A promotion that starts at 9:00 in New York should start at 9:00 in New York, not whenever someone remembers to log in and swap the banner. Until now the timing in GoAdserver was set on the campaign, by date. That works for a campaign that runs for weeks, but not for a flash sale that starts at a fixed hour or a lander that must go offline the minute an offer ends. Creative pools and URL pools can now schedule each item to the minute, in the time zone you choose, with a fallback that takes over whenever nothing scheduled is live.
October 2026
A start and an end on every pool item
Creative and URL pools are the reusable sets you attach to a campaign instead of building ads one by one: a creative pool holds banners, videos or native ads, a URL pool holds landing pages with a weight each. Every item in a pool now has a Schedule section in its edit form:
- Start: the moment the item begins to serve.
- End: the moment it stops.
- Time zone: the zone those two times are in. "9:00 AM New York" means exactly that, wherever you or your colleagues are.
Leave a side empty for no limit: a start without an end runs from that moment on, an end without a start runs until then. The pool's list shows each item's state at a glance with a badge, Starts, Live until or Ended, followed by the time.
The fallback: no gap, no manual swap
A schedule on its own solves half the problem. The other half is what serves around it. That is the Fallback flag: an item marked Fallback serves only while no other item of the same size in the pool is live. A promo swap then looks like this:
- Mark your regular creative as Fallback.
- Add the promo creative to the same pool and give it a Start, and an End if the promotion stops.
- When the promo starts, the regular creative steps aside. When it ends, the regular creative comes back by itself.
Nobody has to be awake at the start time, and nobody has to remember to switch the regular banner back on afterwards. Several scheduled items can follow each other through a week (a weekday creative, a weekend creative, a holiday creative), with the fallback filling any hour none of them covers.
URL pools work the same way for landing pages. There the flag is called Backup, because in a URL pool a URL without keywords already acts as the keyword fallback. A backup URL only gets clicks while no other URL in the pool is live, and keyword targeting keeps working among whichever URLs are live at that moment.
Guarded against an empty pool
The worst outcome of a schedule is a moment when a campaign has nothing to serve. GoAdserver checks for that before it saves. A schedule that would leave a size your campaigns use without any live item at some point in time is refused, with the moment the gap would start. The same goes for pausing or deleting an item when that would cause such a gap later on. Cover the time with another item or mark one as fallback, and the save goes through.
Changes reach the ad servers within a few minutes, so save a creative pool schedule at least five minutes before it starts, and a URL pool schedule at least a minute before. After that the switch happens on the minute.
Where it helps
- Flash sales and launches that start at a fixed hour in the advertiser's market.
- Day-parting a creative: a lunchtime message from 11:00 to 14:00, the regular one the rest of the day.
- Offers with a hard end: the lander leaves rotation the minute the offer closes, and the backup lander takes the clicks.
- Several markets: one pool per market, each scheduled in its own time zone.
Scheduling sits next to everything pools already did: weights, sorting on click-through or conversion rate, per-item statistics and one change that updates every campaign using the pool. Scheduled items keep their own numbers, so after a promotion you can compare it with the regular creative in the same table.
In the API too
Every pool option in the panel is also in the REST API. The schedule is sent as start_at and end_at with is_fallback on a creative pool item (/api/v1/creative-pools/{id}/items/{itemId}) and on a pool URL (/api/v1/url-pools/{id}/urls), so a script, a feed or an AI agent working with an API key can plan promotions the same way.
It works on every GoAdserver platform, for advertisers on an ad network as well as for teams running their own campaigns with ad management. The step-by-step guide is in the documentation: Creative & URL Pools (section "Scheduling items, fallbacks and backups"), and for landing pages How to split-test landing pages with a URL pool.
About GoAdserver
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