Why the twilight zone is the place to be

why twilight zone is the place to beWhile most companies shut up shop at the end of a working day, marketers are busy planning their next move in the twilight hours. This is a story about the value of obtaining insights into consumer behaviour outside of the normal 9 to 5 working day, in order to maximise budgets and realise the true potential of campaigns.
Evenings are a really important time to factor into the marketing schedule, particularly from a pay-per-click (PPC) perspective. The PPC pricing model is based around an auction system; generally, the more competition there is advertising on a keyword, the more expensive the click.
Therein lies an opportunity. PPC budgets are set daily, and they can often become exhausted by the evening if day-parting isn’t applied. This means the evenings can be an extremely efficient time to advertise, as exhausted budgets means lower competition, and lower competition means cheaper costs-per-click.
The starting point is to use data to understand behavioural differences. From this we then audit the devices used by the target consumer during different hours of the day to better understand how the client’s audience act in different ways on different devices, and crucially, on different networks (WiFi or 3G).
What we can determine from the data is that Monday to Thursday evenings are an open goal. In one example, we saw that tablets and smartphones on WiFi networks see a really high sale conversion rate on weekdays between 8pm and 10pm. We can then link TV data into our strategy, and therefore use TV ad schedules from the client’s media plan to ensure we have maximum visibility in-line with the plan.
While Sunday is regarded as the day of rest, it’s no time to relax your marketing activities. When we overlaid weather data over our conversion analysis we discovered with a number of clients that the conversion rate for ecommerce was significantly lower on a sunny Sunday morning compared with a cloudy, cold Sunday morning.
Successful marketing does not happen through sheer coincidence. You have to use data and insights from hourly device and network data, coupled with the knowledge that evenings are generally lower cost than daytimes. Now is the time to accept the ‘dark side’ of marketing and build in sundown strategies that make the most of the ‘Twilight Zone’.

Tom Smith is director of search at Fast Web Media