Changing your ad schedule on Facebook Ads Manager can help optimize your ad performance and budget. Your ad schedule determines when your ads are shown to users. Setting an effective schedule ensures your ads are delivered when your target audience is most likely to engage.
There are a few key reasons you may want to adjust your Facebook ad schedule:
- Improve ad relevance – Showing ads when your audience is active allows you to reach users when they’re most receptive.
- Reduce wasted ad spend – Avoid showing ads to low-quality traffic by aligning your schedule with peak engagement periods.
- Manage budget – Concentrate your daily spend during top-converting hours or days.
- Test performance – Experiment with different schedules to determine the optimal timeslots.
Fortunately, Facebook makes it easy to update your ad schedule in Ads Manager and offers flexibility to set schedules at both campaign and ad set levels.
Check Your Existing Facebook Ad Schedule
Before changing your schedule, it’s important to view your current setup. Understanding your existing ad delivery times will allow you to make informed updates.
To find your current Facebook ad schedule:
- Open Ads Manager and click on the campaign you want to check.
- Go to the ad set level.
- Click on the Delivery column.
This will display a chart visualizing when your ads are scheduled to run. Take note of your active daily hours and days of the week.
Analyzing this schedule chart can reveal opportunities to optimize your delivery times. For example, you may find ads running in the middle of the night when engagement is low. Or ads might not be running on historically high-converting days.
Tips for analyzing your current schedule:
- Look for obvious wasted spend during periods of low engagement
- Check if delivery aligns with typical high traffic days/times for your business
- Compare to analytics data on peak website or sales activity
- See if schedule matches consumers’ typical buying patterns
Having a clear understanding of your existing setup makes adjusting your schedule much easier.
Change Ad Schedule in Ads Manager
Once you’ve reviewed your current schedule, you can move forward with making updates. Facebook enables you to set schedules at both the ad campaign and ad set levels.
Update Campaign Schedule
To change the full campaign schedule:
- Go to the campaign delivery settings
- Click on Change next to Delivery Optimization
- Choose a Schedule
- Select specific Days and Hours
- Save your changes
This will update the overarching schedule for that full campaign. Any new ad sets you create within the campaign will follow this schedule.
Update Ad Set Schedule
You can also define custom schedules for existing or new ad sets:
- Go to the ad set level
- Click on the Delivery column
- Choose Edit Schedule
- Select Days and Hours
- Save changes
Setting ad set schedules gives you greater flexibility to test different delivery times. For example, you may want to show certain products only during weekdays or target specific creatives on weekends.
Granular schedules can help maximize performance, especially if you sell multiple product types or use segmented targeting.
Schedule Considerations
- Avoid drastic daily budget reductions between scheduled hours, as this limits delivery.
- When testing new schedules, make small incremental changes.
- Monitor changes for 1-2 weeks before further optimization.
- Sync schedules to your target audience’s habits and needs.
- Align with website traffic patterns and sales cycles.
Optimize Schedules by Ad Objective
The optimal Facebook ad schedule often depends on your campaign objective and desired outcome from the ads.
Here are tips for configuring schedules based on key objectives:
Brand Awareness Campaigns
- Run during weekday mornings/evenings when commuting traffic is high.
- Avoid scheduling ads in the middle of the workday.
- Consider running continuously to achieve maximum reach.
Traffic Campaigns
- Concentrate delivery during converting times of day.
- Align with site analytics peak traffic hours.
- Test pausing low-performing days or times.
Engagement Campaigns
- Schedule videos when social engagement is highest.
- Run Link clicks ads alongside high website traffic.
- Consider an always-on schedule to foster continuous engagement.
Conversion Campaigns
- Follow daily and weekly cycles of target industry or vertical.
- Review past purchase behavior for audience insights.
- Concentrate budget near end of buyer’s journey when users are lower-funnel.
Customizing your schedule around the desired outcome can directly boost your Facebook ad results.
Use Automatic Placement to Optimize Delivery
Facebook’s Automatic Placements feature provides another option to maximize your ad schedule for conversion campaigns.
This uses Facebook’s AI to automatically deliver your ads to the times and placements predicted to get the best results based on your goal.
Benefits of Automatic Placements
- Requires less manual optimization work
- Quickly identifies high-converting schedule based on data
- Dynamically shifts budget to better-performing times
- Expands reach and frequency for sales and conversions
To enable Automatic Placements:
- Go to ad set level
- Under Placement, select Automatic Placements
- Set an ad budget and duration
- Save changes
This allows Facebook’s algorithms to automatically shift budget and find the ideal delivery schedule.
Schedule Reports to Analyze Performance
Setting up scheduled reports is a valuable way to monitor the impact of your Facebook ad schedules over time.
Reports can be scheduled to email you key metrics at a defined frequency. Include breakdowns relevant to schedules like:
- Hour of day
- Day of week
- Device type
- Placement
- Campaign or ad set
Regularly reviewing scheduled reports makes it easy to spot positive or negative trends from your scheduling changes.
To configure a Custom Report in Ads Manager:
- Click Reports in the left menu
- Click Create Report
- Choose your metrics, breakdowns and date range
- Click Schedule
- Choose the report frequency and enter your email
Schedule reports to run weekly or monthly. Analyze the data to shape your ongoing schedule optimization.
Use A/B Testing to Compare Schedules
A/B testing different Facebook ad schedules is an excellent way to make data-driven optimization decisions.
The steps to properly A/B test schedules include:
- Create two identical campaigns or ad sets with different schedules
- Target to the same audience and location
- Use the same creative, budget, placements
- Run for a set duration (e.g. 1 week)
- Compare performance metrics between the two schedules
- Determine the better-performing schedule
Split testing allows you to directly see how engagement and conversion metrics differ by schedule while eliminating other variables.
Some examples of A/B testing schedules:
- Weekdays vs weekends
- Morning vs evening
- High season vs low season
- Holidays vs non-holidays
The winning schedule from A/B tests should be implemented more broadly. Continually testing and optimizing ensures you maximize results.
Use Rules to Adjust Schedules Dynamically
Facebook Rules provide an automated way to adjust your schedules and budgets in response to performance.
For example, you could set rules like:
- Increase budget for ad sets with decreasing CPA
- Pause low-performing days of week
- Extend high-converting hours of day
- Reduce budget for ad sets with increasing CPM
Rules allow your schedules and budgets to adapt in real-time based on your specified conditions. This saves time versus manual daily optimizations.
To implement Facebook Rules:
- Click on Tools
- Select Rules Manager
- Click Create Rule
- Choose triggers and actions based on schedules
- Define rule details
- Turn on rule
Pro tip: Start with small user-defined adjustments and conservative caps. Monitor new rules to ensure they are having the desired performance impact before removing caps.
Conclusion
Adjusting your Facebook ad schedule is crucial to maximize results and optimize your ad spend. Take time to analyze your current setup and identify opportunities to improve timing. Testing different schedules, leveraging automatic placements and implementing rules can help refine delivery. Stay agile and keep iterating to ensure your ads are matched to periods of peak engagement. With the right schedule in place, your ad performance will become more consistent and cost-efficient.
| Ad Objective | Ideal Delivery Times |
|---|---|
| Brand Awareness | Weekday mornings and evenings |
| Website Traffic | Align with analytics peak hours |
| Engagement | When social and site activity highest |
| Conversions | Follow target audience daily cycles |
| Schedule Optimization Method | Description |
|---|---|
| A/B Testing | Directly compare metrics from different schedules |
| Automatic Placements | Let Facebook determine best times based on goal |
| Rules | Automatically adjust delivery by performance triggers |
| Reports | Regularly analyze performance by schedule breakdown |