At night, someone looks for a repairman, sees your ad and taps “Call”. Ringing, nothing else. By morning that person has booked a competitor, and you paid for the tap. Nobody is to blame: Google simply does not know your office is closed until you tell it.
Below we walk through where that is set in your account, how to avoid mistakes with night hours, and what to do when at night you sell through your website rather than by phone. Everything about the interface was checked against Google’s help pages on 10 November 2026.
Why the money goes and the customer does not come
By default a campaign is set to show all day. So an ad with your number can appear at 2 a.m. if someone is searching for your services then.
There is also an unpleasant detail about cost. According to Google’s help, taps on the number in a mobile ad and on the “Call us” button on desktop cost the same as headline clicks. It does not matter whether you picked up afterwards: the tap itself is what you pay for.
Do not confuse this topic with two others. How to count the calls your ads bring is covered in our article about calls from ads. A voice assistant that answers instead of a person is covered in the piece on calls after 6 pm. Here the question is simpler: should the ad be visible when nobody can answer.
Step 1. Set the hours when somebody really picks up
Google’s help suggests a schedule for those who want ads to show during business hours, when they can handle inquiries right away. It is set up like this:
- In the Campaigns menu, open “Ad schedule”.
- Click the pencil and choose the campaign.
- Select the days of the week and the hours.
- Save the changes.
Three details from the same help page that people often trip over:
- Time zone. The schedule follows the time zone set in the account. If it is not yours, your “9 to 6” will shift.
- Overnight window. To run ads from 11 PM Monday to 7 AM Tuesday you need two entries: Monday 23:00 to 0:00 and Tuesday 0:00 to 7:00.
- Limit. One campaign can have at most six ad schedules per day.
There is also a money trap. The help says that with a schedule, monthly spend can reach 30.4 times the average daily budget. So after “saving” on night hours, check the budget. We described a similar story with weekends in the article on pausing ads for the weekend.
Step 2. If you sell through your site at night, hide the number, not the ad
Not everyone needs silence. An online shop, online booking or a lead form works at three in the morning too, so switching the ad off is a pity. Google’s help on the call asset (the name for a phone number in an ad) offers a way out: the number can be set to appear only when your business can accept calls.
How to do it: open Campaigns, then the Assets page, find your phone number and edit it. The advanced options let you choose whether to show it only on certain days and hours. Set the hours when someone sits by the phone. At night the ad stays, but without the “Call” button, and the person goes to your website and leaves a request.
Two checks so you do not get burned:
- A number can be attached at several levels: account, campaign, ad group or an individual ad. According to the help, the ad level has the highest priority, then the ad group, then the account. So a schedule you set on the account can be overridden by a number added deeper. Walk through all levels.
- The call asset’s schedule controls only that asset. The help does not say where else your number may be visible. Open your website and business listing at night as a customer would and see for yourself.
Schedule or automated bidding: what Google says
People often ask: why switch anything off if automation runs the campaign? Let us look at what the help says, without anyone else’s interpretation.
On one hand, a schedule strictly limits when ads show. The help gives an example of a company that noticed its best results came on Tuesdays from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m., and showed ads only then. If nobody searches your keywords during the chosen hours, the ad simply does not appear.
On the other hand, Smart Bidding strategies themselves take into account the day of the week and the user’s local time. To judge results, the help advises looking at a period with at least 30 conversions (50 for target ROAS). You can turn such strategies on without data, but the fewer conversions you have, the more cautiously you should read their results.
Which of the two options is better for you, the help does not say: it gives no recommended hours or percentages. This is our own conclusion from what we read: a schedule and bids answer different questions. The schedule says when you are ready to receive a customer at all. The bidding strategy works out when that customer is worth paying for. If nobody answers at night, the first question should be the schedule or a hidden number, not waiting for an algorithm to guess.
What to do today
- Write down the hours when somebody really answers. Not “9 to 6”, but the hours when the phone is picked up within a few rings.
- Open “Ad schedule” and compare it with that list. If a campaign shows around the clock, you are either deliberately catching night customers or paying for dead taps.
- Decide for each campaign: switch off night hours, or keep them and hide the number. The choice depends on whether the customer has another way to reach you: a form, chat, an order on the site.
- Review all levels where the number is added and set the hours of the call asset.
- After a week, compare spend and leads by hour: did form leads drop when the call button disappeared? That is your own data, not someone else’s statistics.
You can read about how we set up advertising in the search ads and ads for local business sections.
Want a free audit of your Google Ads? Leave a request: we will look at your account and tell you in which hours money goes without an answer.