Google ads not showing at night

[webpundit]

We have a pretty big AdWords account with a decent CTR, big budget etc. Recently we noticed that our ads were not being displayed at night. Multiple checks later, we confirmed that the ad visibility issue was not a one time deal. In general, our ads stopped being displayed approximately after 10.00pm. I checked our Google budgets to make sure that there was no restrictive budget there, and there isn't - we're not even close to spending our daily budget. These are some of our top performing keywords in terms of CTR and also conversions. I read through the AdWords Help section about this too but did not find any plausible explanation there.

It seemed like our account was going offline after 10.00pm every night! And when I checked during the daytime, our ads were back at their usual #1 positions.

We have a third-party vendor who manages our bids and both they and Google don't have an explanation about what's going on. Does anybody know why this might be happening?

[AussieWebmaster]

Okay a couple of questions...

1. How many terms in the campaign?

2. When you go offline, does everyone drop out?

3. Has anyone played with any type of dayparting? or does your tracking have any auto positioning etc?

[webpundit]

1. We have about 30,000 keywords in our account

2. Unfortunately, our comptetitors' ads are up!!

3. We don't daypart. (not sure what the auto-positioning means)

[AussieWebmaster]

We ran into this problem a while ago.... apparently the spend optimization looks at all potential terms and saves the spend level for those higher on the CTR/CPC chain as the day progresses unless your budget is considerably over the Estimator Tool suggestion... like double

[webpundit]

But it's not like my ads are not being shown only for certain keywords, all of our 30,000 keywords are down. So, how does it help Google for them to identify high CPC/CTR keywords, save the money and then finally not show the ads at all?

[cline]

Where are you geographically targeting? Realize Adwords runs on a PST day and allocates budget in hourly chunks, carrying over unused budget from earlier hours in the PST day.

An example consequence of this would be for a UK B2B advertiser. The UK business day begins at midnight PST. It looks to Adwords like you're spending way beyond your budget as the day begins, so it starts restricting delivery.