When do people find FranchiseHelp? (Part 2)

Earlier, in part one of “When do people find Franchisehelp?,” we took a look at both an introduction to Google Analytics and more importantly, when over the course of a day do people end up finding our website from Google. (If you want a refresher, you can find that article here.)

However, as curiosity never rests around here, I decided to take it a step further and look at the same question over the course of a week and a month.

A brief reminder of why I’m using the verb “find”:

“I use the verb “find” deliberately as I want to exclude any sort of specific user acquisition efforts from the question i.e. I don’t want the fact that we send out an email at 10PM to influence the results.”

Using Google Analytics, similar to the hourly breakdown I got earlier, I can run a daily breakdown as well.

Over the course of 2014, our daily organic traffic pattern looks something like this:

I took the data that comprises the graph you see above, and I grouped each day across both the day of the week and the day of the month.

Let’s start with what the “average week:”

I think this chart lines up with what my expectations for franchise searching are, with a few small oddities:

• Tuesday is a more (slightly) popular day than Monday – Usually, we associate the peak of professional discontent with Mondays. However, we see organic search volume higher on Tuesdays. I think this is likely because people are busier on Mondays. If there are things to do around the office / home, then it may preclude someone from searching for information on franchising.
• Sundays actually see fairly good search volume – It turns out that it’s a misnomer to consider Saturdays and Sundays together as “the weekend.” While Saturday is clearly the lowest search volume of the week, Sundays recover in a big way. I don’t have the numbers in front of me, but my hunch is that activity really picks up on Sunday evenings as the “Sunday Blues” set in hard.
• Friday isn’t as much of a crater as I’d expect – Popular wisdom dictates that Friday are terrible days to get people to reevaluate their lives. There are distractions galore as the promise of the weekend looms. While it’s true that Friday is the 2nd lowest day, I would have expected it to be down on Saturday’s level.

And here’s the “average month:”

(One caveat on the “average month” data is that each individual data point has a much lower sample size then the previous two charts in the series. Each day only has 9-11 data points, with the 31st only sporting 6.)

A few things to note here:

• What’s the deal with the 31st and the 1st of the month? – Great question. I have no idea. My best hypothesis is that people are busy around month end. As one month end and the next begins, there’s added responsibilities at work, so it’s possible that people have to deal with that stuff. It also could be a holiday thing as New Years’ and Labor Day both fell on the first of the month, dragging down organic searches.
• What’s that lull from the 19th to the 26th? – An even better question. And this one I really don’t know. If you have an idea, please let us know.
• Why is the graph so volatile? – Small sample size. So much of what you see in an analysis like this is simply noise or random variation. When you’re only pulling a few data points and trying to read the tea leaves, you often see very bumpy data. If you compare this chart to the previous two, you’ll notice that the others are way “smoother.” That’s because the actual signal from the data is pulled over the course of lots and lots of data points. If you added data together for the last 5 years, you’d likely see a much smoother curve.

So my curiously is satisfied! (Not really, it never is.) But I’ve finally discovered when people find FranchiseHelp!

Need help thinking about when people find information on your franchise, let us know.