Marketing A/B Testing
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Impact of Time on Conversion of Potential Customers to Buying Customers

To successfully and efficiently run a marketing campaign, the team must understand the optimal days and times of which ads or psas should be shown to potential customers. In doing so, the company will be better able to manage a budget while increasing the number of potential customers who buy the product, leading to higher profits. In the first visualization below, we explore the conversion rate of customers by day, grouped by their test group (ads and psas).

In the graph above, we plot side by side bar charts where each bar chart plots the conversion rate by day for one of the test groups. Evaluating the visualization, there are two important insights we can generate:

  1. People who viewed ads were more likely to purchase the product, regardless of the day the ads were shown.
  2. Earlier in the week, especially on Monday, we saw a higher success rate in convincing potential customers to buy the product.

This would suggest that the company should strongly consider placing ads upon the public release of the product, even though ads may have a higher cost than psa. Regardless, to maximize the potential effectiveness of the campaign, more ads and psas should be placed on Sunday and Monday than on other days of the week. Next, we need to determine which times of the day are generally best for placing ads. The visualization below helps to answer that question.

As expected, this visualization also indicates that ads are more effective than psas at generating business. As for the best time to send ads and psas, early afternoon (2pm) until late in the evening (9pm) is generally best. Interestingly, the best hour of the day for both ads and psas was the 4pm hour, with a conversion rate north of 3% for both groups. From this visualization, and the one before it, the company appears to be best served by focusing its messaging in the early to mid afternoon from Sunday to Tuesday. However, to confirm the ideal time, one more one more visualization is required.

This visualization is a heatmap where a stronger color at a point indicates that day and time has a higher conversion rate than other days and times. As expected, mid afternoon through the evening was generally the best time of day and Sunday through Tuesday were the best overall days in convincing potential customers to buy the product. The five best combinations of days and times are as follows:

While Sunday at 8pm, Monday from 2pm to 3pm, and Tuesday from 3pm to 4pm are not surprising, the two other times do not support the previous conclusions. However, Monday at 6am makes some sense as it is at the beginning of the work week and people could be consuming media where the ads or psas are placed before they head off to work. The spike on Saturday early in the morning appears to be peculiar as people are traditionally sleeping at those times. Further investigation would be required to understand the reasons behind the spikes in conversion rate at the aforementioned times, but especially at the initially seemingly odd hours of Monday at 6am and Saturday at 5am and 6am.