What Time of the Hour does a Script actually Run?

Unfortunately, you cannot schedule an Adwords Script to run hourly at a specific time point within the hour. The interface provides no option to specify the exact time of the hour that the script will execute.

Also, AdWords does not guarantee that script will run exactly at same minute every hour.
The documentation just says hourly, but it doesn’t say what time of the hour exactly your would begin to run.

This sort of leaves us guessing in the dark, and we’ll just have to see at what minute within the hour Google will start executing our scripts.
For example, you schedule your script to run at 1PM, it could run anytime from 1:00-1:59.

That being said, in my experience, most of the times i’ve found that the script runs within the hour at the time the schedule was set up. So, when you set up your frequency schedule at the beginning of the hour, the script mostly runs early in the hour. That might just be a coincidence however, so YMMV.

PRO TIP:
you could use the Date() object in javascript to get the get the minute within the hour using getMinutes().
Then you could use the sleep function below to have the script sleep for while if needed.
This way you can sort of partly mitigate the issue for certain situations. Lots of caveats here so be careful.

function sleep(milliseconds) {
  var start = new Date().getTime();
  for (var i = 0; i >= 0; i++) { 
    if ((new Date().getTime() - start) > milliseconds) {
      break;
    }  
  }
}

Want to learn more?

Subscribe to my mailing list to receive updates on the latest Google Ads Scripts FAQs.