Getting the Edge.
One of the first things I teach our search marketing professionals is not to make decisions based on day-to-day data.
There are 3 main reasons for this.
- Daily fluctuations are normal, they do not represent a substantial trend for quality decision making (with the exception of highly seasonal campaigns)
- Many people browse or research on certain days and then make their purchase decisions later (close to pay days in B2C markets)
- Making decisions on marginal data, delivers marginal improvements
So to look into this further, we are going to dive into the data of 2 different businesses.
- Business A (B2C in a super competitive market)
- Business B (moments based business)
In both cases, we analysed data over an extended period of time to see if we could isolate some big data trends that we could maximise into business growth strategies.
So where is our edge going to come from?
Business A – B2C (super competitive market)
We analysed the relative importance of certain days of the week in the context of:
- Volume of search (demand for service)
- Days of the week which generated the most sales activity
The data shows:
- When you exclude the fact that Tuesdays-Thursdays are the highest traffic days on the Internet; this business has the highest amount of research activity on weekends (refer Impressions) and the most sales activity from Monday- Wednesday (refer Leads).
Given this is an unusual trend; it’s really important to get a collective view on why this trend could be true? What are the customer motivations on these days of the week?
ROI Growth Agency’s Strategy Suggestion for Business A
Rather than just allocate more budget during this time, make this time period a window of opportunity. Create dedicated landing pages, with sales/appointment funnels to win this time period and win market share. Even treat leads within this time period with a different categorisation and follow-up process.
Business B – Moment Based Business
The data below is from a very competitive business which we have defined as a moments based business. A moment based busines is one where the customer generally makes the decision in the moment – first click or first phone call.
Your business either wins the moment or does not. It’s that simple.
As a result we decided to analyse the campaign performance for each hour of the day over an extended period of time, so that we could decide which moments represented the best growth opportunity.
The data shows:
- The beginning of the day is where the most opportunity is from people who like to be well planned
- There is also a slight pick up in the last hour of the day from the last minute customer
- After hours does not look positive – but maybe this is a reflection of the website experience not the market opportunity?
ROI Growth Agency’s Strategy Suggestion for Business B
- If you are a small business with a small budget, we recommend just playing in certain times of the day. Dedicate this time to sales and use other parts of the day to plan your operations.
- If you are a bigger business, we recommend developing a special early morning campaign where we plan to grow sales by at least 25% between the hour of 8-12 midday every day, with an integrated sales & marketing plan.
What data points represent the best growth opportunity for your business?
- More traffic
- Better quality traffic
- Higher order value
- Better retention rate
- Certain days of week
- Certain times of the day
- Better website conversion rate
- Better sales conversion rate
There are only so many hours in the day. So which data set do you think will give you the most leverage?
If you want some help unlocking a growth strategy using these data sets; touch base. We would be happy to help.
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