I’m in Palo Alto this week.  Monday I went to workout at Stanford’s Arrillaga Center for Sports & Recreation (a/k/a the student gym).  It was Monday at 3:30 pm.  Somehow I forgot that this gym has a very different busy time than most other gyms I visit.  At most gyms, where the patrons have jobs, the busy time doesn’t come until after people get off work.  At the Stanford gym, 3:30 was just long enough after the last classes get out to pack the place.  Honestly, I’ve never seen more people per inch at a gym in my life.

Yesterday, I ended up going at about the same time.  I wanted to go earlier, but I have a job after all and I’m not fully on vacation this week.  But, the gym was only about half as busy. 

What gives?

All gyms have roughly the same cycle.  They have a daily cycle, where they see almost all their visitors before and after work.  They have a weekly cycle, which peaks on Monday and usually dwindles the rest of the week.  They also have a yearly cycle.  New Year’s resolutions make the first week of January the busiest time of the year.

What’s interesting is that almost everything that consumers buy online has daily, weekly and yearly cycles.  This makes intuitive sense.  Don’t you think that people who shop for insurance at midnight on Saturday are different in some way than those that are shopping on Tuesday at noon?  Of course they are.

Dayparting in search marketing means bidding differently by time of day and day of week.  You measure the differences in conversion rate from click to conversation throughout the week and then you act on this data by bidding differently throughout the day and week to reflect these differences in value.

When I was presenting at the SES San Jose conference, I asked for a show of hands: how many of the audience were using dayparting?  Even though it was billed as an advanced session, I was still surprised that more than half of the audience raised their hands. 

The lesson here is clear:  if you don’t know when your site visitors are most likely to convert and if you are not acting on that information, you’re behind the game.  Get on it!