Before

It used to be that when you created an ad in Facebook, whether in the standard tool or Power Editor, you only had the option to schedule a start and end date.

If you want it to run at particular times of day, then you had to manually turn them on or off.

Perhaps this was possible for someone who had very few campaigns to monitor, but it was too much of a hassle for professional marketers to do regularly.

So, we typically ran our campaigns 24×7 and probably wasted impressions for times when conversions were very low.

Now

Now you can schedule what hours on what days your ads display – so that you can hit your target audience during peak conversion times.

The ad scheduler is a simple addition to the Power Editor which is not hard to figure out, but here’s a step-by-step guide so you can see how it works:

1) Go to Facebook’s Power Editor

There are many guides to getting started with Power Editor – including this one from Facebook – so if you’re not familiar with it, then consult one of these first.

2) Create a campaign

All ads have a campaign, so start by creating one.

3) Create a new ad set

Once your campaign is created, then you need to create the ‘ad set.’ Facebook introduced this middle layer between ads and campaigns earlier this year and they are required for every ad you launch as well.

Ad sets let you combine multiple ad collections into one campaign – each with its own budget and, now, schedule.

4) Set a lifetime budget

So here is where using ad scheduling becomes a bit tricky. In order to have the scheduling feature, you have to input a lifetime budget for a campaign and set the start and end dates and times.

I’m not entirely sure why Facebook insists on this as surely it would be better for everyone to be able to set up camapigns indefinitely, but that’s how it is. (If anyone can think of why Facebook insists on this, please leave a comment!)

5) Select scheduling

Then switch ‘Ad Scheduling’ to ‘Run ads on a schedule’ and you will see a weekly calendar with hourly blocks.

With this interface, you can specify hour by hour when the ads in this ad set should run. For the example above, my run times are from 6pm to midnight, Monday to Friday.

And, as Facebook helpfully points out, your ads will run at these times for the timezone of your target – not your own timezone – so you don’t need to worry about timezone adjustment.

6) Create your ads and upload

At this point, you can make an ad, upload them and they will run according to the schedule.

And when you’re using the standard Ad Tool you will be able to see your schedule, but in order to edit the schedule you will need to go back to the ad tool.

And that’s the ad scheduler. It may be simple, but it ensures that your ads run only during ideal times for conversions – which helps you keep your costs down, and clicks up!