Just a quick note today about something really surprising that I discovered this morning when I was looking over my tracking logs.

My purpose was to determine if I’m send out my email messages at the best times for each of my niches. To figure this out, I decided to start by taking a look at my website logs to see what time of day the most people actually visited my website from day to day.

As I started pouring over the statistics for each of my niches, I noticed an interesting and surprising trend…

The highest percentage of visitors to ALL my websites comes at the 1600 hour!

What really surprised me was that the 1600 hour (4:00 in the afternoon) was most popular in both business and non-business niches.

What does this mean?

Initially I was thinking that a 1600 high point made sense because a lot of people are winding down for the day at 4:00 in the afternoon before they head home for the day.  It’s a good time to catch up on email, do a little free surfing, etc.

But then it dawned on me that I’ve got website visitors coming in from all over the world and different time zones.

I even get visitors from Russia and Iran!

They obviously wouldn’t all be winding down their days at 1600 EST.

So that caused me to take a look at what countries my visitors are coming from… and not surprisingly the vast majority of my visitors in all my niches come from the US and Canada (followed closely by UK and Australia) which operate in my time zones.

Bingo!

Now I know the perfect time to send my email messages to my visitors in order to get the maximum click through rate!  It didn’t take a brain surgeon to figure it out, just a little statistic sleuthing.

But here’s the really surprising part…

The magic hour for all my niches is 1600.

I don’t really get that because I have websites for stay at home moms, hobby enthusiasts, online business owners, parents, home schoolers, brick and mortar business owners, entrepreneurs, etc., yet the magic hour is still 1600 for all my niches!

What’s even more weird is that when I compare the statistics for different niches, they are nearly identical… usually within a few percentage points of each other.  In other words when I compare the times when people hit my site across different niches, they are nearly identical.

Take a look at the two graphs below taken from two completely different niches.

I’m not sure I understand why, but I can definitely make use of the information.

So, I’m curious… Are you finding that your website has the same magic hour as mine?

Is this just a quirk in my business or does everyone in the English-speaking market have the same magic hour for their websites?

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Filed under: Email Marketing • Testing & Tracking

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