Day-parting

Day-parting (time targeting) is a setting in which advertisements are shown only during certain hours and days of the week, or bids are automatically adjusted depending on the time of day. Logic: Users do not convert equally at 3:00 am and at 12:00 pm.

In Yandex Direct this is called “Schedule of impressions” - you can completely disable advertising during non-working hours or set a lowering rate factor. In Google Ads - “Ad display schedule” with increasing/decreasing adjustments by hour and day.

In my practice, day-parting is a mandatory setting for B2B: requests from SaaS projects almost never come at night and on Sunday, but Tuesday-Wednesday 10:00–14:00 is the peak. For B2C and e-com the picture is different: evenings and weekends often give the best CPL. To do this, I first collect data for 30 days without restrictions, download the “By Time” report from Direct, and only then build a schedule.

The main pitfall of day-parting with smart bidding: if you enable a strict limitation on display hours, the algorithm loses some of the signals for training. The compromise is not to turn off impressions completely at night, but to set an adjustment of −70%: the algorithm continues to collect data, but at minimal rates.