How to schedule LinkedIn ads
LinkedIn calls dayparting a custom schedule. According to LinkedIn's help page on campaign and ad set schedules, it is set on the ad set, not the campaign, and you choose the days, a time window for each day and a time zone; the schedule repeats every week. It has conditions:
- Sponsored Content formats only.
- A lifetime budget on the ad set, with set start and end dates.
- Not available with campaign budget optimization.
- LinkedIn Audience Network must be off, which it should be anyway.
Set the time zone to your audience's, not yours. A US campaign scheduled in London time runs from 4am Eastern.
What the panel shows, day by day
Indexed within campaign, so each campaign is compared with its own typical day (100):
| Serving day | CPM | Landing page CTR | Cost per engagement |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday to Friday | 100 to 102 | 97 to 100 | 99 to 101 |
| Saturday | 99 | 110 [106 to 113] | 100 |
| Sunday | 96 [95 to 98] | 109 [106 to 113] | 97 [96 to 98] |
823 single image and engagement thought leader ad campaigns, within campaign (LinkedIn CPM benchmarks). The weekend click-rate lift is the only day-of-week effect in the data that is not noise.
Leads by day: Sunday is cheapest
On lead gen forms in the feed, every weekday indexes at 100 on cost per lead and Sunday at 94, the cheapest day of the week, with the lead rate the same every day (Report No. 3). On conversation ads, leads per send are flat at 0.16 to 0.17% every day; weekend opens read lower mostly because opens lag sends (Report No. 2).
Launch day does not matter either
Campaigns launched Friday to Sunday cost 4% less per engagement than those launched Tuesday to Thursday, a difference that is not significant (interval minus 13% to plus 5%). Launch habits are almost all weekday: 3% of launches happen at the weekend. Launch when the campaign is ready.
What about hours of the day?
Campaign Manager reports performance by day, not by hour, so there is no hour-level evidence in our panel and we do not publish one. Claims that a given hour is cheapest come from single accounts or from outside LinkedIn reporting. If you test hours, run the same ad set with and without a schedule on the same audience for four weeks and compare cost per landing page click.
When a schedule makes sense
- A live event or webinar, where the ad has to stop when registration closes.
- A call-me-now ask where a person has to answer in real time, such as a conversation ad that routes to live chat.
- A regulated or market-hours product where ads must not run outside set times.
For everything else, keep weekends on and judge by day after the fact, not before.