What is Ad Scheduling?
Internet Marketing Dictionary | Google Ad Scheduling

Ad Scheduling is the process of setting up your campaigns within a Google AdWords account so that your ads are shown at specific times of the day or on specific days of the week.

Generally the visitor value of web traffic will vary from time to time and by doing careful analysis of your traffic you may find that it you get a better return on your advertising if you only advertise at certain times of the day or on particular days. For example, if you support your online activites with press advertising and place ads in newspaper at the weekend, you could get a lot of interested traffic at the weekend or on Monday mornings that consisted of people who had read your ads and then gone online to find you.

During the rest of the week your traffic may still be valuable but just not as valuable.

Ad Scheduling lets you turn your AdWords ad campaigns on and off at times that suit your business and also let you automatically increase or decrease your bid prices for campaigns across the board. So for example, you can choose to increase bid prices by 25% on Monday mornings and to decrease them by 20% on Tuesday afternoons.

Some businesses use ad scheduling simply to stop enquiries outside office hours and whilst this may make good sense, if your competitors do this as well, you could find that by continuing to advertise all the time and providing a good quality enquiry form on your site, you could get high quality sales enquiries at times when advertising competition is low which will keep your click costs down.

Ad Scheduling is one of the many reasons why click costs vary for the same keyword within a given Ad Group and Campaign within an AdWords account. It also partly explains why AdSense earnings can vary greatly from day to day.