Over the past few years, on-line advertising has proven to be far less effective than most industry experts originally estimated. This does not mean that on-line advertising can’t be effective for your business. But, you need to know when and where to use on-line advertising to enhance your traditional marketing efforts. A recent study has helped us to understand on-line usage patterns much better. For the first time, this study provides clear evidence that five distinctive dayparts do exist on the Internet. Each of these dayparts displays significant differences in usage levels, demographics and type of content accessed. Savvy marketers can use this information to improve the efficiency of their on-line marketing activity and interactive media buys by weighting their efforts toward those dayparts in which their target audiences are available in the greatest numbers. This study identifies five distinct Internet dayparts. A daypart is classified as a consecutive block of time on similar days (weekdays or weekends) during which the size of the audience is homogeneous as is the characterization of the group using the medium. They are: 1. Early morning (M-F, 6 am – 8 am) 2. Daytime (M-F, 8 am – 5 pm) 3. Evening (M-F, 5 pm – 11 pm) 4. Late night (M-F, 11 pm – 6 am) 5. Weekends (Sat-Sun, all day) Some key findings of this study included: - Daytime is the largest daypart (measured in both total audience and total usage minutes) followed by evenings and weekends. - Affluent, working people between the ages of 25 – 54 make up the largest share of the daytime audience than any other daypart. - Children under age 18 are three times more likely to be reached during the evening or weekend dayparts. - Internet utilities, such as search engines, email and chat rooms show very little variation in usage by daypart. On-line content sites, in contrast, show distinct differences in usage by the time of day. - Use of news and information sites is concentrated in the early morning and daytime dayparts. - Entertainment and sports sites usage increases dramatically during the evening and weekend dayparts. - On average, e-commerce activity is growing and now accounts for 5.3% of time spent on-line. A considerably larger share of e-commerce occurs on evenings and weekends than during the daytime. As you can see, using the Internet to supplement your existing marketing is a wise use of your marketing dollars. The more you can direct those dollars to where and when your target audience is actually on-line, the greater your return on investment. Gumas Advertising is an award-winning, full service marketing and advertising agency that helps their clients maximize the return on their advertising investment through the creation of smart marketing strategies, creative advertising and graphic design concepts and powerful on-line and interactive media programs. Until next month… If you would like to subscribe to Marketing Smart, click here to visit Gumas' Marketing Smart Page If you would like to offer a free subscription of Marketing Smart to someone else or have a subject you'd like to see covered, please reply to: editor@gumas.com JG -