How to Do Dayparting on LinkedIn Ad

Running LinkedIn ads without a schedule is like opening a coffee shop at 2 AM - you might get a few customers, but you're wasting a lot of energy and money when your target audience is asleep. Dayparting, or ad scheduling, lets you focus your budget on the specific hours and days your ideal customers are most likely to be online and engaged. This article will show you exactly how to find your optimal times and set up an effective dayparting schedule for your LinkedIn ad campaigns.

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What is Dayparting? (And Why it Matters on LinkedIn)

Dayparting is the practice of scheduling your ads to run only during specific times of the day or days of the week. Instead of letting your campaigns run 24/7, you strategically select the periods when you believe your ads will perform best. For a B2C platform like Instagram or TikTok, that might be evenings or weekends. But for LinkedIn, the world's largest professional network, the context is completely different.

Your target audience on LinkedIn - whether they're VPs of Sales, Marketing Managers, or Software Engineers - are typically most active during their work hours. They're scrolling their feed during a coffee break, checking messages between meetings, or browsing industry news at their desk. By aligning your ad delivery with their professional routine, you can:

• Increase Efficiency: Stop spending money on ad impressions at 11 PM on a Saturday when your audience is checked out. Every dollar is spent during peak professional hours.
• Improve Engagement Rates: Presenting your ads when users are in a business mindset can lead to higher click-through rates (CTR) and more meaningful interactions.
• Generate Higher-Quality Leads: A prospect engaging with your ad at 10 AM on a Tuesday is more likely to download an ebook or request a demo than someone who stumbles upon it late at night.

The goal isn't just to be seen, it's to be seen by the right people at the right time. Dayparting is your tool to make that happen.

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Before You Start: How to Find Your Best Ad Times

Before you start clicking buttons in LinkedIn Campaign Manager, you need a data-driven hypothesis about when your audience is most active. Guessing is a recipe for wasted ad spend. Here are a few places to look for insights that will inform your schedule.

1. Check LinkedIn Campaign Manager Demographics

If you've run campaigns before, LinkedIn has already collected some useful data for you. While it doesn't give you hourly breakdowns, it can confirm an important piece of the puzzle: your audience's location.

Navigate to an active or completed campaign, click on the Demographics tab, and look at the location data. This is essential for ensuring your schedule aligns with the correct time zones. An 8 AM to 5 PM schedule for an audience in New York is very different from the same schedule for an audience in London.

2. Dive into Your Website Analytics

Your website analytics are a goldmine for this kind of information. You want to see when people are not just visiting your site, but when they are converting. Google Analytics 4 can help you pinpoint these windows.

Here's a simple way to get this data:

• Go to your GA4 property and navigate to Reports > Engagement > Events.
• Find your key conversion event (e.g., 'generate_lead', 'form_submission', or a custom event for demo requests).
• Click on the event name to open a detailed report. Add a comparison for "Hour" or use an "Explore" report to build a view that shows event counts by "Day of week" and "Hour".

Look for clusters of activity. Do you see lead submissions spiking on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday afternoons? Do leads fall off a cliff after 5 PM and on weekends? This is exactly the information you need to build your initial dayparting schedule.

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3. Analyze Your CRM and Sales Data

Don't forget to look at when your best leads and customers actually became leads. In your CRM (like Salesforce or HubSpot), run a report on new contacts created over the last 90 or 180 days. See if you can filter or segment this data by the original creation date and time.

You're looking for patterns among your highest-quality leads. For example, you might discover that 70% of the contacts who eventually became customers first filled out a form between 10 AM and 3 PM on weekdays. This is a powerful signal that tells you when your most valuable prospects are actively looking for solutions.

A Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Dayparting in LinkedIn Campaign Manager

Once you have a data-backed hypothesis about your best times, you can implement your schedule. LinkedIn cleverly has you create a reusable schedule template first, which you can then apply to one or more campaigns.

Step 1: Create a Schedule Template

This is where you'll define the weekly schedule that your campaign will follow.

1. Navigate to your Campaign Manager account.
2. Click on your Account Name in the top left, then select Ad schedules from the dropdown menu under the "Manage" banner.
3. You'll land on the "Ad schedules" page. Click the blue Create schedule button.
4. A pop-up window will appear. Give your schedule a descriptive name. Something like "US Weekday Business Hours (EST)" or "UK Core Working Day" makes it easy to identify later.
5. Next, select the correct Time zone. This is critical. All the times you enter will be based on the time zone you select here, not your local time or the time zone of the user seeing the ad.
6. You will see a grid for the entire week. Now, simply click and drag to select the time slots you want your ads to run. Selected slots will turn blue. You can drag vertically to select hours in a day or horizontally to select times across multiple days. For example, you could highlight Monday through Friday, from 8 AM to 5 PM.
7. When you have the schedule you want, click Create. Your schedule is now saved and ready to be used.

Step 2: Apply the Schedule to a Campaign

With your template saved, you can apply it to a new campaign during creation or add it to an existing campaign.

Option A: For a New Campaign

1. During the campaign creation process, when you get to the Schedule step, you’ll see the option for "Ad scheduling".
2. Check the box that says Show ads by schedule.
3. A dropdown will appear. Select the saved schedule template you just created from the list.

Option B: For an Existing Campaign

1. Navigate to your campaign and click the Edit button next to it.
2. Click the ... (More) icon that appears at the top of the campaign setup page.
3. Select Edit schedule from the dropdown.
4. Choose your saved schedule template and click Save.

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Editing Your Schedule

You can edit a schedule at any time. Just go back to the "Ad schedules" page where you originally created the schedule and click the "..." icon next to the schedule you want to edit. Your changes will automatically update any campaigns using that schedule. This is ideal if you want to refine your schedule, for example, and implement changes across multiple campaigns.

Best Practices and Common Mistakes to Avoid

Setting up dayparting is straightforward, but optimizing for performance requires a little more nuance. Here are a few tips to keep in mind:

• Think About Time Zones: If your campaigns target an audience across multiple time zones, you may need to create separate schedules or different campaigns for each region. A midday schedule targeting San Francisco and London simultaneously is not ideal.
• A/B Test Your Schedule: Don’t be afraid to experiment with your schedule and measure your audience’s response. Consider creating two versions, like one running from 9 AM to 1 PM and another from 1 PM to 5 PM, to see which generates better results.
• Sync Your Ad Schedule with Your Campaign Objectives: After setting your ad schedule, align it with your campaign objectives. If your goal is lead generation, consider when your audience is most likely to convert.

How to Analyze Your Dayparting Performance

After your campaigns have been running for a few weeks, it’s time to see how your schedule is performing. Go to your campaign manager to compare your ad performance before and after you implemented dayparting.

• Assess Click-Through Rates (CTR): Determine if your CTR improves at the same spots where your ads are running.
• Track Cost Per Lead (CPL): Track conversion costs to see if your dayparting strategy has improved your CPL metrics.
• Monitor Conversion Patterns: Use the data to verify the times your ads are most effective, and consider expanding your hours if conversions spike at unexpected times.

Final Thoughts

Dayparting is a simple yet powerful technique for optimizing your LinkedIn ad spend by using data to guide when your ads are displayed. By strategically adjusting your ad schedules to align with your audience's online habits, you ensure every dollar is spent efficiently. For more ways to refine your LinkedIn ad strategy, consider leveraging analytics tools to manually pull data from your campaigns, or try automated solutions that allow you to analyze and act on the insights gathered.

Once you're ready to take your dayparting strategy to the next level, remember to register for Graphed. Our platform enables you to automatically track performance metrics, ensuring your campaigns are as effective as possible.