Your PPC strategy shouldn’t stay the same all year
Customer behaviour is constantly changing and can differ throughout the year. Your paid strategy should also be changing depending on how your customers behave, meaning you shouldn’t be relying on the same functions January through to December.
Demand tends to change based on weather, holidays, financial pressures, buying cycles and other seasonal factors. Each and ever factor can change your customer behaviour on how they shop or use your services. A campaign that performs well in the summer most likely needs a different approach in the winter. Adapting to seasonality is key in maximising your returns, and it’s not as easy as turning campaigns on and off.
Start by understanding when demand actually changes
If you have been running PPC campaigns for a while, you’re probably aware of seasonality already. You’re more than likely already aware of your peak seasons. For those who don’t or even if you already do, it’s still worth it to regularly check historical performance to identify patterns in the usual metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversions, CPA and conversion rates.
It’s best to compare this against your actual sales or qualified leads to understand your peak periods.
During the year, search volume can rise and fall but it doesn’t necessarily mean the searches are less valuable. Just because you’re out of peak, doesn’t mean that you can’t obtain value. Identify your peak, shoulder and quite periods and build your strategy around that.
Adapt your budget to demand
The most effective approach is to adjust how much you spend per month on your campaigns. You don’t have to apply and spend the same amount every month as this can lead to high costs on certain periods.
During periods of high demand, additional budget can help capture more valuable searches but during quieter months, taking action, identifying how your customers behave, and reducing spend can help you save spend for the peak period to maximise your return. However, avoid automatically cutting budgets just because you’ve entered a traditionally quieter period. Check the data, and adjust depending on what you can see.
Consider how competition changes too
Something to take into consideration is that it’s not only your customers behaviour that changes throughout the year. It’s also worth looking at competitors too. Their strategies might change throughout the year so it’s worth keeping an eye on what they’re doing too. Have they changed their ad copy? What about their images and videos? Are they increasing their bids/spending more than usual?
The more you are in your peak period, the more advertisers entering auctions can push CPCs up. This can mean paying more for the same keywords you have been targeting. This is one of the key points to note. It’s worth looking at the data to see if you’re beginning to spend more in your peak periods, and adjust bids and make ad copy as relevant as possible to capture the right traffic.
On the other hand, quieter periods can lead to more opportunities as competitors could reduce spend and bids giving you the prospect to appear ahead of them.
Seasonality should therefore be considered from both a demand and competition perspective.
Change your messaging with the season
Your ad copy is as important as the budget you place in your campaigns, which means the ad copy needs to reflect what matters to your customers at particular points in the year. Rather than running the exact same headlines and descriptions for 12 months, have a think about introducing seasonally relevant benefits. For example, artificial grass is more likely to be bought in spring and summer. By changing the ad copy to reflect pain points such as having a muddy garden in the winter, you can alleviate those issues and engage with your audience via the right ad copy and change the ad copy to mud-free, low-maintenance gardens throughout wet weather.
The product hasn’t changed, but the customer’s motivation might have.
Don’t react too quickly to short-term changes
Sometimes it’s easy to get bogged down on data and make quick decision based on what you’ve seen over the last week. One poor week doesn’t indicate a seasonal decline so it’s best to look at long term data and compare it with previous years if you can. Weather, competitor activity, holidays and even unusually strong previous periods can distort comparisons.
Measure seasonality beyond CPL
A higher CPL during a particular season isn’t necessarily bad if those leads are more likely to become customers.
One metric to keep in mind is your CPL. Sometimes this can be a decent indicator of seasonality and customer behaviour. A higher CPL doesn’t mean bad leads. It’s best to compare:
- Cost per lead
- Conversion rate
- Qualified lead rate
- Cost per qualified lead
- Lead-to-sale rate
- Cost per acquisition
- Revenue
This gives you a much better understanding of which seasons are genuinely most valuable.
To understand this further, read through our blog on CPL and leads.
The Cheapest Lead Isn’t Always the Best Lead
Adapt to your customers, not the calendar
Seasonality strategies doesn’t just mean to spend more in summer and less in winter. It’s about understanding your audience, how they search, why they search and finding what they’re looking for. It’s about altering your strategy via ad copy, images, bid adjustments etc. The strongest strategies adapt to their customers throughout the year.
Seasonality shouldn’t tell you when to stop advertising. It should tell you when, where and how your PPC strategy needs to change.
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