Solved: Turning off Ads at Night Impacting Performance?

Hi there,

Thanks for reaching out!

I'm happy to give you some initial thoughts on your question about turning ads off at night. It's a really common query, and tbh, the way most people think about it is completely wrong. It's one of those things that seems logical on the surface, but when you look at how modern ad platforms actually work, it's often a one-way ticket to worse performance and higher costs.

The issue isn't really about *when* your budget is spent, but *how* the platform's algorithm is learning and who it's attributing conversions to. Manually interfering with that can cause all sorts of problems. Instead of focusing on the clock, we need to look at the entire customer journey and the much bigger levers you can pull to get more leads and sales, regardless of the time of day. I'll walk you through why that 'night spend' isn't what you think it is and what you should be focusing on instead.

We'll need to look at the "Night Spend" Myth...

Alright, let's tackle this head-on. The idea of switching off ads when you're not seeing direct sales feels like common sense, like turning off a light when you leave a room to save electricity. But advertising platforms aren't light switches. They're more like a complex engine that needs to warm up and run consistently to perform optimally. When you manually turn them off and on every day, you're basically forcing a cold start every single morning.

Here’s what’s happening behind the scenes. Ad platforms like Google and Meta use machine learning algorithms. These algorithms go through a 'learning phase' where they test your ads on different segments of your audience at different times to figure out what works. They analyse thousands of signals – user behaviour, time of day, device, location – to build a profile of your ideal customer. Every conversion they get, they learn a bit more, and get a bit better at finding the next one. This process requires a steady stream of data.

When you cut the power every night, you starve the algorithm of that data. You're interrupting its learning process. Even worse, some platforms can see this daily shut-off as a significant change, which can push your ad sets back into the learning phase over and over again. An ad set perpetually in the learning phase never gets to the optimisation stage where it can deliver stable, cost-effective results. You end up with volatile performance, unpredictable costs, and a system that never really figures out who to show your ads to. It's a classic case of trying to be too clever and outsmarting the system, but you just end up shooting yourself in the foot.

The other massive piece of the puzzle is attribution. Most platforms don't just credit a sale to the very last click. They use an 'attribution window', which is typically 7 days for a click and 1 day for a view. This means if someone clicks your ad on Tuesday night but doesn't actually buy until Friday morning, the algorithm correctly attributes that sale back to the Tuesday night ad click. Your report will show the conversion happened on Friday, but the algorithm knows the process started on Tuesday.

If you'd turned your ads off on Tuesday night, that person would never have made the initial click, and you would have lost that sale entirely. The 30-40% of your budget being spent at night isn't being wasted; it's funding the *start* of the customer journey for a significant chunk of your future customers.

I'd say you need to trust the algorithm... most of the time

So, what's the alternative? You need to shift your mindset from controlling the machine to feeding it the right information. Your goal should be to give the platform's algorithm the clearest possible signal about what you want it to do. And that signal is a conversion.

If you want leads or sales, you absolutely MUST be running your campaigns with a conversion objective. Not traffic, not reach, not engagement. Conversions. When you do this, you're telling the algorithm, "I don't care about clicks or impressions. Go find me people who will actually complete this specific action on my website."

The system is then incentivised to find users who are most likely to convert, regardless of what time it is. It learns that people who browse at night might be window shoppers, but a certain subset of them convert the next day. It will then start to prioritise showing your ads to people who exhibit that specific pattern of behaviour. It's far more sophisticated than a simple on/off switch. We've seen this time and time again. I remember one campaign for a B2B software client where we were generating registrations for $2.38 each on Meta. That wasn't by micromanaging the ad schedule; it was by setting up a clear conversion goal and letting the algorithm find the most efficient path to it, 24/7.

Of course, this requires patience. You can't just turn on a conversion campaign and expect perfect results in 24 hours. The algorithm needs data, and it needs time. You need to let it run for at least a week, with a consistent budget, to allow it to exit the learning phase and start optimising properly. Fiddling with it, turning it off, or drastically changing the budget every day is just going to keep you stuck in a loop of poor performance.

There *is* a place for ad scheduling, but it’s an advanced tactic, not a basic cost-saving one. You'd only consider it after you have a campaign that is already performing well and you have a mountain of data that shows clear, undeniable performance trends. For example, if you're a local service business that relies on phone calls and you know you can't answer the phone after 6pm, then yes, it might make sense to schedule your call-focused ads to turn off. But even then, you might be better off running a parallel lead form campaign overnight. For most businesses, especially ecommerce or SaaS where a purchase can happen anytime, running 24/7 is almost always the right answer.

You probably should focus on the things that actually move the needle...

The fact you're worrying about night-time spend tells me you're likely focusing on the wrong part of the equation. It's like worrying about the brand of oil you're putting in a car that has a broken engine. Let's fix the engine first. The real drivers of a successful ad account have very little to do with timing and everything to do with these three things: your audience, your offer, and your message.

1. Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) is a Nightmare, Not a Demographic

This is the most common mistake I see. People define their audience with bland demographics like "men aged 25-45 who like football". This is useless. It tells you nothing about their motivations or their problems. You need to stop thinking in demographics and start thinking in pain points. Your customer has a specific, urgent, expensive problem that keeps them up at night. Your job is to know that problem better than they do.

For example, one campaign we worked on was for a medical job matching SaaS. Their initial approach was to target 'doctors' and 'hospitals'. It was failing. Their CPA was over £100. We changed the strategy. We realised the real nightmare wasn't for the hospital administrator, but for the head of a specific department who was losing their best staff due to burnout from being under-resourced. Their pain was urgent and career-threatening. We started targeting based on that specific pain, with messaging that spoke directly to it. The result? We reduced their CPA from £100 down to just £7. That wasn't about ad scheduling; it was about deeply understanding the customer's *actual* problem.

You need to become an expert in their world. What podcasts do they listen to? What newsletters do they actually read? What software do they already use? Who do they follow on LinkedIn or Twitter? This intelligence is the foundation of your entire targeting strategy. Without it, you're just shouting into the void.

2. Your Offer is Everything

Once you know their pain, you need an offer that feels like the perfect cure. And I'm not talking about a "10% off" discount. I'm talking about the core proposition you're asking them to consider. The single biggest point of failure in B2B advertising is the "Request a Demo" button. It's an incredibly arrogant Call to Action. It asks a busy, important person to give up their time to be sold to. It's high-friction and low-value.

Your offer's only job is to provide a moment of undeniable value. For a SaaS product, this is a free trial or a freemium plan with no credit card required. Let them experience the transformation firsthand. The product sells itself. For a service business, you need to bottle your expertise into something they can use *right now*. A free audit, a checklist, an interactive calculator, a short video course. For our agency, we offer a free 20-minute strategy session where we audit failing ad campaigns. We solve a small problem for free to earn the right to solve the whole thing.

Think about your sales process. What's the smallest step someone can take that gives them immediate value and moves them closer to becoming a customer? That should be your offer. I remember one e-commerce client launched their store with a simple lead magnet offer, and we generated 1500 leads for them at just $0.29 each. The offer was so compelling, the cost to acquire an interested person was tiny.

You'll need to know your numbers inside out...

This brings me to the final, and perhaps most important, piece of the puzzle. You're worried about spending £10 at 2am, but do you know what a customer is actually worth to you over their lifetime? Without this number, you're flying blind. You're making decisions based on fear and gut feelings instead of data.

The question you should be asking isn't "How low can my Cost Per Lead go?" but "How high a CPL can I afford to acquire a fantastic customer?". The answer is found by calculating your Lifetime Value (LTV).

Let's break it down:

• Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA): How much does a typical customer pay you each month?
• Gross Margin %: What's your profit margin on that revenue after accounting for costs of goods sold?
• Monthly Churn Rate %: What percentage of customers do you lose each month?

The formula is simple: LTV = (ARPA * Gross Margin %) / Monthly Churn Rate

Once you know your LTV, you can work backwards. A healthy business model often aims for a 3:1 LTV to Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) ratio. So, if your LTV is £9,000, you can afford to spend up to £3,000 to acquire a new customer. If your sales team converts 1 in 10 qualified leads, you can afford to pay up to £300 for a single lead. Suddenly, that £50 lead from LinkedIn doesn't look so expensive anymore, does it? It looks like a bargain.

This is the maths that allows businesses to scale aggressively. They're not scared of high CPLs because they know the long-term value justifies the short-term cost. I've built a little calculator for you below to play around with your own numbers. This simple exercise will be far more valuable to your business than worrying about what your ads are doing while you sleep.

You'll need a clear action plan...

So, to bring this all together, forget about manually turning your ads off. It's a distraction that's likely doing more harm than good. Instead, I'd propose a complete shift in focus towards a strategy that actually works. We've used this same strategic framework to help all sorts of businesses grow, from generating over 5,000 software trials at $7 each for one client, to achieving a 1000% return on ad spend for a subscription box company.

The principles are always the same. It's about building a robust, data-driven advertising engine, not trying to micro-manage a machine you don't fully understand. Your time is far better spent on high-level strategy than on low-level tactics that the algorithm is already built to handle better than any human ever could.

I've detailed my main recommendations for you below:

As you can see, this is a lot more involved than just flipping a switch. It requires a deep understanding of marketing fundamentals, data analysis, and the technical nuances of each ad platform. It's not just about setting up an ad and hoping for the best; it's about building a comprehensive system designed to attract and convert your ideal customer profitably.

This is where expert help can make a huge difference. An experienced eye can spot opportunities and problems you might miss, saving you a significant amount of time, money, and frustration. We do this day in, day out, and have a deep well of experience to draw on from hundreds of campaigns across dozens of industries.

If you'd like to chat through your specific situation in more detail, we offer a completely free, no-obligation 20-minute strategy call. We can take a look at your current campaigns and give you some more tailored, actionable advice. It's often the quickest way to get clarity on the path forward.

Hope this helps!

Regards,

Team @ Lukas Holschuh