Facebook Ad Scheduling Guide and Best Practices | Facebook Ads Guide

4 min readApr 23, 2020

If you have run ads on Facebook in the last 6 months, you are aware of the immense options provided by Facebook to target your audience as specifically as possible or as broadly as you wish.
But, there’s one tool you are aware of but are most probably not using yet: Facebook Ad Scheduling.
Don’t fuss though, Facebook only allows scheduling when using lifetime budget, so easy to miss for those of us who have been setting daily budgets.
Ad scheduling feature helps you reach your audience when they are most likely to be online giving you slightly less CPM and more Engagement as Facebook thinks whenever the ads are running, they’re getting good engagement — but that’s because you’ve just set it up so that they are shown only when the audience is most likely to be interested.
For a quick example: You would want your ads about insomnia to be shown only from 10 PM to 2 PM because your audience is mostly suffering from insomnia if they are watching your ad at 1 AM!

Let’s begin!

Why use Facebook Ad Scheduling Feature?

At the core, Facebook Ad Scheduling is to make parts of a day also known as Dayparting, to run your ads only on certain days and at certain hours that you find most useful for your business.

When you optimize and schedule your ads taking into consideration the most likely environment around your audience when they see your ad, you can have a closer relationship with your audience and a better bang for your buck. Head on to your ad manager explore the options to schedule your ads with the help of following Best Practises for Scheduling!

Best Practices for Facebook Ad Scheduling

With the easy setup that Facebook provides, it may seem fairly simple to understand when and how to schedule your ads but there are a few best practises that you should follow to make sure that its not only Facebook that makes money. These best practices will help you understand your audience’s schedule better and guide you in making your campaigns. Okay, here we go!

1. Schedule based on Page and Audience Insights

Facebook ads can’t possibly be expected to perform well if they don’t align with your audiences’ daily routines. Audience insights will help you understand when your audience is most likely to be on the social platform. How do you find that? Here we go:

Head over to your page’s admin view and navigate to ‘Insights’
Select ‘Post’

This page shows when your audience is most active. Make sure to notice the time zone in which the data is reported — It might differ if you are using a foreign currency.
Depending on what you learn here, you can either create a single campaign to show in one time set or create multiple dayparts if your audience has multiple durations of activity and inactivity.

2. Boaden Your Schedule

Limiting your schedule might be cost-effective and increase your reach, CTR and lower your CPC, but, you should be wary of creating a too restrictive ad schedule. 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.

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I am Rohan Jain form Mercle Consultancy and I write articles here about digital marketing.

If you need help with your ads or business, reach out to me at help@mercleconsultancy.com or get in touch via our website — Mercle Consultancy

Thank you again!