As part of our ongoing marketing efforts at oDesk, we have a pretty substantial Google Adwords campaign set up. I was reviewing some of the data today and we noticed that for all campaigns, the conversion ratios (% of visitors that sign up for an account) were highest on Saturdays. A little unexpected, but an interesting finding. Google allows you to tailor your campaigns by automatically adjusting your bid amounts by day of week. Seems like it would be appropriate to increase our bid amounts on Saturdays so we capitalize on this increased conversion ratio. Or maybe not?

I was wondering why conversion ratio was higher on the weekend so I decided to take a look at oDesk data for job postings over the last few months. I took a look at over 10,000 jobs posted and analyzed results based on a few simple criteria.

First, I wanted to understand the distribution of types of jobs posted by day. I put together all the results in Excel and did a pivot table on the day of week. Note that for all of the following charts, 1 = Monday, 7 = Sunday. This first chart shows the total ratio of fixed price jobs posted on the oDesk network by the day of week. Sundays apparently have the highest percentage of fixed price jobs.

Ok, so clearly there is a small bias toward fixed price jobs on the weekends. What about job size? The following chart shows the average estimated hours for hourly jobs (estimated hours = estimated workload in hours per week * estimated duration in weeks). Note that durations over 100 weeks are rounded down to 100 weeks. Clearly, hourly jobs tend to be smallest on Sundays.

Ok, we’re starting to see a trend here. Let’s take a look at Fixed Price jobs. I looked at a chart of Fixed Price job size by day of week posted. You can see in this next chart that the budgets tend to be smaller than the average (the average being 100%) on Friday thru Sunday.

So, jobs that are posted on the weekend tend to be smaller and more urgent than the rest of the jobs posted. Now, remember that the conversion ratio was highest on Saturdays. The way I read this data is that if you’re looking for urgent work, you’re more willing to try anything to get the job done so you’ll convert to a user at a higher rate than normal. Now the last step is to look at the relative value of a customer that signs up for our network by day of week. If the “weekend warrior” types do indeed have small, urgent jobs then they should have a lower lifetime value than the average.

While there is not a huge difference, I think the findings are pretty interesting. Note for providers -> if you’re looking for the best jobs available - make sure you’re looking Mon - Fri.

I just went out for a team lunch with our local team - 5 of us had a very nice lunch and talked and joked about family, golf, airplanes, dating, and Hillary Clinton. During the lunch, I thought of the other 8 people that are part of my team. 3 data entry professionals in Mohali, India; 1 work-at-home mom in Pune, India; 1 part-time community moderator in Omsk, Russia; 1 freelance newsletter writer in Oakland, CA; 1 copywriter / editor based in Oregon but traveling in Brazil; and 1 search marketing consultant working at home in San Francisco, CA. If you’re reading this blog, you probably have been in a similar situation.

Why should they be excluded? Do they have the same needs as the rest of us co-located workers that get to enjoy each other’s company and go out for a lunch or a happy hour? Of course they do. So what do you do for team-building for distributed teams. Here’s a few ideas:

1 ) Introduce everyone - Make sure that your remote team is well-connected with each other and with everyone in the organization that they need to be. It’s easy for a local employee to raise their hand and ask others for help, but if you are the primary point of contact for your remote contractor, you need to make sure they have multiple people that they can turn to for help. And have some fun with the intros - ask each team member to send an intro email that includes hobbies or a funny story.

2 ) Run a full group chat 24×7 - Almost all instant messenger platforms have group chat capability. Start a group chat and let it run all day long even if you’re not around. Your team can easily communicate with the rest of the group and make the occasional jokes and comments. If people aren’t around during the time of the chat, they can read it once they get back to their computer. Make sure everyone has personal photos in their instant messenger client.

3 ) Send around joke emails - Why not? You do it with local employees and old college buddies. Spend a little time thinking about your remote staff and send some articles, jokes, comics, funny videos that you think they might find amusing. If you’re using something like oDesk Team for automated time-tracking, you’re not paying for any non-work related time. Encourage a small amount of fun time as part of the weekly work schedule.

4 ) Hold a weekly team meeting - Even if you have your staff is working on completely different things, it’s nice to hear everyone’s voice on the same call. Hold a team meeting at the same time every week and use webcams and headsets via a Skype or Yahoo group conference call.

5 ) Send around a weekly newsletter - Recognize team members for any strong contributions that week. Recognize someone if it’s their birthday. Keep everyone on the same page by including an update from your end.

6 ) Have a photo share - Ask everyone to upload some photos of a weekend activity to Flickr or other photo-sharing site. Spend 20 minutes during a team meeting to let everyone describe a weekend activity.

7 ) Create a Facebook group - If you have enough people on your team, create a Facebook group and consider it your virtual water cooler.

8 ) Host an online game for your team - Play Scrabulous with your team. Play online chess, backgammon, etc. Challenge your team members to a game of Desktop Defender or share Line Rider creations.

9 ) Send around birthday cards - You all know virtual card sites. Any time a team member has a birthday, make sure everyone else on the team sends the brithday-girl or -boy a virtual card. It’s sure to brighten their day.

10 ) Hold a fantasy sports league - It brings together local offices, no reason it shouldn’t work in virtual offices. If you don’t want to do a full fantasy sports league, find something that’s a short-term contest and get everyone involved.