Podcast 17: The Best Time for Ecommerce Retailers to Send Emails for Maximum Engagement

How to access Time of Day reporting in Google Analytics to help you decide when the best time to send marketing emails is for maximum engagement.

EXCLUSIVE RESOURCE: Add Drew's custom Performance Over Time report to your company's Google Analytics account! Click Here to get access + download the transcribe from this episode.

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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.

Highlights

00:48 – A couple of reasons you’ll want to keep track of your top performing days and times

01:10 – There’s no default view for “performance over time” in GA, you need to create a custom report

01:54 – How Drew sets up his custom performance over time report (click here to use it on your own site)

02:59 – How to analyze your custom report once you’ve created it

03:50 – Looking at the data in a pie chart

04:01 – Pulling out just email traffic from the report to determine what day is best to send your emails

05:57 – A look at an “Hour of the Day’ report

Links / Resources

Ready to take a look at your Time of Day analytics? Click here to import Drew's custom performance over time report to your own Google Analytics!

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Transcript

Prefer to read rather than listen to the podcast episode? No problem, you'll find a text transcribe below, and you can also download it for later.

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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.

Want to save this transcribe as a PDF? No problem, click here to download it.

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.