Is it shopping day or washing day for your web site?

When I was a child I knew which day of the week it was because of the activities in the house. If my mum was doing the washing, it was Monday; if we were shopping it was Friday; if we were visiting my auntie, it was Thursday. Every week we had this routine. Nowadays, people do not have such stringent routines, but there is a cycle to what people do, even if it is unplanned. For instance, most people go shopping on a Saturday; most people go to visit friends on a Sunday; and most people go to their doctor on a Monday. That’s just the way it is.

Your web site will have a similar cycle. If you look at your statistics you will find that most people visit your site on a particular day in the week. You will also get different countries predominating on different days of the week. If you identify the patterns in your web site visitor statistics it means you can modify your pages to suit the visitors for each particular day.

If you consider retailers in traditional bricks and mortar stores, they have been doing this for years. They know that the “High Street” is full on a Saturday. So guess which day of the week they give prominence to the highest margin products? Shelves get moved around on a Friday, ready to entice the Saturday shoppers to part with more cash.

Online retailers can do the same trick. If you know which day of the week your web site gets most visitors from, say, the UK, then appeal to those readers on that day. On the day when your web site is mostly visited by people from the USA, change the appeal of your web site to that audience. In other words, adapting your web site to the cycle of your visitors can make it more appealing and therefore more profitable.

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