Hi there,
Happy to give you some initial thoughts and guidance on your B2B search campaign. It's good that you're already thinking about this stuff a week in, most people just let it run and then wonder why their budget is gone. Your instincts about Maximise Clicks and the weekends are spot on, to be honest.
I've managed a lot of B2B campaigns over the years, from small service businesses to larger B2B SaaS companies, and ad scheduling is a common headache, particulary when you're starting out. Here’s a breakdown of how I'd approach your situation.
We'll need to look at your bid strategy first...
Your main issue right now, and the reason for your valid concern, is the "Maximise Clicks" bid strategy. Let's be brutally honest about it: its only job is to get you the most clicks possible for your daily budget. It doesn't care one bit about the quality of those clicks, who is clicking, or whether they're likely to ever become a customer. It just sees a cheap click available at 11pm on a Saturday and thinks "Great, I'll take it!".
You're right that there's less competition for B2B keywords on a weekend. This means lower CPCs. For an algorithm whose only goal is to maximise the number of clicks, this looks like a bargain. But for you, it's likely just wasted spend. The person searching for "business software" at that time is probably not the same person who's ready to engage with a sales process on a Monday morning. They could be a student doing research, a competitor checking you out, or just someone browsing with no real intent.
For a brand new campaign, using Max Clicks for a week or two isn't the worst thing in the world. It helps the system gather data quickly and understand what sort of traffic is out there for your keywords. But it's definately not a long-term stratgey for any serious B2B advertiser. The goal isn't clicks, it's conversions. Every decision you make should be about getting more of those, or at least getting clicks from people who *look like* they might convert.
So while we can use ad scheduling to put a plaster on the problem, the real solution is to move away from this bid strategy as soon as you have enough data to do so. More on that in a bit.
I'd say you need a solid approach to ad scheduling...
Right, so on to your specific question. You're selling to small business owners, and yes, they absolutly work all hours. I know plenty who are sorting out admin on a Sunday night. But there's a huge difference between 'working' and being in a 'buying' or 'procurement' mindset. They might be catching up on emails, but are they actively looking to sign up for a new service and enter a sales funnel? Less likely.
So, you can't just assume that because they're working, your ads will be effective. You need data. For now, I wouldn't switch weekends or late nights off entirely. That's a bit too drastic. Instead, you can use bid adjustments to control your spend during these periods.
Here's how you do it:
-> Go into your campaign's "Ad schedule" report.
-> Segment the data by "Day" and "Hour of day".
-> Even with only a week of data, you should see some patterns. You mentioned most of your conversions come in the morning. That's your first clue.
Based on this, you can set up a schedule. For example, run your ads 24/7, but apply negative bid adjustments for the times you think are low-quality. You could try something like:
-> Monday-Friday, 9am-5pm: 0% bid adjustment (this is your peak time)
-> Monday-Friday, 7am-9am & 5pm-8pm: -25% bid adjustment (shoulder hours)
-> All other times, including all day Saturday & Sunday: -60% bid adjustment
This tells Google, "I still want to show up during these off-peak times if there's a really relevant search, but I'm not willing to pay top dollar for it." It lets you capture that potential small business owner working on a Sunday, but without blowing half your weekly budget on low-intent clicks. It's a way of hedging your bets. You can then monitor the peformance over the next few weeks and make the adjustments more or less aggressive based on where your conversions are actually coming from.
You probably should think about a smarter bid strategy...
This is the most important part. Ad scheduling is a tool, but the bid strategy is the engine. Once you have around 15-30 conversions recorded in your account, you should move away from Max Clicks. Your campaign will never perform at its best while you're optimising for the wrong metric.
Your first step should be to switch to "Maximise Conversions". This changes the algorithm's goal entirely. Instead of looking for the cheapest click, it will now use all of Google's signals (time of day, user's past behaviour, device, location, etc.) to find people it thinks are most likely to actually convert on your website. This is what you want. The system will automatically bid higher for a user it deems high-quality and lower for one it deems low-quality. This inherently solves a lot of your scheduling problem, because the algorithm knows that a user searching at 2am on a Sunday is probably less likely to convert than one searching at 10am on a Tuesday.
Once "Maximise Conversions" has been running for a while and you have a stable Cost Per Acquisition (CPA), you can then evolve to "Target CPA". This gives you more control over your costs. If you know you can afford to pay £50 per lead, you can set that as your target and the algorithm will try to hit it. This is how you build a scalable, profitable B2B campaign.
We've seen this work time and time again. I remember working with a B2B software client. They came to us stuck on Max Clicks, and their CPA was all over the place. We followed this exact progression: gathered initial data, switched to Max Conversions to stabilise things, then moved to Target CPA.
You'll need to refine your audience targeting...
Finally, another layer of sophistication you can add right now is audience layering. Clicks aren't just clicks; they come from people. You can give Google hints about the type of people you want to reach. This helps even with a basic bid strategy like Max Clicks.
Go to the "Audiences" section of your campaign and add some "In-Market" or "Affinity" audiences in "Observation" mode. This is important: "Observation" means it won't restrict your campaign to only these people. It will just observe how they perform if they happen to see your ads. You could add audiences like:
-> In-Market: Business Services
-> In-Market: Business Financial Services
-> Detailed Demographics: Small Business Owners
After a few weeks, you can look at the report for these audiences. You might find that people in the "Business Services" audience convert at a much higher rate. This is powerful data. You can then apply a positive bid adjustment (e.g., +25%) for that audience, telling Google you're willing to pay more to reach those specific people. It’s another way to guide the algorithm towards quality, even before you switch to a conversion-based bid strategy.
This combination of a smarter bid strategy, data-led ad scheduling, and audience layering is how you take a campaign from just getting 'junk clicks' to being a reliable lead generation machine. It takes a bit of management, but it's the difference between a campaign that costs you money and one that makes you money.
This is the main advice I have for you:
| Phase | Action | Rationale |
| Phase 1: Immediate (Next 2-4 Weeks) | 1. Keep "Maximise Clicks" for now. 2. Implement a data-led ad schedule with heavy negative bid adjustments (-50% or more) for off-peak hours and weekends. 3. Add relevant In-Market audiences in "Observation" mode. |
This immediately mitigates the risk of wasting budget on low-quality traffic while still allowing the campaign to gather the conversion data needed for the next phase. It's a damage control and data gathering phase. |
| Phase 2: Short-Term (Once you have 15-30+ conversions) | 1. Switch the bid strategy to "Maximise Conversions". 2. Remove the aggressive negative bid adjustments from the schedule (you can keep smaller ones if data supports it). 3. Analyse audience observation data and apply positive bid adjustments to high-performers. |
This shifts the campaign's focus from click volume to conversion quality. The algorithm is now working towards your actual business goal, which will inherently improve lead quality and efficiency. |
| Phase 3: Long-Term (Ongoing Optimisation) | 1. Once CPA is stable, consider switching to "Target CPA" for better cost control. 2. Continuously test new ad copy and landing page variations. 3. Prune low-performing keywords and test new ones. |
This is about building a scalable and predictable system. You'll have control over your lead cost, allowing you to scale your budget confidently while continuously improving the campaign's overall return on investment. |
As you can see, there’s a clear path forward from where you are now. The steps themselves are fairly logical, but managing the process, knowing exactly when to make each change, and interpreting the data correctly is where the real work lies. It's a continuous cycle of testing, learning, and optimising that separates a successful campaign from a failed one.
This is where professional help can often make a big difference. An expert can navigate this process for you, avoiding common pitfalls and accelerating your journey to a profitable campaign. We offer a free initial consultation where we review accounts together which usually gives potential clients a taste of the expertise they'll see going into their project if they decide to work with us.
If you'd like to chat through your campaign in more detail and see how we might be able to help, feel free to get in touch to book in a free initial consultation. We could have a proper look at your account together.
Regards,
Team @ Lukas Holschuh
