What is the best time to reach your audience through advertising?

You may say “Well, I want my products to be seen anytime, anywhere!” However, that may not be the smartest use of your limited marketing budget, and in many cases too much exposure (through commercials or product placements) may actually generate a negative impact on the attitude towards the brand^[1]. Even big brands such as Coca-Cola, which you are exposed every day have moderated their mass advertising to target their audience more wisely, with specific strategies for each medium (street banners, newspapers, TV, radio, Internet, Mobile Apps, etc.)^[2].

So what is the best time to reach your audience? And how can you know it?

The first thing to understand clearly is the goal you are wanting to achieve. Visits or conversions? And from which visitors segment? New or returning visitors? Once you have clearly defined your goal, Google Analytics will provide you with useful insights to understand your visitors’ behaviour and the best period to engage with then and convert them.

Traffic per Day of the Week and Hour of the Day

Even if weekdays, lunch and after dinner times are the periods we intuitively think will bring the highest peaks in visits/conversions, it can vary considerably based on your industry and behaviour of your audience.

The chart below shows that for an entertainment website, the traffic peak occurs on Thursday, i.e. the day where new movies come out in theatres in New Zealand. However, the days with the highest conversion rate are Monday and Tuesday.

The following chart shows that traffic is relatively steady from 9a.m. to 10p.m., with a slight peak during late afternoon while the best conversion rates occur at lunch time:

To create these charts, use ‘custom reports’ in Google Analytics to cross ‘Day of week’ and ‘Hour of Day’ dimensions with visits, revenue, conversion rate or any other metrics that you identified as your goal (can be the number of pages per visit, the time on site, etc). You also may want to apply this report to a specific visitor segment (new visitors don’t behave the same than your regular customers) or a specific traffic source (organic, paid, Facebook, eDMs, etc). For it to be statistically significant, you may need to take a long period of time (at least one month).

Once you have this data, you can go a little further to obtain a nice visualisation of the best converting times:

To create this kind of visualisation, just gather your data for each hour of each day of the week and use the ‘Conditional Formatting’ function in Excel.
This analysis will provide you actionable insights on when and how effectively target the right people while optimising your budget. Here are some questions that can be answered with these reports:

Real-Time Traffic

As its name suggests, the Real-time Analytics feature shows the number of active visitors, where they came from and what they are viewing IN REAL-TIME. This is quite amazing to see. To enhance the real time traffic reports even further I would like to see Google would be to provide a real-time heatmaps tracking.

With this Real-Time reports, you can directly see impact of your marketing messages displayed right now on TV, radio, eDMs, Press releases and of course Social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc).

Ultimately, analysing your best converting periods will allow you to benchmark and tune your marketing campaigns to reach your goals effectively and make the most of your marketing budgets.

Tip: Keep in mind the time zone you have set up for your Google Analytics profile when analysing your traffic, otherwise combining international visitors with local traffic, may skew your findings…

SOURCES:

• [1] More than meets the eye. Investigating the hidden impact of brand placements in television magazines – Jörg Matthes, Christian Schemer and Werner Wirth, University of Zurich – International Journal of Advertising, 26(4), pp. 477–503

• [2] Coca Cola Content 2020 – Liquid and Linked Content Development

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It’s a sad fact that there are a lot of businesses whose websites are under-performing, leaving thousands of dollars on the table without even knowing it. When it comes to websites most businesses are frustrated with poor conversions, sales and the lack of qualified traffic the website receives.

If you are going to be investing in online marketing and using your website as means of building and growing your business, it is essential that you extract maximum value from your investment by ensuring your website is performing to its full potential.

Having the best looking site has NOTHING to do with whether it will bring you more clients, make more sales or grow your business. A fact lost on many organisations. Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to have a good looking site, but the design element of your site should never be your first consideration.

The simple truth is this: the internet is one of the greatest business building inventions EVER, but you have to use it the right way or it becomes a huge black hole that you pour money into.

So how do you ensure your website gets the most from your online marketing efforts?

Here are 10 tips to help you get the most out of your website

1. Focus & Purpose. Your site should be built with a specific purpose in mind. If this is unclear you are going to be shooting blanks in the dark. Ensure your website is set up to achieve a specific outcome from the onset.
Some common purposes include:

• An extension of our current advertising (radio, newspapers, etc.)
• To educate customers and prospects
• To develop a list of qualified prospects
• To make/ increase sales
• To compete in the global marketplace

2. Show them the Value. If you don’t immediately show your visitor just how valuable your site is, then they will leave… QUICKLY. On the Internet you only have a few seconds to capture your visitor’s attention, otherwise they are gone… and they AIN’T COMING BACK! It’s a known fact that people will do business with companies or people they like and trust. Your website should answer these 4 questions in the mind of your key prospects:

• Is this what I was looking for?
• Who is this company?
• Can they help me?
• Can I trust them?

3. Beware of the glorified brochure syndrome. Your prospects are tuned into channel WIIFM, (What’s In It For Me). Your site needs to speak directly to your ideal customers and you need to show and tell them that you have what they are looking for and how they can get it. Visitors come to a site expecting to find answers to their questions, solutions to their problems or for entertainment value.

4. Function over form: Flash based sites look good but you will really struggle to get them to rank well in the search engines. So many sites focus on the design element and miss the point all together. Your website must be easy to navigate and designed in a way that makes it easy to find information. One of the goals of your website design should be to keep usability easy, and simple.

5. Let your business occupy their head space. Remember this: your visitors will only be on your site for a short time, and once they leave they are NOT coming back. Unless, unless, unless you do one very important thing…YOU NEED TO CAPTURE THEIR CONTACT INFORMATION!!!

6. Follow up: Once you have your prospects contact information you can then follow up and build a relationship with your prospect.

7. Basic SEO elements are missing. Good luck trying to rank your site if it is missing basic SEO fundamentals.  Before you ever lay down a byte of HTML code for a site you have to know and understand at least the basics of SEO and how it fits into the design. The number one aspect of SEO for web design is selecting keywords relevant to your site.

9. Keep your site up to date. Have you ever seen those sites that haven’t been updated in four years? Full of outdated material, outdated pictures, maybe even a copyright date that says “2001”?

Nothing will drive people away faster than a site that looks like a ghost town… remember, your visitors don’t trust you… and they are looking for any validation of that mistrust that they can find.

10. Measure to see what’s working. You need to measure and see what’s working and what isn’t. So many web site owners have no idea how to track, manage and gather statistics so that they can make better strategic decisions. This is crucial to the success of your online endeavors. A tracking solution like Google Analytics provides invaluable intelligence that no website should be without.

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Which of the following two landing pages do you think had the higher conversion rate?

The long page with lots of content (version A) and relatively busy-looking text, or the short page where the main USPs are summarised concisely above the fold (version B)?

Version A

Version B

Increasing Fatso’s Conversion Rate

In this experiment, though the trial membership is free, the conversion process requires the provision of credit card details, which makes this a “high-barrier” conversion – a term First Rate uses to define conversions requiring more than trivial cost, effort or trust.

One of these two pages increased the conversion rate by 4.78% over the other – as measured in a Google Website Optimizer experiment, and had a significant effect on Fatso’s sign-up numbers and their bottom line. Which one was the winner?

To find out – Download the Fatso Conversion Rate Optimisation Case Study.

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• Insurance – Google Analytics Case Study
• Fairfax Media Online Advertising Case Study – Google AdWords