48 Hours

MoreVisibility - May 19, 2008

I was sitting at my desk working quietly as I overheard my colleague on the phone with a client. They must have been talking about making changes to their website and discussing the steps it would take. Then I heard him say in disbelief, “so you mean the website is going to be down for 48 hours?”

His tone caught me off guard a bit. Then I thought about it for a moment and totally understood. It’s just crazy how fast everything has evolved. I mean 48 hours is a weekend. Could it be so bad to be offline for the “weekend?”

I wanted to do some digging and see what kind if stats I could find. I came up with next to nothing. I found an old report from 2002 released by comScore that said the average daily spending during the week was $155 million and the average for weekend days was $97 million. Now these figures are obviously outdated, but I’m pretty confident that the trend still continues. When I think about it, for many of our client’s PPC campaigns, we use the ad scheduling feature. This allows us to set times when we want our ads to be displayed and times when we don’t. I asked some people around the office and thought about some of my clients. I can’t think of one client whose ads are paused on weekdays. However, there are many that are paused on the weekends.

This brings me back to original point. What does it mean to be offline for 48 hours? It means money; and that’s money out of your pocket! But if you have to, maybe it’s better to be off on the weekend.