What day of the week is your audience most engaged with your content? Are they more likely to visit your site in the morning or at night?
Performance over time reports are a great way to sharpen your email marketing strategy, arming you with historical data to back up your decisions when it comes to the days and times you send emails.
In this episode, Drew covers the importance of Time of Day reporting, talks about a few ways you can use these analytics to grow your business, and shares the link to a Google Analytics custom report he created that you can use, too.
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Okay. Today we’re going to use Google Analytics to investigate performance according to time. What do I mean by that? That means we’re going to investigate performance on our website. It could be visits, it could be e-Commerce transactions or revenue over a unit of time, either hour of the day. For example, how does traffic or conversions at 6 AM differ from 10 PM? It could be day of the week, so how is revenue on our Monday different from revenue on our Friday? It could be week of the year. How is week three of the year different from week 52 if you want to look into seasonality?
Why would you want to do this, you’re probably asking right now. Well, if you’ve got your best offer, for example, you don’t want to send out that offer on a day during which no one’s on the site or during which no one has historically responded to your emails. Those are two examples of why you’d want to know this. If you go to investigate performance over time, Google Analytics, the first thing you may or may not notice is it’s not really broken out here on the left hand side. There’s no menu item for performance over time. What you’ve got to do then is create a custom report.
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You click on the customization tab up at the top and you’re going to want to click on “New Custom Report” here. I’ve already built one out called “Performance Over Time” so just to speed things up I’m going to show you how I configured this report. This is the custom report interface. You see you’ve got a title in at the top, you add content to it in the middle, add some filters and views. Just to go through this quickly, I’m calling it “Performance Over Time” and what I’m going to walk through is day of the week. I want to find out how my revenue through email differs on day of the week, that’s the challenge.
We’ll call it “Day of the Week”. Under metrics groups you want to add really whatever you would like to know according to day of the week. Would you like to know about sessions, revenue, bounce rate, transactions, whatever. I’ve put a bunch in here under “Metric Groups” and “Dimension Drill Downs”. This is the key part because dimensions are the unit of time you’re going to use. In my case, I’m using day of the week name and just click there and start typing day … Yeah, and see day of the week name is right here. If I wanted to do hours I’d start typing hour, hour of the day for example or week of the year. This is where you get all that stuff so cancel out of that.
In this case, I’m doing day of the week name, no filters needed. I save that and what I essentially get is this report, and just move over to my second tab. This report will show you down the left hand side here the day of the week name. I put the day of the week index here so I could sort because I like to see these things in order, so these things being days; Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. You can see here it is, I’m looking at all sessions over the past 30 days and summing up by day of the week. I can see session activity according to the day of the week, bounce rate, all the different metrics that I put in my custom report.
Go all the way out here to conversion rate which is kind of interesting. My conversion rate does differ based on the day of the week. Monday’s a great day. You might want to look at this in a pie chart to really get a sense of what’s going on your site day to day. Kinda of interesting but the challenge I put before you was we want to know about email. This is all sessions so I’ve created a segment here. What you want to do is add a segment to your reporting where you pull out just email traffic, in which case, the medium contains email. You might want to only look at mobile traffic or paid traffic. Those are all in here under the segmentation menu.
I have prepared the result for you here where I’m just pulling out email traffic as my segment. Again, looking day of the week, you can see my email traffic over time here. Then I scroll down to the report. Again, here are these seven days of the week, you should recognize these. I scroll over to the right. I see, “Okay wow, my email conversion rate does, again, differ from under 1% to almost 2% so Sunday for this retailer in question is not a good day to send email. Not only is revenue low but conversion rates are low. You see bounce rates are pretty high. People are not purchasing this kind of product through email on Sunday historically.”
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What’s our best day? Our best day, Monday and Tuesday both have really high conversion rates, high revenue, low bounce rates. Monday and Tuesday might be a great day to just send out that key offer that I want to send out. I’ve also done the heavy lifting of breaking out hour per day, day of the week, month of the year. If you wanted to drill down in the data and look at your performance according to any of those units of time … Google Analytics is thinking here, it’ll do some thinking noise. It’s thinking, trying to get the data, and here it is so hour of the day I’m looking at e-Commerce performance. You really, really see up here in the chart that my traffic, my sessions, spike later in the day as opposed to earlier in the day.
Here are the hours in the day in the left hand column, I can obviously sort those. What I’m looking at is revenue and transactions and conversion rate, how they differ. You see later in the day people do, and my conversions rate go up in the hour of 21, 22, 23 so people are really buying later in the day. Hope I’ve given you a great overview of how to do performance by time. Incidentally, you want to make this easy, go to my blog, nerdmarketing.com and you can download this custom report so you don’t have to configure it at all. I’ve got a link to it in my blog post for this tip. Thanks a lot, have a great day.
That’s it for today, thanks for listening to the Nerd Marketing Podcast. By the way, for all show notes and resources that I mention in today’s episode, if you want this slide deck for example just go to nerdmarketing.com/ the number of the episode. For example, nerdmarketing.com/15, 16, 17, just the number, and you can download all the show notes, you can download this presentation.
If you’re thinking about getting started or just getting started in e-Commerce, I recommend you go to my start here page so nerdmarketing.com/starthere. On that page, you can opt in to get two resources I really recommend. One is my top five e-Commerce marketing tools. The other is my million dollar business cheat sheet. Both really lay out the tools you can use to drive your business to a million dollars in revenue in a short amount of time. For those of you who are already running a successful e-Commerce business doing, say, six or seven figures per year and you want to get to eight figures, I encourage you to check out my “Profit Machine Mastermind”.
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I’m about to launch this over the next couple months and it’s going to mostly have seven figure store owners who want to get to eight figures. I’ve found one of the best says to do that is by focusing on retention and customer analytics. I’m going to walk you through my approach and the one I use at my private equity clients over the next year. You can find more information about that at nerdmarketing.com/mastermind. Lastly, for all those on a mobile device right now text Nerdme, so one word, N-E-R-D-M-E, 244222. That’s Nerdme 244222 and I’ll text you back and add you to my list and send you the resources from today’s show. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
