What's the best day and time for a webcast?

Here's an interesting question blogger Ken Molay is asking. What day of the week is best for a webcast? And what's the best time of day?

He's doing a survey to collect data, because as he notes, conducting tests on this sort of thing would be difficult. I completely agree that gathering hard data from tests would be tough, but I think most producers of frequent webcasts could get a pretty good hunch for which days and times pull well, just knowing some of the variables that are in play (like how popular the topic of each event is likely to be). On the survey front, I also worry about whether people's actions of actually attending webcasts at certain times will follow their responses, because quite often, what people *say* they'll do is quite different from what they actually do. But it should be an interesting survey nonetheless, and it's probably better than the hunches all webcast producers are operating on right now.

In July 2007, webcast vendor ON24 did an interesting study that looked at a lot of different data points with key webcast trends. They examined things like months of the year for webcasts, plus which days of the week are best for registration. But they didn't dive into the attendance question based on day of the week or time of day. (Here's a link to a press release about that ON24 report, with a contact name on how to request a copy of the PDF. I couldn't find a direct link to the report PDF anywhere, probably because ON24 wants your name first so they can sell you something. But hey, ON24 is the best webcast vendor out there as far as I'm concerned, so let them sell you!)

Here's my contribution to conventional wisdom on best times for a webcast...

Last October, IndustryWeek did 12 webcasts in two days. We called it the "Operational Excellence Online LIVE" web conference. Sessions started at 11am, noon, 1pm, 2pm, 3pm, and 4pm Eastern on each day (a Wednesday and Thursday). The target audience was manufacturing management. The majority of our audience is based in the Eastern and Central time zones, although there are still quite a few manufacturers in Mountain or Pacific. Overseas audience is generally around 5%.

Since there were lots of variables with these 12 sessions -- 12 different sets of speakers, 12 sponsors who did differing amounts of promotion for the event to their current customer/prospect base, 12 different topics of varying interest to the IndustryWeek audience -- it's hard to draw scientific conclusions. But in terms of attendee percentage, we can make some pretty good guesses.

We found that the first session (Wednesday at 11am ET) had the best attendance percentage. There were several others that had comparable numbers that were just shy of the first session's numbers, so I'm sure that's not statistically valid.

We also found that the 4pm session each day was by far the weakest in terms of attendee percentage compared to other sessions that day. This is despite the fact that both 4pm sessions had particularly good speakers and particularly interesting topics that are normally "hot button" sort of subjects for our audience. (We survey the audience after each session and ask them to rate each speaker, and out of 24 speakers for the 12 sessions, the speakers for the 4pm sessions were rated as the #1, #2, #4, and #8 presenters for the entire conference.) Good content, good speakers, poor turnout.

We had similar results for the 4pm sessions during our December 2006 multi-session online conference. Those two sessions underperformed from an attendance % standpoint as well.

As a result of these pretty convincing results, we've eliminated the 4pm time slot from future multi-session online conferences. We'll see how the numbers change in the future. Perhaps the 4pm time was too late for manufacturers, since a lot of manufacturing companies start and end their days earlier?

What marketers can learn by looking at a manufacturing plant

I'm at the IndustryWeek Best Plants Conference this week. More than 600 manufacturing leaders have gathered in Milwaukee to learn best practices from experts and their peers. Plant tours are one of the key components of the conference, so manufacturers can see other plants' operations and learn from them. Today I was the IW representative who captained the Miller brewing plant tour.

How much can an eMarketer learn from a manufacturing operation like Miller's? Two things came to mind as I went through the tour:

1. Digital marketers should follow the example of manufacturing companies that post their key metrics and list of improvement initiatives for all to see. On the Miller tour today, we went into the room where teams gather for 20 minutes before each shift starts. The front of the room is covered with at least three dozen graphs -- colorful, filled in with magic marker -- that show their key performance indicators and how each shift performed over the past month. They post info about productivity, safety, attendance, etc. There's also a couple whiteboards that enumerate specific tasks they need to undertake, maintenance issues that need to be addressed, and problems that need to be solved.
   
   We need to do the same thing as marketers. Too often we keep our numbers buried in a spreadsheet. Even if your metrics report gets emailed to the relevant people and they read it today, the numbers are quickly forgotten tomorrow. Try posting a board in a prominent place in your office that shows your key metrics and how you're performing against them. Reports and spreadsheets that aren't posted don't cut it...because they're too easy to hide and too easy to forget about.
   
   
2. You need to have a passion for what you do. We didn't get to see a ton of employees -- maybe a dozen over the course of the three and a half hour tour. But the employees we saw were obviously passionate about the 150 year tradition of Miller and its mission to produce great beer efficiently. I could see it in their eyes and I could hear it in their voices.
   
   When's the last time you felt passionate about an electronic marketing campaign? Sometimes we get caught up in the daily grind -- churning out one project after another -- that we forget what it's all about. I know I'm often guilty of that.
   
   Dig a little deeper. Make the extra effort. Spend the time to do a great job on the little details. Remember what attracted you to this business in the first place. And once you've finished -- when you've produced a campaign or materials that are really first rate -- kick back and crack open a cold one...just like they'd do at Miller.
   

Google Analytics offering benchmarking data

About two weeks ago, Google announced that its popular Google Analytics service will now offer web stat benchmarks. According to this post in the Google Analytics blog, the benchmarking tool "enables customers to see how their site data compares to sites in any available industry vertical." So you'll be able to compare your web traffic patterns against others in your broad industry grouping.

Of course no site-identifiable information will be shared, and the minimum benchmarking pool will be 100 sites. You won't be able to view info on a particular competitor, but rather an aggregate group of 100+ comparable sites. In addition, Google will group sites based on their relative size (small, medium, or large), so you won't be comparing Mom & Pop Inc. with Microsoft, even if both are software companies.

This is a great idea, and something I'm not surprised to see Google offering. They have the data, so why not provide it to their users? In the long term, helping sites optimize their web traffic can only benefit Google. Presumably a site that's watching traffic patterns more closely and optimizing its performance will be a better Google AdWords customer when buying pay-per-click ads, so this seems like the next natural progression.

Benchmarking data is likely to be a double-edged sword for webmasters and web marketing managers. While it's great to compare yourself against an industry average when you're doing well, with these new benchmarks I have a feeling a lot of web pros will find themselves explaining sub-par performance to senior management more frequently. It used to be a lot easier to say "we're doing well" when the monthly stats report is passed around the company or department, when there was no data to benchmark your performance!

But the smart marketer will welcome this information. As the old adage goes, you can't improve what you don't measure.