Day Trending: Understanding When Your “Best” Customers Are
-Dan Cubero May 16, 2012
Most of the marketing classes I took in college attempted to help me understand the most important thing in marketing: understand WHERE your customers are located. And yeah, that’s important, especially given the importance that Google and other search engines have put on local listings, local maps and location-based mobile advertising over the past 2 years. But once you have taken those steps, it still leaves one important question unanswered: what is the next step in the process?
To brands out there reading this: do you know which part of the day your prospective customers are doing the most searches for your products/services? Or do you know when your website is receiving the most traffic? How about this one: do you know which parts of the day are costing your PPC campaigns the most? What I am getting at here is that there are certain correlations and inverse relationships for when the most active searches are performed as it relates to the competitive landscape. This competition stems from other brands in your industry, brands in complimentary product categories, or seemingly separate, isolated competitors coming after your customers’ wallet share altogether.
Our experiment looked something like this:
Green = High Performance Metric
Red = Low Performance Metric
As you can see, when fewer searches are being performed (read: less impressions), but with the same number of competitors vying for an ad space, there is an increase in the cost-per-click, and as a consequence, an increase in the cost-per-conversion. That said, there is a clear benefit, especially when working within a limited or set budget, to advertising the greatest amount when these two metrics, cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion, are at their lowest prices of the day as it will allow you to compete more times. Rather than compete at all hours of the day, the bulk of a budget can be allocated to these relatively cheaper hours of the day for lower overall campaign costs, not to mention, when most prospective customers are searching for you anyway! Additionally, lower conversion costs will likely translate into a greater number of overall conversions as well!
Now this is just one example, as this can be replicated for days of the week, months of the year, etc. However, the point is this: don’t forget about the other metrics – “location, location, location” may be a hot-button phrase and filled with a ton of truth, but make sure that once you find where your customers are located, you know how to use your marketing dollars appropriately for the best results and greatest number of conversions!
Now please, critique and comment away!