You’ve created compelling content, targeted the perfect audience, but your Facebook ads campaign turns out to be unsuccessful? The main reason might be timing. There is a best time to run Facebook ads for any business, and finding it out can significantly increase your success. This article will instruct you when and how to schedule your Facebook ads to get the best results.
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How To Find The Best Time To Run Facebook Ads
There’s no one-size-fits-all timing strategy to run Facebook ads for your business. It may vary depending on many factors such as: business industry, audience interests and behaviors, individual living time, country and time zone, etc. For example, the best time to run Facebook ads in the USA may differ from that in Singapore. To find the optimal time for your own company, you can focus on my methods below:
Understand your industry
Different industries have different effective advertising times. During these periods, your target audience may be more likely to search or scroll through Facebook, engage in your content or share it with their coworkers, friends and family.
For example, here’s a reference of best time to run Facebook ads in various industries:
| Industry | Peak Times (Daily) | Peak Days (Weekly) | Details |
| B2B | 9 AM, 3-4PM | Tuesday, Wednesday | Facebook audiences tend to search during business hours. |
| Fashion, Beauty | 12-2 PM, 7-10 PM | Friday, Saturday, Sunday | Facebook users tend to shop during lunch breaks and evenings, especially on weekends. |
| Food and Beverage | 11 AM-1 PM, 6-9 PM | Friday, Saturday | Facebook audiences often search for dining options during lunch and dinner, with weekends being popular for socializing. |
| Tech, Electronics | 2-4 PM, 8-11 PM | Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday | Customers tend to research and compare tech products in the afternoon and evenings on weekdays. |
| Travel, Hospitality | 10 AM-12 PM, 3-5 PM | Monday to Friday | Travelers often plan trips after working hours. |
| Education | 9-11 AM, 7-10 PM | Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday | Customers interested in courses often search in the mornings and evenings on weekdays. |
| Real Estate | 3-6 PM, 9-11 PM | Sunday, Monday | Clients tend to search for real estate in the late afternoon/evening and on weekends. |
| Health and Medical | 9 AM-11 AM, 4 PM-6 PM | Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday | Users interested in health often search for information in the mornings and afternoons on weekdays. |
| Finance | 10 AM-12 PM, 2 PM-4 PM | Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday | Clients typically show interest in financial products during business hours. |
Common peak times and peak days in different industries (for informational purposes only).
Note: These suggestions might not be applicable for all cases. To define the best time to run ads on Facebook for your own business, don’t skip other useful tips below.
Know your target audience
Get to know your target audience demographics and their lifestyle. With around 2.9 billion monthly active users, Facebook is the most popular social media worldwide (reference from Statista). However, this large number of users are not always active. They’re more likely to use Facebook during certain times and engage in content that aligns with their current interests.
Example 1:
A business professional may be active during business hours or early morning/evening when they are commuting. Meanwhile, a new parent may be scrolling Facebook during newborn’s nap times or before bed.
Example 2:
Most people are employees, thus, according to Muhammad Arham, a Meta Ads Manager at Techbunk, the best days to run ads on Facebook or any platform to educate your target audience is from date 20 – 30 of the month. Then from the 1st date of the month, when they receive their salaries, you can advertise your sales campaign to them.
You can also analyze these general user behavior patterns:
- Early Birds: Those who often scroll their phones right after waking up. The best time to run Facebook ads in the morning to target them is from 6-9 AM.
- Lunchtime Lurkers: Those who use Facebook during lunch breaks. To target them, you can run ads from 11 AM-1 PM.
- Afternoon Attention: People focus on work and reduce time for Facebook. For these audiences, you shouldn’t waste money to run ads from 1-4 PM.
- Evening Escape: People turn to Facebook for entertainment and news after their day. The peak time to run ads to target them is from 5-9 PM.
Set up A/B tests
Use A/B tests to compare the effectiveness of running ads at different days of the week and different times of the day and determine the best time for your business.
Utilize a third-party tool
Some third-party tools can help businesses find the best time to run Facebook Ads, such as: AdEspresso, Revealbot, Qwaya.
AdEspresso: AdEspresso is a comprehensive Facebook ad management platform that offers detailed data analysis and campaign optimization. It helps you determine when your ads are performing best based on past performance data and makes recommendations on effective ad timing.
Revealbot: Revealbot is a Facebook ad automation tool that helps you optimize your campaigns and save time. It analyzes data and makes recommendations on the best time to run Facebook ads based on your performance and goals.
Qwaya: Qwaya is a powerful Facebook ad management tool that offers advanced features such as competitor analysis, A/B testing, and process automation. Qwaya helps you determine when to run effective ads based on data and optimize your campaigns for the best results.
Consult with a Facebook ad expert
Find these methods too complicated? You can contact Facebook ad experts for consultation. They understand the Facebook ads platform thoroughly and can help you set, manage and optimize your ad campaign.
SpeedX Agency team, a leading Facebook partner with top experts who can help clients overcome challenges in improving ads, is here for you.
Why You Must Find The Best Time To Run Facebook Ads
Let me tell you a story of my client, Dalton, the owner of a small business selling baby products. She had been struggling with her Facebook ad campaigns, even though she poured a significant amount of money into running ads. Conversions were low and CTA (cost-per-acquisition) was skyrocketing.
After months of fruitless efforts, Dalton was introduced to me. My team and I analyzed through her previous campaigns and found out the problem: poor ad scheduling. Her ads were running at suboptimal times when her target audiences were least likely to engage. We carefully analyzed her business, her audience demographics, interests and online behavior. We did A/B tests with different ad schedules to find the optimal timing for Dalton’s target market.
And the results were wonderful. After implementing the new ad schedule, the conversion rate increased significantly and the CTA decreased dramatically. Dalton’s ad campaigns generated a positive ROI (return on investment).
So you see, the time you run your Facebook ads can make or break your ads campaigns. Perfect timing will increase click-through rate (CTR), boost conversions, and optimize your budget.
Increase CTR
Peak Facebook times are ideal for businesses to publish ads and increase click-through rates. However, the key is to ensure your content is both captivating and addresses your audience’s needs. Without these two elements, it’s difficult to leverage the best time to run Facebook ads and increase CTR.
Boost conversions
For online food and beverage businesses, peak Facebook times are crucial for increasing conversions. Their primary customers are often office workers who mainly use Facebook during their breaks.
This also applies to financial businesses. They often focus their advertising on weekends when more Facebook users have time to research and consider profitable investments.
To increase conversions from advertising during peak hours, businesses must present offers that directly address their customers’ pain points.
Optimize budget
Running ads at times when your target audience is most active on Facebook increases the likelihood that they’ll see and engage with your ads. This helps reduce the Facebook Advertising Cost wasted on low performing time periods.
How To Schedule Facebook Ads At The Best Time
Use Meta Business Suite
Meta Business Suite is free for any business, organization, or individual active on Facebook. It allows you to schedule ads in advance. It also helps you track and analyze the results to identify the best time for Facebook ads.
To start scheduling, you must have Facebook access to the page which is added to your business portfolio in Meta Business Suite, or have task access to ads. Then, you can follow those steps:
- Go to Meta Business Suite at https://business.facebook.com.
- Click on Ads from the menu bar, then click Create ad on the top right.
- Select a goal for your ad, or set up Automated ads/Boost Facebook content.
- Fill in the information asked for your ad: ad creative, special ad category, audience, budget, placements, customer info, payment, and privacy policy.
- Under Schedule and Duration, pick a Start date and Start time. To determine how long your ad runs, edit Days or choose an End date.
- To see your ad will look across different placements, click See all previews.
- Click Schedule to finish.
Use Ad Scheduling
Ad scheduling is only available when you set up a budget. To use Ad Scheduling, first go to Meta Ads Manager and click the ‘+Create’ green button.
Complete the setup steps as you would for a normal campaign. But stop at the Ad Set setup screen, and scroll down to the ‘Budget & schedule’ section. Here, you have two options for scheduling your ads:
Option 1: If you choose ‘Lifetime budget’, you can schedule your ads using the scheduler provided by Meta. It looks like this:
You can highlight the time sections of this table in dark blue. These are the times you can choose to have your ads automatically turn on and run.
Option 2: This option is available when you select ‘Daily budget’. It looks like this:
Basically, you can choose the start and end date (in the future) of your ad campaign. And your ads will only spend and run during the time period you choose. For example, some offline beverage businesses do not want to turn on ads on the first days of the week, so these two options give businesses the flexibility to do so.
Custom rules in Meta Ads Manager
Facebook Ad Custom Rules in Meta Ads Manager are a powerful tool that helps you schedule ads at the defined best time to run Facebook ads and optimize your campaign’s performance.
Custom Rules allow you to set up automated rules based on specific conditions you set. For example, you can create rules to:
- Turn ads on/off: Automatically turn ads on at times you’ve determined perform best and turn them off at other times.
- Adjust budgets: Increase or decrease ad budgets based on campaign performance or specific metrics like cost per result (CPA) or click-through rate (CTR).
- Send notifications: Get notifications when ads reach milestones or need your attention.
Here are steps to create a custom rule:
- Go to Meta Ads Manager at https://adsmanager.facebook.com/.
- Pick the ad sets or ads you want to apply the rule to.
- In the Rules dropdown menu, select Create a new rule.
- A new window appears, choose Custom rule, then select Next.
- Choose Rule name and ad sets or campaigns which you’d like to Apply rule to.
- Select Action to do when your ad or ad set meets the conditions.
- Set the Conditions of your rule, then click Add. Select + if you want to add more conditions.
- Active the type of Notification that you want to receive, it could be Meta notifications or email notifications.
- Add a Subscriber to receive notifications when your rule is triggered.
- Select Create to finish.
Epilogue
Hope that with these useful pieces of information, you can determine the best time to run Facebook Ads and gain optimal results for your business ad campaigns. To run effective Facebook Ads, it’s essential to continuously expand your advertising knowledge. We’ve compiled a wealth of information and insights on paid advertising in our Facebook Ads Blog. Feel free to click and explore our recent articles – they’re incredibly valuable. SpeedX Agency wishing you success with your Facebook Ads!
