It doesn’t matter how many leads you’re pulling in from Google Ads, or how cheap they are. If they don’t answer when you call back, don’t remember filling out your form, or just aren’t motivated to do business with you, you’ve got a serious problem.
And a big part of that problem comes down to the time of day and day of the week your ads are showing.
If you want to convert more leads into paying customers, you need your ads showing at the right times. There’s a setting in your account that handles exactly that.
Below I’ll cover:
- Why lead timing has such a huge impact on whether it becomes a customer
- Where to find this setting in your campaign
- How to use it to convert more leads into paying customers
Real quick before we dive in. If you want hands-on help with your Google Ads, claim a free 7-day trial of my Skool community, the PPC Lead Lab. Inside you’ll find all my Google Ads courses plus a community area where you can post questions and get direct feedback from me on your campaigns.
Let’s get started.
Why timing matters for service businesses (but not stores)
If you run an online store, it doesn’t matter what time someone clicks your ad. A customer who spends $50 at noon is worth exactly as much as one who spends $50 at midnight. As long as they pull out their card and check out, it’s money in the bank.
Service businesses don’t work that way. You’re not selling a product, you’re selling a service, and getting paid isn’t as simple as sending traffic to a checkout. You have to talk to the lead on the phone, qualify them, learn their needs, budget, and timelines, then quote the work and actually do it before you get paid. It’s a much longer process, and capturing the lead is only step one.
The problem is that lead quality can swing wildly depending on when it comes in. There are two big reasons.
Reason 1: Intent
For most service businesses, someone who fills out a form at 10am on a Tuesday tends to be in a more serious frame of mind. They’re awake, focused, and actively trying to solve a problem right now. Someone filling out that same form at 3am on a Saturday is often just browsing, half asleep, or curious.
Both count as a lead in your dashboard. But only one is likely to become a customer.
Reason 2: Speed to lead
This one’s even bigger. Speed to lead is one of the biggest factors in whether a lead ever becomes a customer. The faster you follow up, the higher your chances of closing.
A lead that comes in at 10am on a Tuesday can get a callback within five minutes, while that person is still at their computer thinking about the problem. A lead that comes in at 3am on a Saturday might sit in your inbox until Monday. By the time you reach out, they may have already hired someone else or lost interest.
You can solve this by telling Google when to show your ads. It takes one simple setting that most people aren’t even using. Let me show you where it lives.
Where to find the ad schedule
- Open your Google Ads dashboard and select the campaign you want to work on.
- In the left-hand menu, scroll to Audiences, keywords, and content.
- Click Ad schedule.
If you don’t see a schedule here, the campaign has defaulted to running 24/7. That means your ads run every hour of every day, all week. For some businesses that’s fine. For most lead-based businesses, it’s not a great idea.
To create a schedule, click the blue pencil icon, select the days and times you want your ads to run, and click save.
For most local service businesses, that’s your standard business hours. If you’re open 9 to 5, Monday to Friday, set the schedule to 9 to 5, Monday to Friday. The logic goes right back to speed to lead. There’s no point paying to generate a lead at 11pm when the voicemail won’t get picked up until 8am the next day.
Heads up: your cost per lead might go up at first
If you’ve been running ads for a while without a schedule, like a lot of people do when they’re new, adding one will very likely push your cost per lead up at first. Here’s why.
At night, competition is lower. Fewer competitors are bidding on the same keywords at those hours, so the clicks are cheaper. If you’ve been pulling in leads overnight, that drags your average cost per lead down. Switch to daytime-only, when the auction is more competitive, and those clicks cost more, which raises your average CPL. It’s supply and demand.
So when advertisers add a schedule for the first time, a lot of them see CPL go up, panic, and revert to 24/7. That’s almost always a mistake.
It’s easy to get caught up in the numbers and lose sight of what matters. Yes, we want leads and CPL matters. But if those cheap leads don’t convert, who cares? Daytime leads might cost twice as much as nighttime leads, but they might also be 3x more likely to convert, which more than offsets the higher cost. So if your CPL goes up after adding a schedule, don’t panic. It’s probably worth it.
The bid adjustment mistake (even pros make this)
Here’s a mistake I see all the time, even from advanced advertisers.
In your ad schedule there’s a column called bid adjustment. Click the pencil icon and you can raise or lower your bids for a given time window. On paper that makes sense, and it’s a smart move when you’re using manual bidding. If you know a certain day brings in better customers, nudging your bids up that day helps you win clicks during that window.
The problem is that most local lead gen campaigns run on Maximize Conversions. And these bid adjustments do absolutely nothing when you’re using a smart bidding strategy like Max Conversions. You can make all the adjustments you want and Google will ignore them. Manual bidding is the only time Google pays attention.
This isn’t necessarily bad, because smart bidding already pushes your budget toward the days and time blocks that produce the cheapest leads. But it won’t necessarily push budget to the days with the best sales. So if you find a specific day or window pulls in really low-quality leads, you may want to remove that day entirely instead.
Don’t over-restrict your schedule
A really tight ad schedule is tempting, but it’s not always the right call. Two reasons.
Search volume. Say you operate in a small niche or serve a tiny area, and there just aren’t many people searching for what you offer. You might already be struggling to get enough leads to keep the campaign viable. Chop your schedule down to a narrow window and you could cut off leads you can’t afford to lose. Yes, a Tuesday-morning lead beats a Saturday-night one. But a mediocre lead you can actually work beats no lead at all when volume is that tight. In a low-volume situation, a tight schedule can do more harm than good.
Cost. When you restrict the schedule, you force smart bidding to spend within a tighter window. Google will always spend the budget you give it, even when clicks are expensive in that window. So if you restrict your ads to the most competitive hours of the day, expect your cost per click and cost per lead to climb.
The good news is this is easy to test and easy to reverse. That’s the beauty of almost everything in Google Ads. Make a change, watch the data for a couple weeks, and if it’s not working, widen the schedule back out. Nothing here is permanent.
Want help with your Google Ads?
If you would rather someone else ran them, here is Google Ads management for local service businesses. If you are an agency, we also run white label PPC under your brand.
Prefer to run them yourself? Join Practical PPC, my Google Ads course for local lead generation.