Solved: Lower Ad Costs at Night, Algorithm Problems

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out! It's a really common situation to be in, so I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on it. A lot of advertisers fall into the trap of looking at surface-level metrics like cheaper costs at night and think they've found a magic bullet, but the reality is often the opposite. The key isn't just about *when* you spend your money, but about the *quality* of the audience you're reaching at those times. Letting the algorithm "take care of it" is a recipe for wasted budget if you don't guide it properly.

I'll walk you through why cheap traffic is often a false economy and how you can build a much smarter, data-driven approach to ad scheduling that actually improves your results instead of just cutting costs.

The Great "Cheaper at Night" Myth

Let's tackle the main issue head-on. You've noticed your ads are cheaper at night. This is almost universally true for every advertiser on the planet. The reason is simple supply and demand. Most businesses schedule their ads to run during business hours, when they assume their customers are most active. This creates a bidding war, driving up the cost of impressions and clicks between, say, 9 am and 9 pm. After midnight, most advertisers have either paused their campaigns or their daily budgets have run out. Competition plummets, and so do the costs.

So, you get cheaper clicks. Brilliant, right? Not so fast. You have to ask yourself a more important question: who are you reaching at 3 am? And what is their mindset?

Think about it. The audience browsing social media or searching on Google in the middle of the night is generally not the same as the one browsing during their lunch break. You're often reaching:

• Passive Scrollers: People who can't sleep, mindlessly scrolling through feeds with zero intention of making a purchase or filling out a lead form. They might click out of curiosity, but their buying intent is practically non-existent.
• Shift Workers: This can sometimes be a valuable audience depending on your niche, but for most businesses, it's a small fraction of their target market.
• International Audiences (by mistake): If your location targeting isn't locked down tightly, you might be reaching people in different time zones for whom it's the middle of the day, but they may not be your ideal customer.

The point is, the commercial intent of this late-night audience is drastically lower. They aren't in problem-solving mode. They aren't actively looking for a solution. They're in entertainment or distraction mode. So while you pay less for the click, that click is worth significantly less to your business. This is why you saw 30% of your budget being spent during the worst hours – the algorithm was chasing cheap actions, not valuable outcomes. It's a classic case of winning the battle (low CPC) but losing the war (no conversions).

Why Blindly Trusting the Algorithm is a Costly Mistake

Now, you asked if the "algo will take care of it in the end". This is a dangerous assumption that many advertisers make. The algorithms on platforms like Meta and Google are incredibly powerful, but they are not magic. They are optimisation machines that follow the exact instructions you give them, and they can only work with the data you provide.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth I've learned from managing millions in ad spend: when you set your campaign objective to "conversions," you are telling the algorithm, "Find me the cheapest possible conversions based on the data available." If the algorithm sees a pocket of very cheap traffic late at night where it can occasionally get a conversion for a lower price than during the competitive daytime hours, it will absolutely pour your budget into that time slot. It's doing its job – finding the path of least resistance to the goal you set.

The problem is, the algorithm doesn't understand context. It doesn't know that the ten cheap conversions it got at 2 am were from low-quality leads who will never turn into paying customers, while the five more expensive conversions it got at 2 pm were from high-intent buyers who will become long-term clients. It just sees "conversion" and "cost". I remember one B2B SaaS client whose campaign was getting dozens of cheap "leads" between midnight and 5 am. When we dug into it, they were almost all from students or individuals in unrelated fields filling out the form with junk information. The algorithm was just chasing the cheapest form-fills, not qualified pipeline.

This is precisely why your initial manual optimisation didn't seem to hit the sweet spot. By just pausing ads during the day, you were swinging the pendulum too far in the other direction and likely missing out on your most valuable customers. The solution isn't a simple on/off switch; it's a more nuanced, data-driven approach to scheduling, which we call "dayparting".

We'll need to look at building a proper, Data-Driven Dayparting Strategy

Dayparting isn't about guesswork or feeling. It's about letting the data tell you exactly when your ideal customers are active and converting, and then focusing your budget on those specific windows. It’s about surgical precision, not swinging a sledgehammer.

Here’s how you get started. You need to become a detective and investigate your own account data. In both Google Ads and Meta Ads, you can break down your performance reports by the hour of the day. Don't just look at one or two days; you need a statistically significant amount of data, so pull the report for the last 30 or even 60 days.

Now, here's the most important part. Ignore metrics like clicks, CPM, and CPC for this analysis. They are vanity metrics in this context. You need to focus on the metrics that actually impact your bottom line:

• Conversion Rate (CVR): What percentage of clicks are turning into conversions for each hour?
• Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) / Cost Per Lead (CPL): How much are you paying for a valuable action during each hour?
• Return On Ad Spend (ROAS): For every pound you spend, how much revenue are you getting back in each hour? (This is the gold standard for eCommerce).

You will almost certainly see a pattern emerge. There will be "dead zones" (e.g., 1 am - 6 am) where you have some spend but virtually zero conversions. There will be "prime time" hours (e.g., 11 am - 3 pm and 7 pm - 10 pm) where your CVR is high and your CPA is at its best. And there will be "shoulder hours" in between where performance is average.

Let's look at what this might look like in practice. Here's a chart illustrating a common scenario, where cheap CPCs at night directly correlate with terrible ROAS.

As you can clearly see, chasing the low CPC is a fool's errand. You'd be far better off pausing your campaigns from midnight to 6 am and reallocating that wasted 30% of your budget into the 12-3 pm and 6-9 pm slots, where your return is 9x or higher. You'll spend more per click, but you'll acquire far more valuable customers and generate much more revenue.

I'd say you should build an intelligent ad schedule

Once you've done the analysis, you can build an intelligent schedule. I don't recommend a simple on/off approach. Instead, I suggest a tiered strategy:

1. Pause During Dead Zones: For any hour blocks where you consistently see high spend, low clicks, and almost no conversions over a 30-day period, just turn the ads off. Be ruthless. This is pure wasted spend. For most businesses, this is the 1 am to 5 am window.
2. Maximise Prime Time: Identify your top 2-3 performing hour blocks. These are your golden hours. Ensure your campaigns are running with their full intended budget during these times. This is where you should be allocating any budget you saved from the dead zones.
3. Test Shoulder Hours: What about the hours that are just 'okay'? Maybe your ROAS is profitable, but not amazing. Here, you can experiment with bid caps or budget rules. For example, you could set a rule to reduce your bids by 20% during these less-optimal hours. This allows you to stay in the auction but at a more efficient price point.

This process isn't a one-time fix. Customer behaviour can change. You should revisit this analysis every month or so to make sure your schedule is still aligned with your performance data. It's an ongoing optimisation process. To help you visualise this decision-making process, I've put together a simple flowchart.

You'll need to see the bigger picture

While dayparting is a powerful tactic, it's important to remember that it's just one lever you can pull. If your campaigns are struggling, scheduling might just be a symptom of a deeper problem. The fact that you have such a large portion of your budget going to unproductive hours suggests there might be other areas for improvement.

You should also be asking:

• Is my targeting right? Are you truly reaching your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)? Forget demographics. You need to define your customer by their pain point. What is the expensive, urgent nightmare that your product or service solves? Target users based on that. For a project management SaaS, the nightmare isn't 'needing a better to-do list'; it's 'the CEO is furious about another missed deadline and budgets spiralling out of control'. Your ads and targeting need to speak to that problem.
• Is my offer compelling? The number one reason campaigns fail is a weak offer. A vague "Request a Demo" button is high-friction and low-value. Your offer must provide immediate value. For a SaaS business, this means a free trial or a freemium plan. For a service business, it could be a free audit, a calculator, or a valuable checklist. You must solve a small problem for free to earn the right to solve their bigger problems. We offer a free ad account audit for this very reason. It provides immense value upfront and demonstrates our expertise.
• Is my creative effective? Your ad copy and visuals need to stop the scroll and speak directly to the customer's pain. Use a Problem-Agitate-Solve framework. "Struggling with [Problem]? It's frustrating when [Agitation]. Our solution provides [Solve]." This is far more effective than just listing features.

Fixing your ad schedule will definitly help and stop the bleeding, but addressing these core strategic elements is what will truly transform your account performance from mediocre to exceptional. To help you quantify the potential impact of simply reallocating your budget, I've built a small interactive calculator below. Play around with the sliders to see how shifting spend from your 'Off-Peak' hours to your 'Peak' hours can dramatically improve your overall results, even if the cost per conversion is higher during peak times.

The numbers often speak for themselves. This isn't about saving money; it's about making your money work harder and smarter for you.

You probably should use this summary to get started

I know this is a lot to take in, so let's boil it down to a clear, actionable plan. This is the exact process we would follow for a new client presenting this problem. I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

You'll need an expert if you want to scale

The steps I've outlined above will absolutely put you on the right track and will likely lead to a significant improvement in your results. It's the difference between flying blind and using a data-driven GPS to navigate your advertising spend. However, this level of analysis and ongoing management can be time-consuming, and it's really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to true account optimisation.

Getting your scheduling right is a huge step, but it's one piece of a much larger puzzle that includes audience research, offer creation, copywriting, creative testing, landing page optimisation, and strategic scaling. Each of these areas requires deep expertise and constant attention to truly maximise your return.

This is where working with a specialist can make a substantial difference. We've run this same process for countless clients, from eCommerce stores where we've achieved a 1000% return on ad spend to B2B SaaS companies where we've driven CPLs as low as $22 for high-value decision makers. We have the experience to quickly identify these patterns, implement the right strategies, and manage the entire optimisation process for you, freeing you up to focus on running your business.

If you'd like to get a more personalised look at your account and see where these opportunities might be hiding, we offer a completely free, no-obligation strategy consultation. We can jump on a call, share screens, and walk through your campaigns together to give you some immediate, actionable advice. It's a great way to get a second set of expert eyes on your strategy.

Regardless, I hope this detailed breakdown has been helpful and gives you the confidence to take control of your ad scheduling. Letting the algorithm run unchecked is rarely the best path forward. A bit of strategic, data-led intervention can make all the difference.

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh