At Search Engine Watch Livein Seattle last week, Lexa Pope from the Google AdWords team discussed their new ad scheduling features that will be released in a few weeks. The new features will allow advertisers to schedule the ads to show on weekends or weekdays only, or on other set days the advertiser specifies. Dayparting is also included allowing advertisers to schedule their ads during specific hours, such as to run late at night or at lunchtime only. Also unusual is the fact that Google AdWords preannounced the new features launch.

I followed up with Michael Mayzel from Google following the conference to get the run down on the features, since they are not expected to go live until sometime next month. Here is the rundown from Mike:

• We are releasing this ad scheduling functionality at the request of advertisers and agencies who have asked for greater campaign management control.
• AdWords' new ad scheduling functionality will enable advertisers to drive greater returns from AdWords by providing them with more granular control over when their ads run and how much they bid.
• Ad scheduling allows advertisers to run their ads and modify their bids based on time of day as well as intra-day and intra-week cycles in campaign performance.
• Small business and local advertisers can now schedule their ads to run only during business hours.
• More sophisticated advertisers can now better capture & exploit intra-day and intra-week cycles of buyer behavior.
• We are planning to role it out to all advertisers next month.

This is definitely seen as a move to catch up with Microsoft adCenter, as this was one of the big selling features (along with demographics) that adCenter launched with. And it was likely announced in Seattle to catch the big buzz since the Search Engine Watch Live event was held in Microsoft's neighborhood. It is great to see these features will shortly be available in AdWords, and advertisers should hopefully see these features live in June.