Setting up day parting for Facebook ads can currently be done through

Did you know that you can set your Facebook ad campaigns to run at one time of day and not another? That you can make sure your ads aren’t being served at a time of day when people probably aren’t likely to take the action you want them to?

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Are you clear on what ad strategy to use to actually make more sales in your business?
Why Use Facebook Ad Scheduling?
How to Schedule Facebook Ads
3 Best Practices for Facebook Ad Scheduling
1. Schedule Based on Page and Audience Insights
2. Broaden Your Schedule
3. Monitor and Adjust Scheduling as Needed
Reach Your Target Customer with Facebook Ad Scheduling

Facebook and Instagram ad scheduling is one of my absolute favorite things about creating campaigns in the Ads Manager. There’s nothing I love more than making decisions about when and how to spend my money!

Check it out with this example schedule:

As you can see, I’ve got my ads set to run 2pm-12am Sunday through Thursday.

Here’s how you set it up:

Remember that the schedule for your ads is controlled in the Ads Manager under Ad Set:

Under the “Run ads on a schedule” radio button, select Use this ad account’s time zone. The data you’re going to find in Google Analytics will hopefully be in the same time zone as your ad account, and that’s what you’ll use to determine the schedule.

“But how do I know when the best time of day to run my ads is?”

I’m so glad you asked! (It’s a sign that you’re just as delightfully nerdy about this stuff as I am.)

The answer depends on what the objective for these particular ads is. If you’re running a campaign to try to sell something, you’ll need to think about the buying trends of your customers.

For example, I make the most sales of Absolute FB Ads on Sundays and Mondays. Why? I’m not 100% sure, but what I do know is that the people who buy that product are really serious about using Facebook ads the smart way. (Otherwise they’d just keep Googling for the answers to their questions.) That investment shows they’re really committed to the success of their Facebook ads, and they probably want to start the week off on the right foot!

That’s anecdotal evidence, and it’s good enough for me to decide to run remarketing ads to people who have seen the Absolute FB Ads sales page, but only on Sundays and Mondays.

If the objective of your campaign is list building, however, you can find more concrete data about what time your people tend to subscribe inside Google Analytics.

Open up your Google Analytics account. Think back to when you created this opt-in, and open your dates that far back until today.

Now click on Behavior and All Pages. Find the slug for your thank you page in the list and click on it. If you don’t see it in the list, add more rows to the bottom.

(If you don’t have a thank you page that’s on your domain, stop right this moment and create one. You’ll need it for conversion tracking anyway! Your email provider will be able to explain how it’s done.)

Now click on Secondary Dimension and type in the word “Hour.” When you see Hour in the drop down menu, click on it.

Take a look at the report. It’ll show you the number of people who have landed on your thank you page (which means they’ve signed up for your list) sorted by hour of the day.

As you can see, my biggest sign up time is 2pm (or 14 hour). In fact, my best times are all in the afternoon.

Sure, plenty of my subscribers sign up earlier or later in the day as well, but I’m not interested in running ads to every single person who MIGHT sign up for my list. I want to spend money on the people who are most likely to convert, so I choose to run my ads primarily in the afternoon.

You can also look at this data for the days of the week:

But what I want you to keep in mind is that Facebook ad traffic may behave differently than other kinds of traffic. According to the data above, Friday is my 3rd best day for sign ups. However, my conversion tracking has told me on a consistent basis that my ads tank on Fridays. Why? People probably aren’t interested in learning about Facebook ads right before they start their weekend (whereas they ARE gung-ho to learn on Mondays as I mentioned above).

Make sure you’re paying attention to the context of your numbers, and not just cold data.

Are you clear on what ad strategy to use to actually make more sales in your business?

Yes, running ads at certain times can help you grow your audience and make more sales, but only if you go into it with a clear understanding of why you’re promoting each thing, and where it fits in the bigger marketing picture.

Discover the specific Facebook and Instagram ads I use every month for myself and my clients in this free masterclass:

If you’re currently running ads on Facebook or Instagram, you know the wealth of options Facebook Ads Manager provides. You can choose where your ad is shown, specify incredibly detailed (or incredibly broad) target audiences, and create the visual portion of your ad, all in the same place.

But there’s one tool you may not be using yet: Facebook ad scheduling.

Facebook only allows scheduling of ads with a lifetime budget, so the option is easy to miss if you’ve been setting daily budgets instead.

The scheduling feature is useful for saving time—you can set publish dates for your ads all at once.

It also helps you reach your target audience more efficiently by restricting your ads to time slots when the majority of your audience will be online.

Ready to enjoy these benefits?

In this post, we’ll walk you through how to schedule your ad, and show you best practices for Facebook ad scheduling.

Why Use Facebook Ad Scheduling?

The core value of Facebook ad scheduling is dayparting, or restricting the days and times at which your ad can appear. With dayparting, you can choose to run your ad only on certain days and time slots.

If you select times when your audience is most active, your ads will be much more likely to reach target customers when they’re online. You’ll likely maximize your ad spend, not to mention save time by having posts set to automatically publish with scheduling. If you had to manually post ads during peak times for your audience, your ad management could take up hours of your week.

This scheduling is also cost-effective if your audience isn’t active during typically popular hours. The off-peak times when they’re online will typically have lower ad costs. If you schedule your ads for these times, you’ll likely save more money than if you didn’t use a restricted schedule.

How to Schedule Facebook Ads

Facebook ad scheduling is easy to use and takes just a few steps to set up in Ads Manager.

1 – Go to your dashboard in Ads Manager and click “create” to start a new ad or ad set.

2 – Set up the initial parts of your ad as usual. If you’ve never created an ad in Facebook Ads Manager before, check out our complete Facebook Ads Guide for information on setting your objective, placements, and target audience. Once that’s done, you can move on to budget. To use Facebook ad scheduling, you have to set the budget to “lifetime” and specify a total amount you want to spend during the life of the ad.

3 – Underneath the budget details, select “Show More Options” and click “Edit” next to “Ad Scheduling.”

4 – Next, select “Run ads on a schedule.” A box with dates and times of day will appear, and you can choose exactly when you want your ad to run. Facebook shows time blocks in one-hour increments. Schedule your ad by day, or choose to run your ad during the same time block every day. For example, if your audience is always on from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m., you might run your ad only during that time block every day of the week.

5 – Once your ad is scheduled, click “Continue,” and complete the rest of the ad creation process. Once you publish the ad, it will run according to the schedule you set.

3 Best Practices for Facebook Ad Scheduling

With such an easy setup, Facebook ad scheduling may seem fairly simple, but there are a few best practices you should follow. These will help you get the most out of your Facebook ad scheduling by helping you determine the best times to run your ad in order to reach your target audience effectively.

1. Schedule Based on Page and Audience Insights

You can’t expect Facebook ad scheduling to work well unless it’s aligned with the routines of your audiences. How do you know when your target customer is most likely to be on the social platform? Insights from your Facebook business page will help determine your audience’s typical schedule.

At the top of your Facebook business page, select “Insights.” Then, choose “Posts” from the left-hand menu, and select the “When Your Fans Are Online” tab. This will show you what days and times your audience is most active.

Depending on what you learn from your page and audience insights, you might set different schedules for different Facebook ad placements. For example, if you find that your target audience on Instagram is on at different times than your target Facebook audience, you could create two different ad schedules and use ad placements to specify where you want each scheduled ad to run.

2. Broaden Your Schedule

Limiting your ad schedule to when your target audience is active is cost-effective and increases reach, but you should be wary of creating a schedule that’s too restrictive. Open up your schedule to multiple potential times when your audience might be online, rather than just scheduling during the one or two peak times during the week.

For example, say your audience is mainly online Monday through Friday from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m., but they also have a small spike Tuesday through Thursday from 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Schedule your ad to run during both of those time slots so your ad has more reach.

Broadening your schedule can also help keep ad costs down if your audience is mainly online during peak hours. Schedule your ads to run during some off-hours as well and you’ll likely reduce per-ad costs and increase the reach of your ad.

3. Monitor and Adjust Scheduling as Needed

No matter who your audience is, their active times are subject to change. To see if your schedule needs to be adjusted, keep track of your ad performance through the “Ads” section of your Ads Manager dashboard. It will show you a series of key metrics, including cost per result; reach; frequency; and amount spent so far.

If you notice your ad results are dropping, the first step is to recheck your page insights and see if the times have changed for when your audience is online. Page insights will give you the most detailed idea of how much you need to adjust your Facebook ad scheduling, as covered in the first section.

If page insights don’t give you enough guidance, trial&error works as well. Start by widening your schedule to include an extra hour at either end of your ad’s run time. If your ad performance doesn’t improve, try removing the added hour and adding it at the opposite end of the ad schedule instead.

By using your page insights and continually monitoring your ad’s performance, you will make the most of Facebook ad scheduling and effectively target your desired audience.

Reach Your Target Customer with Facebook Ad Scheduling

Creating an ad for a specific target audience takes work—you have to research your customers, build a segment based on that data, and design the visual element of your ad to appeal to those customers. All of that effort is wasted if your ad is shown when your audience isn’t online.

By tracking your audience’s habits and using Facebook ad scheduling, you can increase the chances that your target audience sees your ad. You’ll also save time with this feature by creating several ad sets at once and setting future publishing dates, rather than having to create each new ad at the time you want to publish it.

Have you used Facebook ad scheduling? Let us know in the comments how it worked for you!