Your PPC strategy doesn’t have to stay the same all year
Customer behavior is constantly changing and can vary throughout the year. Your paid strategy should also change depending on your customers’ behavior, which means you shouldn’t rely on the same functionality from January to December.
Demand tends to change based on weather, holidays, financial pressures, purchasing cycles and other seasonal factors. Each factor can change your customers’ behavior in terms of how they shop or use your services. A campaign that performs well in the summer will likely need a different approach in the winter. Adapting to seasonality is key to maximizing your returns, and it’s not as easy as turning campaigns on and off.
Start by understanding when demand actually changes
If you’ve been running PPC campaigns for a while, you’re probably already familiar with seasonality. You’re probably aware of your peak seasons. For those who don’t or even if you already do, it’s still worth regularly checking historical performance to identify patterns in the usual metrics like impressions, clicks, conversions, CPA and conversion rates.
It’s best to compare this to your actual sales or qualified leads to understand your peak periods.
During the year, search volume can go up and down, but that doesn’t necessarily mean searches are less valuable. Just because you’re off peak, doesn’t mean you can’t get value. Identify peak, shoulder and lull periods and build your strategy around that.
Adapt your budget to demand
The most effective way is to adjust the amount you spend monthly on your campaigns. You do not have to apply and spend the same amount every month as this may result in higher costs at certain periods.
During periods of high demand, extra budget can help you get more valuable searches, but during quieter months, taking action, identifying how your customers behave and reducing spending can help you save spending for the peak period to maximize your revenue. However, avoid automatically cutting budgets just because you have entered a traditionally quieter period. Check the data and adjust according to what you can see.
Think about how competition has changed, too
The thing to keep in mind is that it’s not just your customers’ behavior that changes throughout the year. It’s also helpful to look at competitors as well. Their strategies may 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 photos and videos? Are they increasing their bids/spending more than usual?
The longer you are in the peak period, the more advertisers will enter auctions, resulting in higher CPC. This may mean paying more for the same keywords you were targeting. This is one of the main points to note. It’s a good idea to look at the data to see if you’ve started spending more in peak periods, adjust your bids and make the ad copy as relevant as possible to attract the right traffic.
On the other hand, quieter periods can lead to more opportunities as competitors can reduce spending and bids, giving you a leg up on them.
Seasonality should therefore be viewed from the perspective of demand and competition.
Change your messages with the season
Your ad copy is just as important as the budget you put into your campaigns, which means your ad copy should reflect what matters to your customers at certain points of the year. Instead of running the same titles and descriptions for 12 months, consider offering seasonal, relevant benefits. For example, artificial grass is most likely to be purchased in the spring and summer. By changing your ad copy to reflect weaknesses like having a muddy garden in the winter, you can mitigate these issues and engage with your audience with the right ad copy and change your ad copy to mud-free, low-maintenance gardens throughout wet weather.
The product hasn’t changed, but the customer’s motivation may have changed.
Don’t react too quickly to short-term changes
Sometimes it’s easy to get caught up in the data and make a quick decision based on what you’ve seen over the past week. One weak week does not indicate a seasonal decline, so it’s best to look at long-term data and compare it to previous years if you can. Weather, competitor activity, holidays, and even unusually strong prior periods can distort comparisons.
Measure seasonality beyond CPL
A higher CPL during a given season isn’t necessarily a bad thing if those leads are more likely to become customers.
One metric to consider is your CPL. Sometimes this can be a good indicator of seasonality and customer behavior. A high cost per lead (CPL) doesn’t mean you have bad leads. It is better to compare:
- Cost per lead
- Conversion rate
- Qualified lead rate
- Cost per qualified lead
- Lead-to-sale rate
- Acquisition cost
- profit
This gives you a much better understanding of which seasons are truly the most valuable.
To understand this further, read our blog on CPL and Leads.
The cheapest lead is not always the best lead
Adapt to your customers, not the calendar
Seasonal strategies don’t just mean spending more in the summer and less in the winter. It’s about understanding your audience, how they search, why they search and finding what they are looking for. It’s about changing your strategy via ad copy, images, bid adjustments, etc. The strongest strategies adapt to their clients 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.
