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

Related Posts:

• Using a Custom Google Analytics Configuration to Understand Online Marketing Performance
• How to Report on Actual Adwords Search Keywords in Google Analytics Reports
• Organic Search, E-Commerce and Page Load Times
• Your SEM Competitive Advantage
• 10 Worst AdWords Campaign Mistakes

Source: Kiwi Flickr

This year was the third time I’ve been to Webstock. I go for a few reasons: to visit Wellington!, to get perspectives on web design & web development that I wouldn’t normally, to let my brain think about things other than digital marketing and to catch up with people.

Of course, it isn’t easy just to turn off from the digital marketing side of things so I spend a lot of my time at Webstock thinking about the impact of changes & future trends to the digital marketing industry.

Here’s what I learnt online businesses need to be doing this year:

• Iterate. Listen to your customers, watch your analytics, learn what needs improving and optimise like a crazy person. The website that is most agile will win.
• Don’t be late to the mobile party, be early. How does your online audience want to engage your business via mobile? Does that exist? Is there a business case for it?
• Be wary of “gut feel” or “I just know” interpretations of data by your staff or your third party providers. Expect empirical evidence that backs up that gut feel.
• “If you review the first version of your site & don’t feel embarrassed, you spent too long on it” – Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn.com
• For Barack Obama’s US presidential campaign, his online team were tracking how dollars spent on online ads were turning into dollars received via fundraising. If a campaign that complex can achieve it, no-one has an excuse for not knowing their ROI from online spend.
• Jeff Attwood’s description of social software was very good: “tiny slices of frictionless effort, spread across an online community”. A good reminder that to leverage user-generated content you need your users to want to contribute and make it super-easy to do so.
• I thought Daniel Burka’s recommendation that “subtraction is iteration too” was a good reminder. Don’t be afraid to subtract

The talks & presentations are going to be made available in the near future so keep an eye on the Webstock blog for those.

You can also follow Webstock on Twitter: @webstock.

Related Posts:

• Using a Custom Google Analytics Configuration to Understand Online Marketing Performance
• How to Report on Actual Adwords Search Keywords in Google Analytics Reports
• Your SEM Competitive Advantage
• Strategic Marketing (EMA)

• Of course you want greater ROI from paid search
• And of course you want to make more money from paid search and spend less time worrying about it, right?
• And how about an unfair advantage over your competitors?

First Rate has teamed up with SearchIgnite to deliver you exactly that.

As Australasia’s leader in Search & Performance we have been appointed as the exclusive licensee in New Zealand and Australia for the Search Engine Marketing technology offered by SearchIgnite™, one of the world’s leading providers of SEM bid management.

This arrangement provides First Rate with an advanced suite of tools to manage, optimise, track and report on your SEM campaigns. And when you combine this advanced technology with our talented team of Adwords qualified professionals, you’ll get even greater results.

The main benefits include significant operating efficiencies, more in-depth campaign reporting and improved digital media ROI.

The same technology that is currently used by more than 500 clients world-wide, optimising over 50 million keywords and delivering $6 billion in online transactions annually is now available to New Zealand advertisers.

Key Features of the SearchIgnite™ Technology

Here is a list of some of SearchIgnite’s best features:

Predictive and Automated Bid Optimization

Optimise your search spend using automated and predictive technology based on results:

• Optimise against a fixed budget to maximise revenue, conversions, profits or clicks
• Optimise against a business metric with no budget constraint to maximise results against a set CPA/CPS or ROAS target

Cross Channel Tracking and Attribution

Integrate data from multiple marketing channels (SEO, Display, Email, Partners, etc) to understand the whole picture and how each media channel is affected (assisted) by any others.  This goes beyond first click or last click tracking and leads to holistic campaign optimisation (not just search).

Ad Creative and Landing Page Testing and Optimisation

Easily identify, optimise and test both creative and landing pages to generate maximum conversions.

Cross Engine Efficiencies and Keyword Recommendations

Expand keyword lists and upload changes to multiple engines quickly and easily. This operating efficiency means more time is available for strategic decision making and allocating media to those channels that return the best ROI for your business.

Enhanced Reporting and Analysis

Easy to understand reporting tools complement existing web analytics packages such as Google Analytics with better channel-specific insights.

Don’t take our word for it

If you are investing  $10,000+ per month on paid search, you’ll not only see your results improve but you’ll get more sales at a lower cost just by using SearchIgnite™ technology.

There are plenty of SearchIgnite success stories such as E*TRADE who increased conversions by 299% as can be seen in the graph below. Please take 2 minutes to read the full E*TRADE case study.

Call us on 09 920 1740 or contact us via email to arrange for a no-obligation SearchIgnite presentation.

Related Posts:

• IgnitionOne Launches, Offering Industry-First Digital Marketing Suite
• First Rate at SMX Australia – eMetrics Melbourne
• The Integration of Search Marketing and Display Advertising
• Increasing the Performance of your Digital Media Spend with Cross-Channel Conversion Attribution
• New SearchIgnite 4.0 Driving Increased SEM Performance for First Rate Clients

I could count on the fingers of one hand how many times this year have I been asked “how do I turn more visitors into customers, more orders and more conversions..?”

Strange that in a world where there’s much more pressure than ever before to be more efficient and costs have been cut in all areas of the business that this isn’t happening online.

I know of one large corporate who, in an attempt to cut costs got rid of the evening office cleaners and instead issued staff with cleaning products – but to the very best of my knowledge didn’t try to be more efficient by turning more of their visitors into customers. I know which of these things would have likely had a better impact on the bottom line – not to mention office hygiene!

In the last couple of years we’ve all heard more than enough about “doing more with less”. Usually that’s meant fewer staff, less marketing budget, less time and overall – fewer resources. And this was often accompanied by depressing projections, budget cuts, staffing cuts or if you’re really (un)lucky, management demands for the undeliverable within impossible timeframes! (No, Forsyth is not talking about First Rate here – Ed.)

But it doesn’t always have to be that way. You probably have a pretty “good” website for your organisation – it’s been signed off by the agency, the marketing department, finance and the CEO’s wife – and everyone who gets a say in it is pretty happy with the site.

And many of you have then gone on to solve the first major hurdle, the “we’ve spent all this money on our site but no-one comes to it. The internet doesn’t work for us” – problem through intelligent SEO and/or PPC strategies. And some of you are even looking at bounce rates and exit rates to better understand “where” and more importantly “why” visitors are exiting your website.

From this point there are 3 options to get more revenue from the website:

1. Expand your SEO efforts
2. Improve your PPC programme
3. Or – Start turning more of this traffic into customers. Do Conversion Optimization.

So what is Conversion Optimisation?

So what does it mean? Without being flippant the short version is that it means you find ways to get more customers without spending more on advertising. Or put another way, increasing sales for the same budget spend, along with experimental learning that will benefit all areas of your website.

Essentially it’s about testing different versions of the same page to see which one converts more visitors into sales or newsletter sign-ups or enquiries or whatever the various goals of your website are.

It’s about something as simple as looking at your conversion rate – let’s say it’s 2% – and understanding that if you can increase it to 3% that’s the same net effect as adding 50% to your online marketing budget.

In fact, as your traffic is driven by all your offline activity too, you could argue that it’s the same as adding 50% to your total marketing budget. And you don’t need expensive software or complex tools to do this, the nice folk at Google have created Website Optimizer which is completely free. Obviously, you need to know how to maximise the benefits this tool brings, and how to implement and configure it correctly. We do – and we’d love to help (contact us to have a chat).

Why Should You be Doing Conversion Optimisation?

So you can test different versions of pages again and again and get detailed reporting on what’s working and what’s not. Do you think your website is so unbelievably good that it converts the most amount of traffic it possibly could?

If not, you should be doing conversion optimization. If you honestly think your website is that good, think again.

Unless you’ve been doing conversion optimisation on every page that’s part of every conversion point or funnel then it isn’t that good. I know that whoever built it and designed it probably told you it was, but chances are that it’s not I’m afraid.

To get an idea of how fickle conversion rates can be, take a look at this, one of my favourites for real-life testing examples. It’s amazing to see which variants get the best conversion rates and if you can guess the winner 100% of the time then let me know!

It’s easier to turn more traffic into visitors than to buy more traffic. It’s more efficient, it’s cheaper and frankly it’s just plain sensible.

At the end of the day it doesn’t matter whether your marketing department like your website or not, and it doesn’t matter how clever your creative agency is, or how well the site design matches the CEO’s curtains. Instead it’s about ensuring that visitors get everything they need from your site – and that as many as possible convert to customers.

Conversion Design – How to Get Started

The staff in your call centre know what your customers want, your sales people and account managers do too – they talk to your customers and potential customers more than anyone. But were they involved in the website design?

Or let’s turn the question around: Did the people who designed your site ever go out and try to sell your product/service? If they didn’t, then how did they know what the potential customer objections are or indeed what your customers or prospects want?

Your customers are a particular group of people with a particular requirement, they’re not “everybody” and understanding them is an important step in getting more out of your website. This is one of the first steps in starting the conversion optimisation process.

Getting more customers without spending more on advertising is not an instant fix but it has the potential to make a huge difference to your business. If you want to find out more about this, drop me a line (forsyth @ firstrate.co.nz).

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The time it takes to load a page has always had a big impact on how visitors navigate around your website, and more crucially, how long they stay on your website. 2010 will be a turning point for your website if it loads slowly.

Visitors won’t endure slow loading pages anymore

In 2006, Akamai commissioned Jupiter Research who interviewed over 1,000 internet users and produced a report entitled “Customer Reaction to a Poor Online Shopping Experience“. The main takeaway from the report was that the average time a visitor would be prepared to wait for a website to load was 4 seconds – any longer than that, would see potential customers abandoning the website and going elsewhere.

Akamai again commissioned a report which was published in September 2009 with the objectives of understanding how customer expectations to online shopping have evolved.  The results were astounding – the average time a user would be prepared to wait in 2009, has halved to only 2 seconds!

Source: Every Second Counts: How Website Performance Impacts Shopper Behaviour – www.getelastic.com

Wow – 2 Seconds! Does your Homepage load in 2 seconds?

The respondents in the Akamai Report stated that website load time is second only to high prices on a customer’s list of pet hates.

Have you spent all that time and money making your E-Commerce website look as exciting as possible, featuring products with competitive pricing on a website that has been conversion optimised, only to find out that your customers are leaving without buying because you haven’t put the time into making your page load any quicker…?

It has been proven that you can increase your conversion rates and decrease your bounce rate simply by moving all your javascript externally, building your website with CSS, Gzipping, removing whitespace and utilising low latency server architecture. Why not fix this today?

Page Speed as a factor for Organic Search Engine Rankings?

This is where page speed will get interesting in 2010!

Yahoo recently filed a patent that explores the ways a search engine considers the time it takes pages to render, for example how quickly that page is loaded directly after clicking on a natural listing from a search engine. Basically they’re hinting towards the fact that those sites that are the quickest to load will get a boost in the organic rankings.

Since that patent was launched, Matt Cutts (Google’s head of Web Spam) has been interviewed and he said that Page Speed will be a part of the Google algorithm (if it’s not already). We have known for a while that Page Speed has been a part of Quality Score in Adwords, and we should start to see it making a difference when Caffeine starts to go live on the rest of Google’s data centres in early 2010.

Here’s what Matt had to say:

Historically, we haven’t had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast. It should be a good experience, and so it’s sort of fair to say that if you’re a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don’t want that as much.

I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about ‘how do I have my site be fast,’ how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?’

Just this morning, Google blogged about released an experimental tool in Google Webmaster Tools called Site Performance. It takes the aggregated data from Google Toolbar regarding actual page load times, example pages, and more interestingly how your site compares to other sites. Although it’s still in labs, it is an interesting development and indicates where SEO is moving towards.

Finally, Microsoft’s Patrick Harris mentions Page Speed as the most important on-page factor to focus on for SEO in the recent webcast “Search Engines: War Stories from the World Tour” (Dec 1 webcast, 6:50 in the video).

As we can see, in more ways that one, the speed at which your website loads should be a major concern to you in the next decade…

How can you improve your Page Speed?

Other than the Google’s new Site Performance feature in Webmaster Tools, there are plenty of tools available to help you monitor and improve your page load speed:

www.WebPageTest.org

WebPageTest is an online tool to show you what parts of your site take the time to download. It provides a useful waterfall feature to give you a visual pinpoint as to exactly where the bottlenecks are.

Google Page Speed

Google have released their Page Speed Firefox plugin (also need to install Firebug, but both tools are extremely useful). This is similar to WebPageTest but you need Firefox and Firebug to be able to use it. It also provides a useful timeline of how your page renders.

Google Closure

An interesting add-on to Google Page Speed is called Google Closure. This plugin can compile all your Javascript into compact, high performance code. It basically checks and optimises your code which helps to make code that is cleaner and easier to maintain.

Related Posts:

• Your SEM Competitive Advantage
• AdWords moves landing page quality goalposts
• Using a Custom Google Analytics Configuration to Understand Online Marketing Performance
• Google to Update Ad Quality Scoring
• How Google can make – or break – your company