, go to the bid adj. column. 
5. Hover over a specific time and day, and click the pencil icon to make a bid adjustment.
6. Enter a value for the percentage of the bid adjustment (we recommend starting small, for example a 10% increase). Note that if your campaign uses a maximize cost per click bid strategy, bids are capped at $2 per click, regardless of how bid adjustments are set.

Conclusion

Scheduling your Google Ads campaigns around times when your audience is most engaged sounds obvious, but it’s an optimization tactic that many organizations overlook! Use custom ad schedules to maximize your chances of turning site visitors into volunteers, donors, or advocates and turn your online wins into offline impact.

Have a success story of using custom ad schedules? Tweet us @WholeWhale.