[Video] How To Advertise at the Time of Day That Gets The Most Sales

So one of the best things about being a nerd is that I get to wear skivvies when I’m doing my marketing videos. If you, if you follow me you’ll see that as soon as the weather gets cold, I’ll be wearing skivvies and cardigans all the time. They — I actually went to a conference one time and this conference was aimed at large corporations and brought up past life and they said, “This is a data scientist,” and it was like literally I just passed wearing a cardigan and, and sneakers. So hey one of the perks of the job so you too, you can become a data scientist.

Anyway, so today I’m going to talk about why you should care about what time of day visitors are coming to your website and how to use that information. So you can find out what time users are visiting your website using Google Analytics because it does tell you what time people are coming there. There is actually a — Oh, what is it? There’s a, you can, you can even go down to the minute but you can basically work out what hour of day people are coming. There’s a dimension, I think it’s like called “hour or hour of day.” In fact, I think there are three so there are this hour and hour of day and then there’s like minute and you can add all them together but you can go — you can find out what time of day and you can find out what day of the week people are coming.

Okay, so the reason that this is useful is depending on your industry people are coming to your website and buying or signing up as lead at different times of the day. People are not, people are not behaving the same on your website as they are on someone else’s website.

Let me give you an example. Alright, so let’s say you’re a car yard and the majority of people are coming to your website they’re wanting to look at cars on a Saturday. So they might be coming to your website and signing up as a lead at Saturday morning between 8 a.m. and lunchtime maybe at 12 or something. Obviously, they’re coming to your website at other times but they’re coming to your website specifically to sign up as a lead at that time.

Another example, let’s say you sell products for mothers of babies. Now, you — and I discovered this recently because I was working with a client who sold products for mothers of babies – people will be coming to your website to buy at 4 a.m. and that’s because the babies are waking at 4 a.m. and that’s when they’re having their last breastfeed of the night and guess what, they can’t get back to sleep. So what they end up doing is they surf the web for baby care products and buy the thing that’s been on their wish list for a while. So that could be a big buying time for baby care products, 4 a.m., who would have thought that?

Now, let’s say you sell dental appointments or you’re a chiropractor or a massage therapist or something where — basically, your prospect woke up this morning with a sore back, alright, or a sore tooth or something, sore something. And on their way into work, bitching and moaning the whole way in, they’re like, “I’ve got to make this appointment, as soon as I get into work I’m going to make this appointment.” Either they’re going to make the appointment whether on the bus or they’re going to drive in, get into the office and then make an appointment. So you’re going to have a large spike of users at 8 or 9 a.m.

Well, there’s plenty of other examples. You might find that people are looking for real estate after dinner when they put the kids to bed or maybe you, maybe you’re a restaurant. People are going to be looking for you at dinnertime or at lunchtime. So it actually matters what time of day people are coming to your website. You will have a much higher conversion rate if people see your advertisement or are reminded of your presence at a time congruent with when they could purchase from you or would be likely to or serve as lead.

Alright, so this is where pulling that data out of Google Analytics helps. Now, earlier I was like, “Oh, which exact fields?” I’ve got standardized reports now that pulls the exact field out so I don’t need to be looking at all the time. I don’t set things up manually anymore. I have a report and what it does is it shows you what time of day users are transacting and also what time of day users are interacting.

So with the interacting, literally every fifteen seconds we check, “Are you still there?” you know, “Are you still there?”. We check if they have moved their mouse or if they have scrolled on the page and if they did so within the first or within the last fifteen seconds we go, “Yes, they’re still there. They’re still interacting.” And we count that as one point of interaction. Then the next fifteen seconds we recheck again, “You still there?” and the more of those we have the more we can see they’re interacting.

Now, if we have people that are interacting a lot at a particular time of day, that is a predictor for, for transactions as well. You usually find that they’re — well, you always find that there’s a lot more interaction with your website than there are purchases because sometimes people won’t complete their purchase then and there or there might be spending their time reading about your website and need to be convinced of the need to purchase or sign up. And that’s where your remarketing comes into play.

Now, what I often find in this engagement report that shows the time of day is there’ll be certain times a day like for example that example — for example, the example, that’s terrible, that’s just silly Petra. Alright, for example, the breastfeeding mother at 4 a.m., we can see on the graph that at 4 a.m. we have a sudden spike in engagement. Even, even though there won’t be a huge number of users at that time of day there’ll be a sudden spike of engagement at 4 a.m. because that’s when all the babies across all the world are waking up and there’ll be a sudden spike in the revenue per user at 4 a.m. as well. So we know that that particular audience we don’t want to be turning off advertising at 4 a.m.

The other thing though is if you have large spikes. Let’s say you have large spikes after dinner like you might have a service where people want to sign up after dinner or in the evening. You don’t want to have a situation where your Ad budget has run out by lunchtime. That’s going to be really sucky for you because then all of your competitors who have a bigger ad budget are going to be getting all of the evening people and that’s when they want to convert.

So if you have — basically, if you have a budget which is less than the total number of prospects that are out there searching for you then you want to optimize your budget to be released at times of day when people are more likely to be buying or signing up for something. So especially if you have a service or a product that people are wanting to purchase in the evening, you want to make sure that your budget is still alive in the evening otherwise you’re going to be in trouble because if people don’t tend to convert in the morning and they’re only seeing you in the morning then you’ll be losing out to your competitors.

Alright, so the way we do this is in — first of all, you want a kind of a report — a kind of report, my goodness I’m saying crazy things. Alright, so, first of all, you want a report that tells you what times a day people are more likely to be purchasing and what times a day people are going to be engaging. But then you go into Google Ads, if you’re running Google Ads campaign, you want to actually set up your schedule so that you do have a reasonable amount of budget assigned two times a day when people are likely to convert and very little if any of your budget at times a day when they are not likely to convert. That way you’re not wasting your budget on times of day that aren’t going to be very effective.

So for the moment like if you don’t target babies or parents of babies if that’s not your target market, the chances are that you don’t have conversions at 3 a.m. Maybe one exception to that might be if you target highly-stressed insomniac executives then you might have transactions at 3 a.m. but the majority of services aren’t attracting conversions at 3 a.m. So don’t try and target those people. Cut those people off from your ad budget because unfortunately, there might be some random zombies who are logging in at 3 a.m. and typing in the types of keywords that will trigger off your ads and then you’ll be paying for those people that aren’t likely to be converting.

So do use the graph that tells you what time of day people are converting and do give it some thought and make sure to cut off the times that are not getting enough, enough conversions. Now, if you find that your people are typically converting during a particular time but you don’t want to, you don’t want to stop your ads from running at other times, you just want to increase the amount that you’re bidding, sometimes you can do that. So in Google Ads, you can actually increase the bid adjustment for certain times of the day if you’re confident that that’s the time of day that you want to be targeting. So if it’s a really good time of day for you, you can, you want to have a larger bid adjustment so you want the bid adjustment to be in the positive numbers. So if you have a bid adjustment of say plus ten% then it means that you will be bidding ten% more for users at that time of day and you can have a negative bid adjustment such as minus ten% if or more if someone is having at an off time of the day.

The other way that you can do it is you can — if you want to be really fastidious about it, you can actually separate your campaigns into time of day so you can have morning campaign and an evening campaign and you can spread your budget across them so that you can be absolutely guaranteed that if you have an evening conversion service that you haven’t run out of budget by lunchtime.

Alright, so that’s a couple of different ways and do keep in mind that splitting — anytime you split campaigns you can be in a situation where you have too many different campaigns and that can confuse you so you don’t want to be in that situation where it’s hard for you to tell what’s working and what isn’t because you’re splitting your pie into too many pieces. I would only do that if you were really needing to ensure that your budget got spent at a particular time of day.

Alright, well hopefully that is helpful. Sorry about me coughing in the middle of that and if you want to subscribe for this kind of tips, you can do so by coming along to my blog website which is at www.petramanos.com. You can — I think across the top you should see like a little ribbon that says Subscribe, if you click on that and sign up you should get tips and educational pieces from me a couple of times a week. Otherwise, you can head on over to YouTube and you can subscribe to my channel there.

Alright, well I hope you have a wonderful day and speak with you soon.