What is it?
The Hour of the Week Bidder recommends time-based bid adjustments based on the performance of KPIs. It analyzes how your campaigns perform at different hours of the week and allows you to apply bid adjustments with a single click—eliminating the need to manually create time slots and adjust bids individually, as required in Google Ads.
The tool groups campaigns into Ad Schedule Groups. Each group has campaigns that have the same dayparting settings which means that they have the same ad schedules and bid adjustments.
If campaigns in a group don't have any ad schedule settings, we will group them into 4-hour slots by default. These can easily be changed. Ad schedule groups let you view aggregated data and set bid adjustments for similar campaigns together.
Important note for Microsoft Ads accounts: As you may know, unlike with Google Ads, in Microsoft Ads each campaign can have a different time zone. In the Hour of Week tool, this translates into the following:
The system fetches data for the selected campaigns irrespective of each campaign’s time zone, which means that if a campaign accrues, for example, 5 impressions from 12:00 AM to 4:00 AM, the data will be fetched properly for that hour range, no matter what the time zone is. This also works when selecting multiple campaigns.
Why Use It?
With this tool, you can:
Save time and ensure consistency by applying bid adjustments across multiple campaigns and time slots in a single step.
Gain more control over ad delivery by adjusting or excluding specific time slots based on when your ads perform best.
Overcome platform limitations by creating flexible time slots and making bulk updates more efficiently than in native ad platforms.
Customize your bidding strategy by controlling aggressiveness and choosing whether to increase, decrease, or balance bid adjustments.
React to performance trends faster by using data-driven recommendations that consider statistical significance and recent performance.
Select the Scope
From the tree view on the left, select the campaigns you want to set bid adjustments for. We recommend selecting one ad schedule group at a time, a set of campaigns within that, or individual campaigns.
Combine and split equivalent ad schedules
When set to No, the tool will use the same ad schedule slots as you already have in the Google Ads interface to make bid adjustment recommendations. When set to Yes, the tool may combine or split similar ad schedule slots and recommend bid adjustments to offer more granular ad suggestions.
Why should you select one ad schedule group?
This is to ensure that you're analyzing similar campaigns together. It will also make sure that you see the current bid adjustments and ad schedules for the campaigns. If more than one ad schedule group is selected, the tool won't be able to show you the current bid adjustments and schedules.
You can also select the date range for which you want the system to analyze data. A longer date range will have a clearer trend. By default, the system selects the last 4 weeks.
Select your Strategy
Choose a Goal
When you select an Ad Schedule Group from the left and press Update, the system will automatically show you some bid recommendations on the right. The goal can be changed from the 'Choose Goal' option on the right. It is important to select the right goal for the campaigns because this is what the system will use to make bid recommendations.
Types of goals:
Increase Clicks: Maximize impression share to get the most traffic.
Increase Conversions: Increase conversions while trying to keep the cost/conversion reasonable but this may result in increased cost/conversion.
Reduce Cost per Conversion: Try to reduce the cost/conversion while maintaining or increasing conversions. This may sometimes result in fewer conversions.
Increase Conversion Value: Maximize conversion value to drive more revenue.
Increase Conversion Value per Cost (ROAS): Try to increase conversion value and reduce the cost to improve ROAS.
Set Aggressiveness
The aggressiveness setting allows you to provide a range within which the bid adjustments will be recommended. By default, this is set to "low".
For example, if your goal is to increase conversions and you want to be more aggressive and try to get as many conversions as possible even it if means bidding 50% higher, set the aggressiveness level to 'High'. You can also select if you want us to suggest bid adjustment increases, decreases, or both.
Review Recommended Bid Adjustments
After selecting the scope and goal, you can review the recommended bid adjustments. These can also be dragged and dropped to be changed.
The Expected Change on the top right is an estimate to help you decide which changes to apply. This estimation gets better as more data is available for the campaigns.
As the actual results will depend on many factors, it's always important to monitor the performance closely after applying any changes.
How are bid adjustments recommended?
Based on the goal that is selected, our algorithm identifies time slots that can help achieve that goal by either getting a higher or lower bid adjustment. A time slot should have enough data to be eligible.
In the chart below you will see the metric you are optimizing for (upwards) vs cost (downwards).
Green Time Slots: The time slots for which the algorithm recommends an increase in bids are highlighted in Green.
Red Time Slots: The time slots where a lower bid adjustment is recommended are highlighted in Red.
Grey Time Slots: Time slots with not enough data will be grey and bid adjustments for those time slots are based on the performance of nearby time slots.
For example, if the time slot 4:00 - 6:00 am doesn't have enough data we'll look at the performance of time slots adjacent to this (2:00 - 4:00 am and 6:00 - 8:00 am) to make a recommendation.
Important: If you're using automated bidding strategies from Google Ads setting bid adjustments by time will not have any impact as Google will not consider them.
Managing Ad Schedules
It is possible to change ad schedules for multiple campaigns together by just dragging the blue bars on the chart. To stop showing ads during a given time, drag the blue bar to the end of the time slot to make it grey. The grey bars are time slots during which the selected campaigns won't show ads.
You will be able to view the Timezone being considered by the tool, on the top right.
If you have pre-defined ad schedules for the selected campaigns, they will show up here automatically. However, if campaigns with different ad schedules are selected those ad schedules will not show up because this data cannot be aggregated.
Even if you are using automated bidding strategies from Google, you can use the ad schedule feature in Optmyzr to turn off ads when you don't want to advertise. For example, if you're a local flower shop and you don't want to show ads when you are closed, you can use this feature to do it.
Use Cases
Identify High and Low-Performing Hours
Problem: You notice that your campaigns generate most conversions during certain times of the week, and some hours generate little to no conversions. How can you bid consistently during these periods?
Solution: The tool analyzes the performance of your campaigns by time slots.
For high-performing hours, you can select the Increase Conversions goal. The system will automatically highlight high-performing hours and recommend higher bid adjustments.
For low-performing hours, select the Reduce Cost per Conversion goal and review the red time slots highlighted by the system. These indicate hours where lowering bids can improve efficiency.
Overcome Limited or Fragmented Data
Problem: How do you deal with time slots in your campaigns that do not have enough data? Insufficient data makes it difficult to decide whether to increase or decrease bids.
Solution: You can rely on the tool’s algorithm to evaluate adjacent time slots when data is insufficient. Grey time slots are automatically adjusted based on nearby performance trends, ensuring that every hour has a data-backed recommendation.
Demo Video