When you create a Google Ads reservation campaign, you can set the exact start and end times in advance in addition to the start and end dates. This feature is helpful when you already know the exact time of when you want your campaign to start and end, so you won’t have to change it manually.
This article explains how campaign start and end times work and when you might use them.
Example
Let's say that you own an online party supply shop and want to have a campaign dedicated to sales of supplies for the last minute buyers for the New Year’s Eve party. You want your campaign to run exactly for 26 hours, starting exactly from 6 PM on December 30 to 8 PM on December 31 and you have a set budget for this campaign. In Google Ads, you're able to set these start and end times for your campaign to match your exact campaign schedule.
How campaign start and end times work
Google Ads reservation campaigns always have a start and end date, which you can set during campaign creation. The default start time is 12 AM on the campaign start date and the default end time is 11:59 PM on the campaign end date. These start and end times are based on your account’s time zone. If you opt to not use the default time, your campaign will start and end at your set time and date based on your account’s time zone.
If you schedule a campaign to start today, the start time will be the later of either:
- The time you saved your campaign, or
- Your preferred campaign start time.
This means that if your preferred campaign start time is earlier than the time you saved your campaign, your campaign will start based on the time you saved your campaign.
Note that a campaign’s minimum flight duration is 24 hours, except for Cost-per-hour (CPH) campaigns which only require a minimum of 60 minutes.
Example
You want to schedule a campaign to run from 9 AM on February 2 to 11 AM on February 3. By the time you finish campaign creation and accept the quote to reserve your campaign, it’s already 9:30 AM. Your campaign start time will then be 9:30 AM instead of 9 AM on February 2.
Keep in mind
When you set a start date and time, you can edit that date and time at any point until your campaign begins. After the start time has passed, you can’t make edits to the campaign times. However, you’ll still be able to pause, resume, or remove your campaign.
Note that you can still edit your campaign start and end times after campaign creation. If you do, it might result in a new quote, depending on the availability of the inventory for the new time duration you’ve set.
Example
If your campaign’s start time and date is 4 AM on February 1, you won’t be able to edit your start time and date from 4 AM onwards on February 1. You can, however, still pause, resume, or remove your campaign.
Daylight saving time
You no longer need to make manual calculations for Daylight Saving Time (DST) when you set your campaign start and end times. This is automatically adjusted based on your account’s time zone.
Example
Today is February 2 and your account’s time zone is Central European Time (CET). You want to schedule your campaign to run from 10 AM to 11 AM on May 5 in Central European Summer Time (CEST), which will be the active time zone due to daylight saving time in May. In this case, you should set the start date as May 5 with 10 AM and 11 AM as the start and end times, respectively. The system will automatically adjust for daylight saving time to run the campaign on the set date and time in CEST.
