When it comes to metasearch traffic, the data for determining weekly trends for your account is readily available. We wanted to take it a step further to get a better understanding of these patterns on an hourly level. So over a two-week span, we tracked hourly spend, clicks, and bookings for a sample of US focused clients on Google Hotel Ads in order to identify which hour of the day receives the highest value leads.
Hypothesis
We expected to see spikes in click and booking volume around two times of the day:
- During the typical lunch hour
- In the late afternoon/early evening (after 5:00 PM)
The basis for this belief was that consumers would search for hotels and ultimately book during either their lunch break or after work in the evening when they have the time to sit down at a desktop. We set out to quantify the highest booking hours of the day.
Methodology
We used the following methods when pulling our data:
- We pulled data on the hour starting at 8:00 AM and ending at 9:00 PM. *
- For the hours we did not pull live data, we estimated hourly clicks, cost, and conversions based on the given numbers evenly distributed over this time period. **
* There may be slight inaccuracies in these numbers due to human error and slight differences in the timing of each data pull.
** The numbers pulled each hour are estimated by Google and may slightly differ from the actual hourly metrics.
When do Customers Click the Most?
We found that, across our sample of American clients, our highest click volume on average was seen around 6:00 to 7:00 PM. Unsurprisingly, we see the general trend of click volume increasing throughout the day. There was an additional hour long spike around 11:00 AM as well where we saw heightened click volume (compared to the hour before and after). We believe that these trends can be attributed to consumers becoming more active online throughout the day as well as being away from work and having additional time to search. Below is a graph outlining the average clicks we saw per hour, as a percentage of the total daily average.
Our results show that the highest average click volume was seen during the 6:00 to 7:00 PM CST hour. This helps us get an approximate idea for what time of day we are seeing the most clicks come through, but clicks aren’t meaningful unless they lead to bookings. So next, we will investigate the highest booking hours of the day.
