Lower conversions on certain days & times?

[Tonearm]

Do you guys find there are lower conversion rates on certain days of the week or times of the day? Not just lower sales, but lower conversion rates?

[tomasvdb]

definitely

[Tonearm]

Maybe weekends and in the middle of the night? Weird though right? People still click but don't buy.

Do you vary your bids or pause your campaign at certain times based on this?

[poster_boy]

Do you vary your bids or pause your campaign at certain times based on this?

Absolutely. Altering bids based on time of day (typically) requires the assistance of technology, but altering your strategy based on day of week is quite a bit more manageable can generate significant lifts in revenue and ROI.

[deep_alley]

I have seen it happening and so used the Ad Scheduling option to decrease my budgets on the day of week when my conversion rates dip. The ROI for that day is better than it use to be before the ad scheduling was incorporated.

It is strange like you mentioned, clicks don't decrease as much as conversion rates do.

[fenway]

Most definetly. Peak Buying times can be very distinct, and very different from business to business or vertical to vertical. Conversion rate patterns over the 168 hour week, can vary greatly from the overall traffic patterns for the same site. Especially when PPC is involved. If daily budget caps are in effect, this can artificially limit traffic in your best times, but the users in that peak day/time are still more likely to buy. So, traffic stays the same, but higher conversion rates. A business' own inter-weekly patterns can vary from season to season as well.

For smaller businesses, breaking conversions down to this granularity can be revealing. If you break a week down into 168 hour parts, but see relatively few conversions, you may only see 5 conversions in a one hour period(say between 7pm and 8pm) on Tuesday nights. Whereas the same hour on Friday will see 2. If you collect this data over an 8 week period, you'll begin to see that the Tuesday hour has 40 conversions (8 x 5) vs 16 (8 x 2)on Friday for example. So the Tuesday hour has 2.5 more conversions(40 / 16), but not nearly 2.5 times the traffic levels.

Its my experience that you may see 1,000 clicks in the Tuesday hour but 800 or so on the Friday night hour. If daily caps are in effect, than you may very well see 1,000 clicks in both hours. But, the difference between a 4% conversion rate and a 1.6% conversion rate is obviouly large. If your avg, cpc is $1, than shifting the $1K budget from the friday hour back to the Tuesday hour, could very well yield double, 40 more conversions in the Tuesday hour, or 24 more total on your week.

If the Tuesday 7pm to 8pm hour happens to be your most heavy-hitting hour, driving 20% or so of all of your conversions, a move like this can can make a noticeable difference to your overall conversion, allowing you to afford higher CPC's.

[Tonearm]

Very interesting. I've been tracking customer IPs on my site lately and many of them do browse one day, bookmark, and come back to buy a day or week later. Shifting resources to an area of greater yield would be good, but I don't want to eliminate the come-back-later customers.