Ad schedules (also called dayparting) let you choose the days and hours your PPC ads are eligible to show, so you can stop ads when you cannot answer calls or push harder during your best lead windows.
In Google Ads, you set an ad schedule at the campaign level, picking specific day-and-time blocks (for example, Mon-Fri 8:00am-6:00pm) or leaving it as “all day.” When your schedule is “off,” your ads do not enter the auction at all, which means you will not get impressions or clicks during those hours. When your schedule is “on,” you can either run normally or apply a bid adjustment by time, like +15% during lunch or -25% late afternoon if leads trend lower quality. Your schedule uses your account time zone, so a campaign built for Orlando (Eastern Time) will follow that clock, even if you are targeting other areas.
| Dayparting approach | What it controls | When it’s a good fit | Watch-outs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hard on/off schedule | Ads can only show inside the hours you set | Call-driven businesses (dental, law, HVAC, pest control) that miss calls after hours | You can lose great leads that search at night unless you have 24/7 answering or fast follow-up |
| Bid up/down by time | Ads can show all day, but you pay more or less during specific windows | You have enough conversion data to see patterns by hour/day | Bid adjustments can have reduced or no effect under some automated bidding setups, so confirm what your bidding strategy supports |
| Separate campaigns by schedule | Different budgets, ads, and bidding by time block | High spend accounts where mornings vs evenings behave like different markets | More moving parts, easier to misread performance if tracking is not clean |
| All day (no dayparting) | Full eligibility | You have strong lead capture (forms, chat, booking) and quick follow-up | Late-night spend can creep up if you are not watching lead quality |
What dayparting does not do: it does not “save” unused budget and roll it to tomorrow. Your daily budget is still a daily budget, and the platform will try to get results within the hours you allow. If you restrict the schedule heavily, spend can concentrate into a shorter window, which can raise CPCs in competitive Orlando categories (think personal injury, emergency dental, and some home services).
Our practical setup process for local businesses is simple: start by pulling day-of-week and hour-of-day performance (using conversions, not just clicks), then adjust in small steps. If you are a clinic, office, or service company that only answers phones 9-5, a hard schedule is usually the fastest fix for wasted spend. If you are already staffing phones and follow-up well, bid adjustments are often better because you still capture after-hours “research” searches and can call them first thing in the morning.
Two Orlando-specific tips we use a lot: (1) align schedules with your real intake capacity, not your posted hours, and (2) if you get tourist or commuter traffic, test an “after work” bump (for example 5:00pm-8:00pm) before you cut evenings completely. Also, if phone calls are your main conversion, schedule your call assets to match your ad schedule so you are not paying for calls you cannot take.
If you want us to map your best-performing time blocks and set clean dayparting rules, that’s part of our PPC management service and it usually pairs well with better landing pages so clicks turn into booked appointments.
And if you are seeing clicks but not enough leads, review your site’s basics from what makes a website “good” for a small business before you decide the schedule is the problem. After dayparting goes live, keep a simple scoreboard of lead volume and cost per lead using the metrics we track for marketing performance, then revisit the schedule every 30 days as your data grows.
