"Our paid search click conversion rates go down nights and weekends," Marc Katz, CO CustomInk, told me when I interviewed him for this week's Case Study (story below.) "Click volume goes down, but the proportion of orders to clicks also goes down."

Marc also told me he normally gets about 20% of orders from consumers calling the phone number displayed prominently on the site. Here too there are definitely weekend patterns. He gets so few calls on Saturdays that "we only staff the line for three hours." But then "Sundays are busier, and as the day wears on the line gets busier and busier so by Sunday evening it's almost like a normal weekday." So, he staffs phones for eight carefully chosen hours on Sundays.

Why does this matter to you?

When I ask most marketers about how they adjust their pay per click ad spending and/or their inbound call center hours for weekends, they tell me either "We don't" or "We just shut down on weekends entirely."

Hardly anyone, aside from the most sophisticated eretailers and catalogers, tweaks weekend schedules based on actual demonstrated customer use patterns. And, being b-to-b is no excuse for cutting call centers willy nilly on Sundays. Some of Marc's customers are businesses.

However, one word of advice -- don't cut any paid search ads due to lower weekend conversion rates unless your metrics package is tracking whether those surfers wind up converting later. You may be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Weekend surfers may be researching purchases they intend to make from work the following week.

Got an interesting data of your own to share? Lemme know. aholland@marketingsherpa.com

Link to Case Study about CustomInk:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=273