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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One of the biggest online marketing failures we see organisations make is the lack of importance placed on tracking marketing activities, analysing results and then acting on insights gained.

Do you realise and understand that Analytics data can be your most valuable marketing asset?

In fact, CMOs are well aware they will have to be much more financially accountable in the future. In fact, 63 percent of respondents believe marketing ROI will become the most important measure of success over the next three to five years.” (IBM Global CMO study, 2011).

Through analytics analysis and acting on insights you can gain

• A better understanding of your customers
• Increased results
• Higher ROI
• Smarter systems for decision making

You are likely to be using Analytics to measure the performance your website as standard, but are you also using analytics to measure:

• the effectiveness of your online advertising,
• your mobile platform
• your social platforms (Facebook, YouTube etc) and social marketing

Ongoing Analysis of your Analytics will help you to understand

• What content is most valuable to users – to then develop more valuable content
• How various market segments differ in behaviour – to then tailor the asset / website / marketing to these audiences
• How customers use of multiple channels by customers before purchase (including offline and mobile) – to ensure visibility and encourage conversion through the whole process
• How you can improve conversion and return from your marketing dollar, giving you more to reinvest and grow, as well as ensuring you are providing a great product and service.
• What marketing channels should take priority when budgets are limited – both to achieve growth goals, and ROI metrics
• Customer trends around products and preferences – allowing a faster response to changing needs.

Analytics tools are constantly evolving and providing valuable new insights, which also should be quickly explored and utilised. For Example – are you using Real Time Analytics, Visitor Flows, Multi-channel Funnels, Assisted Conversion Paths?

A Caution… it is possible to drown in data, and Analytics data is absolutely useless unless it is acted on.  Appropriate resource (internal or 3rd party) and a process must be put in place where insights from the data is regularly evaluated to influence business decisions, marketing tactics, and development decisions.

A Secret.. We have found that the secret to effective analytics implementation is the planning and requirements capture.  Only once you have evaluated your business and marketing goals, objectives and KPIs can you develop an appropriate measurement framework to deliver the intelligence needed. Additionally, a more advanced custom solution may be required to maximise commercial benefit. Then you can be assured your marketing is on a solid foundation and can evolve as quickly as your customers do.

Should you be leveraging your Analytics more? Contact Us – we would love to help!

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First Rate is Google’s first trans-tasman Google Analytics Certified Partner. With a smart team of more than 15 Google Analytics Qualified individuals, you can be sure of sound advice, great technical expertise and brilliant actionable insights that will make a positive difference in your marketing strategy.

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IBM has conducted face-to-face interviews with 1,734 Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) across 19 industries and 64 countries to understand the forces changing business and markets today – and how the marketing profession is changing in light of these.

The study points out that CMOs are generally feeling anxious about the level of complexity that is on the horizon.

But it also gives readers hope in drawing the conclusion that there is consensus as far as key areas of improvement are concerned, which can be summarised as:

• Understanding and delivering value to empowered customers
• Creating lasting relationships with those customers
• Measuring marketing’s contribution to the business in relevant, quantifiable terms.

I want to pick up on two themes here. ROI and Data.

CMOs Have to Show a Real Return on their Marketing Expenditure

Here’s a quote from the IBM study by Rob Colwell, Executive Manager – Commercial and Marketing, Qantas Frequent Flyer:

“The success of my role is far more about analytics and technology than it is about hanging out with my ad agency, coming up with great creative campaigns. We must increase campaign ROI.”

We are glad to hear industry leaders talk about marketing ROI.

We’ve been talking about it for a long time. Check out this post from June 2004 discussing our Media Tracker ROI tracking technology (now replaced by Google Analytics) and prior to that in November 2003 where First Rate’s founder Jon Ostler (now Group CEO of Q Ltd, First Rate’s parent) spoke on marketing ROI and the case study work we did for NZ Retirement Commision’s sorted.org.nz.

IBM makes the following observations as far as marketing ROI is concerned:

At one stage, it was enough to point to advertising recall, brand perception or website traffic. But CMOs are under increasing pressure to provide quantifiable evidence of how their marketing expenditure is helping the organisation achieve its goals.

If they are to use their budgets as wisely as possible, CMOs also need to know which initiatives deliver the best returns. In other words, they need to know what to stop investing in, as well as what to ramp up.

But here is the quote that really stood out for us:

CMOs are well aware they will have to be much more financially accountable in the future. In fact, 63 percent of respondents believe marketing ROI will become the most important measure of success over the next three to five years.

I have included a graph from IBM’s study, below, which puts the 63% in context.

Here are the seven most important measures to gauge marketing success:

Source: ibm.com/cmostudy2011

Outperforming Organisations Use Data Extensively

Clearly marketing ROI and the underlying data is (finally) becoming more and more important for organisations. What is equally important is that the correct analysis skills and interpretation is applied to extract valuable information – in turn influencing marketing decision making and company strategy.

IBM states that we now create as much information every two days as we did from the dawn of civilisation to 2003, quoting Eric Schmidt. That’s staggering!

The key is to ask yourself what you are doing with all that data that is being generated by YOUR organisation…?

Think about the various data repositories that exist. How well do you think you are currently extracting compelling insights that demand organisational change, to bring about an increase in sustainable competitive advantage?

Are you mining the new digital data sources to discover how your customers found your website, why they transact (or why not), how to best optimise along the entire purchase chain – from keywords to ad copy to landing pages to purchase funnels and beyond – and understanding what your customers really want from you?

Are you gaining true customer insights from your Google analytics configuration or are you simply comparing traffic levels year on year? – Similarly, are you tracking and taking action on what consumers are saying about your brand on review websites?

Outperforming organisations use data much more extensively than underperforming organisations throughout the entire customer lifecycle. The differences are particularly marked in the phases devoted to stimulating awareness and desire and building advocacy after the sale.

According to IBM’s study more than 70 percent of CMOs state that they aren’t fully prepared to deal with the data explosion that is currently happening, and this will only accelerate.

If you haven’t yet read the study, make sure you do. It’s quite an interesting read; you can download it from here.

Please contact us for a discussion around extracting insights and value from your web analytics or driving increased marketing ROI from optimised digital marketing campaigns and an ongoing CRO programme.

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First Rate Enables Pinnacle Life to Make Better Business Decisions using Google Analytics

Pinnacle Life became the world’s first life insurance company selling fully underwritten policies online in 2007 and since then has gone from strength to strength.

For a business utilising both online and offline marketing channels, detailed analytics intelligence is vital. It is important that all marketing activities are accurately measured through to conversion, such as new customer applications. This allows an accurate assessment of marketing spend leading to maximum ROI from all marketing activities, with budget allocated to the most effective channels for continuous campaign improvement.

Pinnacle Life choose to use Google Analytics combined with First Rate’s analytics expertise to deliver this value.

Click here to download the Google Analytics case study.

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For a long time posts and threads across the web sprung up discussing concepts like “first-click attribution” and “last-click attribution” for conversions. While the common and default method among many web analytics packages attributed the last-click to a conversion, multiple methods to attribute the first-click to a conversion were shared and deployed across the online marketing community.

But until recently, the question was “what about the possible clicks between first and last click and those sources?” With the new Google Analytics (GA) interface, a feature referred to as multi-channel funnels (as mentioned back in April 2011) can show a fuller story of the click path before a conversion is made.

What are multi-channel funnels (MCF)?

With multi-channel funnels, advertisers are now able to see ALL clicks (from first to last) attributed to conversions. This means that credit for a conversion not only is given to the first or the last click but to all clicks across channels which ‘assisted’ the conversion. This helps us understand the online interactions across different channels ultimately leading to a conversion, which is very useful for us marketers!

For example, consider the following click path across a range of different channels:

Previously with last-click conversion attribution only the paid ad would have received credit for the conversion. And with first-click conversion attribution, only the referring website channel would have been credited for the conversion. But both of these conversion attribution methods do not tell the whole story. (Note: Currently, GA reports seven different types of channels which a click can be represented by).

3 insights you can get from MCF

Touch points and conversion points

Touch points can be referred to as first-click, and conversion points can be referred to as the last click.

With GA MCF you can see how important touch points are in playing a role as the first point of entry (contact) with your user. Consider the three different scenarios below:

1. Touch point: paid advertising, conversion point organic search.
   

2. Touch point: paid advertising, conversion point website referral.
   

3. Touch point: paid advertising, conversion point organic search.

In each of the three scenarios, the touch point was made via the paid search channel; however the conversion point was attributed to another channel either organic search or a website referral.

Previously if an advertiser was to decide where to allocate their advertising budget based on last-click conversion attribution, they wouldn’t see that paid search advertising plays an important role in generating new visits which can ultimately lead to a desired action.

Assisted clicks

Much like touch points, if the effectiveness of marketing efforts across channels were only measured by the conversion point (last-click conversion attribution) and did not account for the clicks made from other channels in-between the touch and conversion point (“assisted” clicks) the clicks would not receive credit for helping to assist with a conversion.

In the example below, the touch point was made by organic search and the conversion point is represented by a website referral. The assisted clicks however, were all made by paid search advertising which, essentially contributed to the conversion!

Assisting keyword searches

Taking it a step further, let’s say you wanted to see how keywords played a part in conversions across source/mediums such as Google paid search and Google organic.

For example, let’s say you wanted to know how brand and non-brand keywords contribute to a conversion path. Here is how: Open up the “Top Conversion Paths” report and click to view the “Source Medium Path”. Then add a secondary dimension under traffic sources labelled as “Keyword Path”.

The report should then show the following two types of dimensions:

Dimension: Source Medium Path

Secondary Dimension: Keyword Path

Using the example above, five clicks across two different mediums combined with both generic and brand related keywords were made. Traditionally with last-click conversion attribution models, a filter like this would attribute the conversion by a Google organic search made by a brand related search. The problem with this attribution model is not only are the initial Google paid search clicks not credited for being the touch point but also, that the conversion path was initially started with a generic search.

Traditionally, with the absence of MCF, it would be easy for one to conclude that it is organic brand search that brings in conversions. However the truth is, without the Google paid non-brand click the conversions may never have happened.

For a deeper analysis of your web analytics and sound advice for how your website’s conversions really take place contact First Rate about a tailored solution that meets the demands of your marketing efforts.

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