Should you run Google Ads 24/7 or only during working hours?

This is a pretty common question when you're using online ads to generate leads.

• Run ads only during office hours and you might miss out on some leads.
• Run ads 24/7 and you might be wasting money on leads that come in overnight when you can't contact them.

The 24/7 crowd argue that every lead is good and clicks can sometimes be cheaper in the middle of the night.

The office hours only crowd make a valid point that if you only get back to a Friday night lead on Monday morning your chances of winning the sale are minuscule.

Both arguments have merit.

Don't guess, test.

You'll be confident that you've made the right scheduling choice once you've tested what works best for your account.

Run your ads 24/7 for a while and compare performance between office hours and after hours. Or, if you're currently running ads 24/7 you can compare using data from the last few months.

Cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-action (CPA) (aka cost-per-lead) are popular metrics for judging campaign performance but I don't think either is right in this case.

You see, there is a very strong link between how fast you respond to a lead and how likely the lead is to turn into a sale. Leads that arrive after hours often turn into sales at a much lower rate than leads that arrive during working hours. Just looking at how much the click or lead cost can be misleading.

Instead you might consider using cost-per-converted-lead. i.e. how much ad spend did it take per lead that turned into a customer. Calculate this by dividing the ad spend during each period by the number of leads from each period who turned into a customer.

Here's an example.

Working hours

• Ad spend: $150 000.
• Leads that turned into customers: 300.
• Cost-per-converted-lead: $150 000 / 300 = $500.

After hours

• Ad spend: $50 000.
• Leads that turned into customers: 80
• Cost-per-converted lead: $50 000 / 80 = $625.

It's a bit more work to calculate, but it tells you how well the ads are working to deliver sales, not just clicks or leads.

If you don't have enough sales data to get a clear answer you could use cost-per-contacted-lead as a proxy. It works on the assumption that if you can't contact a lead you're not going to be able to win a sale.

It's calculated in a similar way, except instead of counting the number of leads that turned into a sale you count the number of leads the sales team was able to speak with.

Again do this for both office hours and out of hours periods.

Related articles

Advertising is expensive. Do as little of it as you can.

It is almost always cheaper to get a happy customer to return than to win another one through advertising.

Is your conversion tracking teaching Google the right lessons?

If every enquiry looks equally valuable, Google will chase quantity. Does it ever learn which leads actually become customers?

Map every route a Google Ads lead can take into your business

I trace every route from the ad to the CRM to find leads and tracking data that go missing.

Are you making Google Ads decisions with the right evidence?

The ad account says the leads are good. The sales team says they aren’t. Who has the evidence needed to decide?

How I decide which Google Ads evidence gaps matter most

Finding problems is easy. The difficult part is identifying the few evidence gaps that could materially affect leads, decisions and profitability.

What happens after a Google Ads lead arrives?

A neat sales funnel can hide where leads go missing, follow-up breaks down and the evidence needed to improve your ads gets lost.

Topics you'll find on this site