Website Benchmarking Initiative Insights: Comparing Days of the Week

The four charts above illustrate the difference in behavior between visitors on various days of the week. We measured visits as a measure of popularity and bounce rate and pages per visit as measures of interaction. Note that visits is a relative average, and these numbers are only useful in relation to each other. That said, the trends seen in the above charts is a baseline for all continuing education sites.

What we found

Visits

Overall, visits measures a level of popularity of your site on a particular day. The most visits, the more popular the day. The most popular day appears to be Tuesdays with a steady decline throughout the week. Mondays appear to be just above average days.

Bounce Rates

In this Insights report, bounce rate is a measure comparing interaction and interest across days of the week. The lower the bounce rate, the more interested visitors are and the more likely they are to interact with your site. Mondays and Tuesdays appear to be the best two days, with the rest of the week weakening throughout. This cycle repeats itself week to week.

Pages per Visit

Similar to bounce rate, this metric is a measure of interaction. Bounce rate measures the likelihood that visitors will interact, while pages per visit measures how much they interact across the days of the week. Similar to the other two metrics studied, the weekend days are the worst for interaction. Interestingly, while sites jump in popularity from Monday to Tuesday before seeing a decline, pages per visit suggests that visitors are highly engaged from Monday through Wednesday before preparing for the weekend and losing interest.

What does this mean?

An interesting set of trends emerge from this analysis. The beginning of the work week is a moderately popular day for visiting continuing education sites. The number of visits spikes on Tuesday before seeing a gradual decline until the weekend. This trend repeats itself week to week, regardless of the month that is studied. If your particular website follows a different trend, it is likely a rare and special case.

Similarly to popularity, continuing education sites interact best with visitors, i.e. maintain visitor attention, in a similar pattern. In both the bounce rate and pages per visit charts, we can see that weekends are clearly under performing all other days during the week. That said interaction seems to start strong at the beginning of the week before seeing a gradual decline through Friday.

It's tough to say what this may mean for your particular site. First, check to see whether your site's visitors follow similar patterns. Then consider measuring your site's ability to actually convert into visitors into leads, applicants, and enrollments. Consider this for other aspects of your marketing. If people are more likely to stay on your site (low bounce rate) and learn a bit more (high pages per visit) on Tuesday than any other day of the week, perhaps your marketing can attempt to leverage this factor. Keep in mind that it's not just emails that bring people on your website.

Overall it seems that the earlier you can get something out in the week (as long as it isn't on Monday morning), the better.