Seasonality might be best associated with the major holiday events at the end of the year: Black Friday, Cyber Monday, etc., and while that time of the year can have a major impact on many businesses, focusing only on events that are large can leave you under-strategizing around other “seasonal” trends throughout the year.
Whether it’s an obvious change in behavior based on the time of year, like those end of year holidays, the changing of the seasons themselves, or a trend that repeats itself in your industry each year, there are quite a few strategies you can employ to make the most of those seasonal changes. Here are 10 strategies to lean into (or out of) seasonal trends within your accounts.
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10 seasonal PPC strategies for any business
Whatever the occasion for your seasonal PPC ads, these 10 tips can help set you up for success.
1. Use historical data to forecast future fluctuations
History might repeat itself, or it might rhyme, but either way, regular trends are something you should be aware of and ready for.
The first step in optimizing your accounts for these trends is to know when they’re coming and to know with enough heads up that you can actually do something about it.
Here are some places you can go to get insights on how these seasonal trends are impacting your campaigns and start to understand what each portion of the year holds for your accounts:
- Ad platforms: Every self-serve ad platform includes some form of visualization. Leverage a long lookback window and review performance trends for high/low conversion rates, increased/decreased costs, and any other anomalous performance. Note the time of year they occur and for how long, then see if there’s a repeating pattern.
- GA4: Review overall site trends for your company, not just your campaigns. Are there performance spikes or dips that happen regularly? Do you see common trends in year over year data?
- Internal teams: Depending on your business model, the best insights around seasonality might come from your sales teams or another team within your company. B2B lead gen, for example, usually has some component of personal selling that happens, and I’ll pretty much guarantee that if there’s a salesperson at your company who’s been there for more than a year, they’ll know the different trends that occur within the year and why.
Once you’re able to pinpoint when these fluctuations are happening (and ideally why they’re happening), review the performance of your individual keywords, ad sets, and campaigns during that time to see if there are standouts or duds. Just because the account saw a big slowdown or spike doesn’t mean it was uniform across the account. Use those insights to inform your campaign strategy for the next time that the seasonality effect comes around.
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2. Revisit and expand targeting to accommodate trends
We’re mostly talking about how buyer behavior changes during these seasonal periods, but don’t forget to think about who your audience is or how their shopping behavior might be changing.
For search campaigns, revisit your keywords. 15% of queries are new every day and have never been seen before. That trend doesn’t go away during seasonal shifts. If anything, there may be outside factors influencing your audience to search differently than they have before.
Use tools like the Google Keyword Planner, Google Trends, and regularly review your search terms report to find new keywords to add to your account to capture any shifting behaviors.
In some cases, you might even need to reach an entirely different audience than your regular clientele. If you’ve ever lived in a college town, you know the summers and winter break are drastically different from the school year. With many students going home over those time periods, it makes sense for bars and restaurants to take a more family-friendly stance than they might when students are in session and they’re only interested in what the drink specials are.
Don’t be afraid to think outside the box with your targeting and challenge your usual assumptions.
3. Customize ad copy
This is probably the most obvious adjustment for seasonal campaigns and the one you normally think of when it comes to promotional times.
The most common way I see advertisers incorporate these messages is to adjust their existing ads’ headlines and descriptions to include the new messaging. While that strategy is totally acceptable and fine, I’d caution against that. Each time you adjust your ad, the data will get muddied and make it hard to tell how things are doing over time.
Instead, I’d suggest you create an entirely new ad unit that contains the seasonal messaging. This could run alongside your existing creative, or you could pause them. That’s up to you, just know Google might not serve your new creative if it doesn’t feel confident in how it will perform.
If you don’t want to make entirely new ads, there’s a good middle ground that I’m a pretty big fan of as well.
Use headline and description ad assets when you can’t or don’t want to update your existing RSAs. These will rotate individual headlines and descriptions into your existing RSAs. These can be scheduled to run during only your promotional period and then turn off when it’s over. Just remember that these will honor any pinning strategies you have in place.
4. Don’t sleep on seasonal assets
Speaking of assets, there are a few ad assets you can utilize to highlight your seasonal messaging.
Promotion assets are extremely customizable for just about any seasonal messaging you want to use.
To start, you can select what your occasion is from quite a large list of options. From there, you can customize language, currency, the type of promotion you’re running, and then there’s space for info about the item, a final URL, and then you can customize the details of your promotion. It’s pretty obvious how these can be useful for promotional periods.
But while promotion assets were designed for this purpose, they’re not the only ones you can use to infuse seasonality into your accounts.
Callouts are standalone snippets of text, so you can easily add a handful with seasonal tilts in them to get into rotation.
Structured snippets are similar. You can easily add a new variant or two with a new set of seasonal messaging that can rotate with your evergreen variants.
Sitelinks can also be customized to reflect your seasonal messaging, but they’ll take a little more effort than callouts and structured snippets. For sitelinks, you’ll need seasonal messaging, but you also need a unique landing page that isn’t used in other sitelinks.
Lastly, price assets can operate pretty similarly to promotion assets, and you can easily use the header and description fields to help incorporate your seasonal messaging.
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5. Make sure your landing pages are ready
With all this ad customization you’re doing, it’s important to make sure those messages are reflected on the landing page. It’s easy to get excited about all the bells and whistles of ad copy, but if your landing pages aren’t delivering on those awesome messages, you’re likely to lose your customers when they feel like you’re not delivering on the promise of your ads.
If your seasonal shift sees an increase in traffic, it’s a good time to make sure your landing pages load quickly and that your site is able to handle the influx of traffic.
A great tool to help troubleshoot any speed deficiencies on your site is Google’s Page Speed Insights. With this tool, you can find out which pages on your site are slow for mobile or desktop, then address specific problem areas to speed them up.
6. Align your budget with your goals
If the seasonal trend you’re about to experience is one where business slows, you might not need to adjust your Google Ads budget. For example, over the holidays, my B2B accounts usually slow down quite a bit, but we don’t lower the budget for a couple of reasons.
First, we’re likely not going to spend the entire budget anyway, so there’s no real risk of leaving it. Second, the people who DO convert during that time are usually pretty motivated. If you’re researching new software for your company in the week between Christmas and New Year’s, you’re likely up against some sort of annual renewal and need to make a move quickly.
But for other accounts where volume scales up, sometimes by multiple folds, not increasing your budget could mean that you miss out on incremental traffic and maybe not take full advantage of your promotional period.
Google Ads daily budgets do take into account the performance trends and will spend over your daily budget on strong days. But if your promotional period is multiple days, you’re likely going to be spending too hot and since the algorithm is going to try and balance out to a monthly average, you’ll almost certainly miss out.
7. Use seasonality adjustments
If you’re using Smart Bidding and your seasonality is a short burst of large performance swings, like a 25% or more increase or decrease in conversion rate, you can use a feature from Google called a Seasonal Adjustment.
You can learn more about seasonality adjustments here, but effectively, they let you tell Google to expect performance that will be very different from your “normal” performance. That way, it doesn’t over- or underreact to performance changes during your short seasonality impact. Overall, these are intended to be used sparingly, but can have a very large impact on your performance.
8. Remarket strategically
Remarketing lists are a solid staple in regular campaigns, but when your seasonal promotions come around, they can be a great way to reach back into a valuable group of users.
Here are a few examples of remarketing lists that could be great to leverage during promotional periods:
- Cart abandoners during recent sales
- Users who purchased during last year’s sales
- Users who signed up to be notified when a sale occurred
- Newsletter signups
9. Schedule your ads ahead of time
One of the biggest stress factors during promotional periods is making sure the right ads are active in the right places at the right time.
Many platforms will let you schedule your ads ahead of time to turn on when your sale starts and turn off when your sale ends.
My advice to you: trust but verify.
Leverage these tools to turn things on and off for you, but still spot check. You’ll alleviate the stress of needing to be present when ads need to change over, but you will still have peace of mind once you check in.
10. Maintain and optimize your seasonal PPC ads in real time
One last point for seasonal campaigns is to always maintain and optimize your ads during these times. Don’t put these as a “set it and forget it” strategy. During peak hours, things move fast. Just like other times of the year, it’s important to keep a close eye on how your campaigns are performing, especially if the window is short, i.e., a weekend-long sale. We might not like working on the weekend, but if you turn your promos on Friday evening, then don’t check again until Monday, you could miss out on important intraday trends that you could have capitalized on.
But that doesn’t mean you have to be tied to your computer the whole time during these periods either. Platforms like Google Ads have tools that can alert you when performance changes by large swings. In the image above, Google will review the ROAS performance of the ads every hour and send an email if the ROAS is below 100%.
Tools like this can give you peace of mind to go about your day but let you know when you need to log in and handle business.
Get results from your seasonal PPC campaigns year-round
Seasonal trends can have a big impact on your business throughout the year. Those impacts can be positive or negative depending on how you handle them. Use these tips to make the most of your seasonal trends and get the best performance you can for your account.
