After running Facebook ads for the past few months I’ve noticed a potential trend. Facebook traffic seems to spike on Sunday evenings, which is not typical for website traffic, usually Mondays are the big day for any given week. I thought about my own personal Facebook usage and realized that my wife and I tend to use Facebook for at least 30 minutes Sunday evening as well. Sunday nights have become TGISNFBT (thank goodness it’s Sunday night Facebook time). Ok that acronym might not catch on, but if it does, you heard it here first.

Why the Sunday night blitz?

Facebook is all about connecting with your friends and sharing the fun, or bad, stuff going on in your life. The challenge is that you need time to actually do something in your life to write about. Typically Friday nights, Saturdays, and Sundays are reserved for actual living. You know, not working (usually) and doing activities that don’t involve the job or boring life requirements, like washing the dishes.

Sunday night has become the show and tell time from the weekend’s events on Facebook. Uploading that picture of you dancing on the bar from Friday night, or your story about how some lady backed up into your new SUV in the mall parking lot on Saturday afternoon then tried to pick a fight with you.

So what about those individuals who only access Facebook at work? They are probably updating their friends about their weekends escapades on Monday, on their lunch hour of course. Mondays have always been the primary traffic day online so that’s typical, but again Sunday is usually the worst. So let’s capitalize on this potential Facebook “Prime Time” schedule.

“Prime Time” Facebook advertising

Start experimenting with a weekend only version of a Facebook ad with a higher than normal bid on it, so that you can guarantee good placement for the weekend traffic spike. Activate that weekend only ad Friday afternoon before you leave for the weekend (remember to turn off the lower bid ad for comparison). Remember to update your Facebook status when it’s TGISNFBT time. You know you want to keep using that acronym.

Monday morning check the weekend ad’s CTR and see if you noticed a spike. Remember to turn off the higher priced weekend ad on Monday afternoon. Review the numbers throughout the week and determine if there was an identifiable increase for the weekend version of the ad. As with any online advertising campaign, if you don’t see an increase in traffic or conversions, revise it or kill it. Good luck!

Google Analytics is by far the most integrated web-site traffic analysis tool for free online. If you associate your Google AdWords and Google Analytics account, you can easily determine which Pay-Per-Click (PPC) ads are delivering the highest conversions, and which ads aren’t. This gives marketers the unprecedented ability to track the effectiveness of advertisements and prove a campaign’s ROI instead of relying on circulation numbers and other averages.

It’s a bit scary to realize how much information can be tracked with Google, but rest assured you’re only tracking visitors movements on the sites that you have development access to.

I won’t bore you with a reinterpretation of the excellent video put together by Google itself on the basics of site analytics, but this video is just the tip of the iceberg. You can easily get lost in the mountains of data, but if you stay focused on what’s important to you, analyzing your site’s traffic and making informed decisions backed by data on how to improve, your web site will become second nature.