Advice about the best time to post is an average over audiences that are not yours. Your own clicks are a better guide, and Lnki already lays them out by weekday and hour. The card is called When people click, and it is on the Analytics overview.
What the heatmap shows
The grid has a row for each day of the week and a column for each hour. The stronger the colour of a cell, the more clicks landed in that hour of that weekday during the period you picked.
Three facts sit under the grid: the Busiest day, the Busiest hour and the Quietest day, each with its share of the clicks. The single busiest hour of the week is named in the card's header, and the same hour appears near the top of the page as a Best time to post line.
The Traffic tab has a wider version of the same heatmap, plus two charts that flatten it: By hour of day, with all weekdays together, and By weekday, with all hours together.
Give it enough data
- Pick a longer period. The date menu offers the last 7, 30 or 90 days, or a custom range. One week of clicks mostly shows when you posted that week. Thirty or ninety days starts to show habit.
- Remember what is counted. The heatmap counts clicks from people. Bots, link previews and prefetches are filtered out, so the preview fetched when you paste a link into a chat does not colour a cell.
- It covers the whole workspace. The heatmap adds up every link. If one link carries most of your traffic, its rhythm is what you are looking at. The Links tab shows how much each link contributes.
Clicks follow posts
The heatmap records when people clicked, and people click soon after something reaches them. If you send every newsletter on Tuesday at nine, Tuesday at nine will be your busiest hour whatever your audience would have preferred. So read the grid in two parts:
- The peaks you caused. They tell you your current schedule gets a response, not that it is the best one.
- The activity you did not cause. Clicks on days when you posted nothing come from evergreen links, search and old messages. They show when your audience is around without being prompted.
Turning it into a schedule
- Note the two or three busiest blocks that your own posting times do not explain.
- Move one regular post into one of those blocks, and keep everything else the same.
- Give it a few weeks, then compare. The period picker compares the range you choose with the one before it, so the Clicks card shows the direction.
- Keep the change if it helped, and try the next block.
What it cannot tell you
A click is not a sale. The heatmap shows when people open your links, not when they buy, sign up or read to the end. If your landing page analytics says Thursday visitors convert better than Tuesday visitors, believe it. Use the heatmap to decide when to be in front of people, and your own outcome numbers to decide whether it worked.
The analytics tutorial covers the rest of the Overview, and how Lnki counts a click explains what is filtered out before a click reaches the grid.
