When optimising your online marketing efforts to increase your ROI, every aspect needs to be reviewed. One which is commonly overlooked is the time of the day, or day of the week that you send or launch the marketing campaign online. Optimising your campaign to send, or turn on your adverts at the ideal times, can have a big impact on the number of conversions the campaign generates.
Email Campaigns
The time and day that you send an email marketing campaign is extremely important to its success. Even if you have the best subject line, a high converting design and a great offer, if you send the email at the wrong time your campaign’s success will be limited. There have been a lot of studies conducted on when to send emails with varying ‘best times’ found based on the offer or type of email campaign. You should always test times of day on your own list, however to get a head start on your testing the majority of the studies concluded:
- Emails sent on a Thursday have the highest open rate and click through rates closely followed by Tuesday.
- Subscribers are most likely to open emails between 2pm and 6pm.
- The worst day of the week to send is a Monday (inboxes tend to be fuller and people busier).
- The worst time to send is 10pm – 7am with this period labelled the ‘inbox abyss’ by many email marketers.
- It is worth testing emails sends on the weekend as people have more time, and a lower volume of marketing emails are sent during the weekend. Keep in mind that abuse reports are highest on Saturdays & Sundays.
Social Media Updates
There are many best practice time and days to post your social media updates, but the best way to determine which time will work best for you is to use the metrics provided by the social media network itself. Facebook provides a platform for Page Admins called ‘Insights’ In these reports there are some very clear and easy to read data on when your social media updates had the most impact. Using this data you can very easily tailor your posting times and maximise the impact that each post made has.
Facebook Insights
Pay-Per-Click Campaigns
There is no ideal time of day to run PPC campaigns as every product or offering will have different times of day which work best. There are a lot of tools inside PPC providers such as Google Adwords that allow you to break down the performance of your campaigns by day of the week or by hour and you can use this data to analyse when you should have your ads on and when to either have them off, or to reduce bidding down.
When looking at your data it is important to make sure it is statistically relevant as smaller volumes of data can distort what is actually happening so should not be relied on. The main metric to look at is the number of conversions and the cost for each conversion and then optimise accordingly. Quality of leads is another important metric to note as enquiries during business hours can be better. Generally cost per clicks are cheaper during the night and during the weekend which can offer an opportunity to use timing to maximise your ROI.
Optimising Your Google Adwords Campaigns Based On Day Of The Week
As with everything I recommend, it is all about testing and using that data to refine and improve your campaigns. One time may work for your business which doesn’t work for others so rather than relying on ‘best practice research’ such as the times I have mentioned earlier, its important to split test and then refine your ads based purely on results.
