Do B2B Conversion Rates DROP On Fridays? [Infographic]

Fridays are everyone’s favorite day at the office. But our Bizible marketing team posited that Fridays were a “terrible, horrible, no good, very bad” day for lead-to-opp conversion rates. Our suspicion was that our conversion rates drop for leads created on Fridays because our sales team doesn’t follow up with with them until Monday. By that time, the leads have had a whole weekend to forget they were interested.

We supposed we might want to turn down — if not completely shut off — our paid media campaigns on Fridays. It’s no use paying for leads that don’t convert well, after all. Since our attribution data was able to shed light on the subject, we pulled some statistics to answer this question. We were surprised by what we saw.

Well, how many opportunities originated from Friday’s leads?

We began by pivoting the data to find the volume of leads created on Friday that eventually converted to opportunities. Evidently, the percentage of the total number of opportunity conversions progressively rose from Monday’s leads through Thursday’s leads. But the graph showed a whopping 9% drop on Fridays. Thursday-created leads account for 24% of all opportunities, while Friday only accounts for 15%. Fridays are conclusively the weekday with the lowest volume of opportunities based on the day the lead was created.

Hang on, are we actually looking for VOLUME?

No, in fact. We realized that we shouldn’t care about volume. While the volume stats were interesting to consider, they didn’t answer our question about Friday’s conversion rate. Volume of opportunities is an entirely different metric than lead-to-opp conversion rate.

In order to find the metric we were looking for, we needed to take the number of leads created on a particular day and divide it by the number of those leads that converted to opportunities. That would tell us whether or not Friday’s leads converted better or worse than any other day.

Instead of comparing Friday’s opp count to Thursday’s opp count (to get a volume percentage), we would be comparing the number of Fridays leads to the number of downstream opps from Friday leads. After calculating the other days’ conversion rates in the same manner, we compared each day’s respective rates against the others.

Turns out, our Friday conversion rates are fine

Curiously enough, Friday’s conversion rate was only 1% behind Monday’s conversion rate. Leads created on Friday, while there might be less of them, are still comparable in value with the conversion rates of the other days of the week.

We debunked our own myth. Our Friday conversion rates are just fine.

However, weekends have lousy conversion rates

Since Friday’s conversion rates didn’t drop, we almost expected the weekend rates to be comparable as well, even though there was significantly less volume. We were wrong again. Unwittingly, we discovered that leads created on weekends convert at a terrible rate. It seems leads don’t take us seriously on the weekends at all.

The attribution data we were working with was very granular. Because we had transparent information about specific touchpoints throughout our entire funnel, we were able to answer a pressing question about our marketing strategy. This was generated by our our multi-touch attribution solution — and without it, we couldn’t have discovered the answer to this question for ourselves.

If we had trusted our hunch about Fridays, we would have turned down a profitable ad campaign generating leads that were actually converting well. Our educated guess wasn’t on point, and we needed to know the hard facts in order to dispel our assumption. Does your organization have this level of transparency in your marketing data?