What day of the week should I set my campaigns up on?

[scienceisrad]

I am new to doing SEO, and am not an SEO professional.  I'm just taking a DIY approach to learning about and doing my own SEO for some non-profit work and using Moz is my first foray into it.  I have a question about which day of the week is best to run my campaigns.

I have 5 campaigns running, but I set them up rather haphazardly.  So one is running on Saturdays, and the remaining 4 run on Mondays.  I am running these campaigns on sites that are not mine.  I'm not the webmaster.  This is a non-profit, sort of a research effort that seeks to investigate other non-profit websites that all advocate on a particular topic.  I'd like to be able to compare the 5 campaigns (e.g., their keyword rankings especially).  So I think I should get them all running on the same day.  Setting aside that Moz isn't able to let me switch which day they run on, I'm needing advice on how to think about which day of the week I should choose.  I haven't been running them for very long and I'm sill a newbie so I don't think it's a huge deal that I'll need to re-setup at least one of the campaigns to get them all on the same day.   I've been searching Moz Q & A and google for things like "best day of the week to track SERPs" and "how often to track SERPs" but I'm not getting anything that's helping me think about what's important for choosing a day of the week.  I am getting results for other rank trackers out there that let you do more frequent ranking but I'm not quite ready to branch out to other tools, so I really more need some guidance on how to think about which day of the week to choose here in Moz.  Blog posts, tutorials, links to related questions, etc on this topic would be awesome, plus your general thoughts and discussion on it would be great, too.

[scienceisrad]

I have competitors under each campaign, too.  But it is limited to three competitors in each campaign, and I have a lot more than four websites I want to be able to compare.  I suppose one way to get at this would be to check ranks manually every day for a week or two to get a sense of whether there is intra-week variation.  I don't think I'll put forth that effort, though.  Switching the one campaign to Monday would be way easier.  Still, any other opinions or resources are welcome!

[gowebsol]

This falls under "Wow...I've never thought of that" for me. After hundreds of campaigns, I've never considered the day of the week when starting to monitor for rankings, etc. It's certainly a  good question, if only to rule it out as an influence on your reports.

I'd say it's far more important to start tracking and to benchmark the data historically and against your competitors. This brings up the question, why not set up a campaign for one site, and then add the others as competitors? You may well have a compelling reason to not do this, but my impression is it would simplify things for you and allows you to look at data side.

As far as blogs, tutorials, etc. go, I have not found any on when to monitor. Seems you've stumbled on a question that hasn't been asked before!

[Bob_van_Biezen]

Hi scienceisrad,

Great to see you investigate SEO on your own!

Personally I think there isn’t any specific “best day”. With all measurements it’s important to do it consistent on the same way to make sure you’re equation is right. I would compare this with tracking weight lost. It doesn’t really matter which day of the week you pick, just make sure it’s the same day , same time and uhmm before or after you take a crap.

In your case, I would just remove the one campaign and set it up on Monday again. Although rankings fluctuate a bit I think you just need a global picture of your competitors to make decisions about your own strategy (unless you’re doing some big SEO project with a whole team ofcourse).

I hope this helps!

PS. It’s also possible to make one campaign and add competitors so they do get monitored as well.