Let’s Talk About (Ad Agency New Business) Stats Baby

Looking to 2011, we’ve got a lot on our plate: potential new site and blog re-design, webinar and conference plans and other good stuff.  But a big focus for us in 2011 will be analytics and just how effective our efforts to bring in new business really are.

Sure, we get good feedback via WOM, both directly and indirectly, regarding what we’re doing well and what could be improved, but we absolutely need to do a better job in the analytics department.  You should be thinking about it for your agency as well in 2011 if analytics isn’t much of a focus.

So with that said, a few quick stats from around the web, and internally here at RSW/US,  you might find interesting.

First, a big-picture stat that, quite frankly, is not really apropos of the post’s theme but interesting nonetheless: What percent of American internet users use Twitter?  Answer: 8%. (Per  Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project.)

Did not know that.

Moving on, a post on Problogger (When’s the Best Time to Publish Blog Posts?) this week about the best time to blog and Tweet. (When’s the last time you thought about that?) Per the post, in regards to blogging:

I recently did a survey of over 1,400 blog readers and I asked them what time-of-day they read blogs. Morning was the most popular, followed in decreasing popularity by the rest of the day. Most respondents reported reading blogs at more than one time, so this piece of data reinforces my suggestion to publish early in the morning.

But then:

The best timing advice, however, may actually be around frequency. Last week, I analyzed 1000 of the most popular blogs on the web, according to Technorati. I compared their posting frequency with the number of incoming links and visitors they had attracted (according to Yahoo and Compete).

I found that among very popular blogs, publishing multiple times per day led to a huge increase in a blog’s success. This tells us that rather than focusing one perfect day or time, we should aim to publish at many times, and on many days.

Well, most agencies barely have time to write a post a week, much less multiple times a day (yikes).

How about Tweeting:

The most frequently cited piece of this research has been the idea that Friday at 4pm is the most retweetable time of the week. While your niche maybe different, this data was based on analysis of nearly 100 million retweets, so in aggregate, Friday at 4pm is indeed the most retweetable time of the week.

Interesting. I found a site this week called Twitalyzer that shed some light on our RSWUS twitter feed. Here’s the breakdown of our Twitter followers and what times they typically read our tweets, dated from 12/1 to 12/8. (You may need to click on the graph for better detail.)

Apparently most of our tweets are read between 1pm and 9pm, according to Twitalyzer’s service. And I typically don’t tweet past 4 or 5pm.  I need to rethink our strategy it would seem.

So what’s the point here in the grand scheme of things?  Do some analytical studies on your social media efforts and don’t pay too close attention to anything else. That’s not a knock on ProBlogger’s data, it is what it is, but just take a look at the comments on the ProBlogger post; you’ll see advice on when to optimally blog and Tweet that includes almost every day of the week.

Bottom line: do a bit of homework with Google Analytics, or any other range of analytics services out there and find the timing that works best for your agency.