When Do Your Customers Visit Your Online Business?
Stuart and Toni Livesey
If your small business involves trading online have you stopped to think about what time of day your customers visit your website?
Is it even important to know such a statistic?
Well let’s answer the first question and think about the second.
A survey back towards the beginning of the year found that, in the United Kingdom, most purchases at online websites were made during office hours. That wasn’t because of some psychological impulse only to shop online at the same time one might shop in a bricks and mortar shop, it was because most people were shopping online while they were at work.
Even before the results of the survey came out there were a few savvy online retailers that we knew who had already spotted that trend.
Now the results of a similar survey in the United States has been released and the findings show much the same thing. Most online shopping - even window shopping - is done during business hours and people are doing it from work.
Is this an important statistic?
It’s a very important statistic to know and understand. At the very least the busiest time of the day for your website is not the time of day to do any upgrades. Save all that to the time of day when people aren’t trying to see your site.
It’s also important to know what time of day people are looking for your product because that can affect your advertising. If you are using Adwords then you want to pay to have it appear in an ideal spot at the time of day when your prospective customers are looking for your product.
One online retailer in the United Kingdom that we know is prepared to pay for his Adwords advertising to appear during office hours in the UK. For the rest of the day he’s prepared to turn his Adwords advertising off completely.
There are other ways you can use that statistic to help improve your sales too - but we’ll let you think about those for yourself.
By the way - even if you only have a bricks and mortar small business it’s still important to know the day of the week and even the time of day that most of your potential customers walk past your business.
