Wednesday, October 05, 2005

Optimal dayparts for advertising

Would you believe me if I told you that "there are some parts of a day where online advertising is most effective" ?

A recent survey conducted by Atlas reported that lunch break and evening time ( just before bedtime ) yield as much as 35% higher conversion than other hours in the day. Now, this does not imply that people do not visit websites during the rest of the day or do not click ads at all during rest of the day, but this certainly is concrete statistical evidence to support that a product has as much as 35% higher chance of getting purchased if the advertisement is displayed during these hours.

That leads to an interesting question - "If the information about optimal dayparts is public and well researched, why don't all advertisers display their ads only during these dayparts ?". A look at the laws of demand and supply would easily answer that question ( and is a phenomenon witnessed today on television advertisement ). Lets say that all the advertisers want to advertise only on the prime dayparts ( similar to prime slots on television ) - this would create a very high demand, and given taht the supply of the media on these prime dayparts is limited, would cause the cost of the media during these hours to be raised significantly. In this scenario, advertising on prime dayparts would mean fewer eyeballs and significantly narrow reach to the target audience at the same or higher cost while there is lots of cheap media lying unused on other dayparts. Pushed to the extreme, the market would eventually swing back and breakeven at a point where the media cost during the prime dayparts is 35% higher than the media cost for the remaining dayparts.

So does it really make sense to run after prime dayparts for interactive marketing ? While there is no absolute answer to this question, the key lies in setting up good metrics to measure the progress of the campaign and gathering the statistics from your campaign to build/optimize your media plan. With a good plan, you would certainly be able to find the eyeballs to market your product.

2 comments:

RK said...

Why no new posts?

BTW, Wish you happy Diwali :-)

Pranav Bhasin said...

I've just been too busy lately. I should get back to my standard of 3 posts a week pretty soon.

Wishing you a very happy diwali too :). How is Cressida group doing ?