Looking at online sales cycles is a Pandora’s box.  Once you decide to look into your analytics to truly understand what steps a visitor needs to go through in order to convert, you always end up with more questions than answers.  There are a number of ways you can look at what it takes for a visitor to become a customer. You can go the:  

Engagement route: Understanding how and why a visitor moves through your site in a given session towards conversion. 

Recency and frequency route:  Understanding separate sessions and time between sessions as steps towards conversion. 

Micro and macro conversions route:  Looking at how pre-transactional conversions like newsletters, wishlists and downloads move a visitor towards a conversion. 

I could go on for a while with other options, but the purpose of this post was to make things even more confusing by injecting a new term into the mix: Dayparting. (place maniacal cackle here). 

Dayparting is a fairly established term in the offline marketing space, used for managing media buys in radio and television.  An example of this is selling radio ads against the morning daypart so that you can have the largest audience (people in cars). 

Dayparting is now making it’s way into online media buys, and there are some great articles and whitepapers on the web about how to optimize your search spend based on time of day.  It makes pretty good sense.  Look at your conversion rate based on the hour of the day (one click in Google Analytics by the way), or even the day of the week.  Look at where conversion is higher.  Plan keyword spend accordingly. 

Using this concept for in-site marketing makes for a very compelling case.  We have a few customers at Sitebrand who run personalization campaigns based on the day of the week, but imagine if you tweaked your website so that: 

• in the mornings you ran your normal site messaging, as people are looking at you as they drink their morning coffee and aren’t buying
• during lunch hours and early afternoon your site pushes your wishlist instead of a sale, because people are looking for products on your site that they will buy later at home.
• From 5-10 pm you ran aggressive sales messages, knowing that people are on the home computer and much more likely to convert.
• From 10pm to 7am you run more discounts and promos, because you might get some ‘midnight special’ bumps to conversion.

Especially if run against a control group, this would make for a very interesting look at conversion from a dayparting perspective.  That is, until another way to look at online sales cycles catches my eye…. 

Cheers, 

Jim 

PS.  Note that I didn’t even TRY to bring time zones into this.  Neo, there is no spoon.

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