Seasonal waves of demand present an excellent opportunity to optimize your contextual campaigns. However, you need to set them up and manage them differently than you do for the rest of the year. To ensure that all the “hot” periods are productive for your advertising, we’ll share a couple of tips on working with seasonality in Google Ads.
Why It’s Important to Consider Seasonal Trends
Seasonal changes affect purchasing behavior, so it’s essential to consider the following:
- Growth of interest: Consumers are actively looking for products and services that are relevant at a given time.
- Competitive advantage: Campaigns adapted to the season receive more organic traffic.
- Budget optimization: Advertising budgets are distributed more efficiently through targeted campaigns based on seasonal trends and market insights.
This approach helps maximize current opportunities and attract a new audience. If you need Google Ads management services, learn more about them.
How to Work with Seasonal Trends in Google Ads
Let’s find out what you can do to make the most of seasonal trends.
Use Broad Match
You’re unlikely to see this advice anywhere else. We would never recommend using general keywords for your topic, especially in broad match. Due to fierce competition, the rates for them are so high that attracting targeted traffic without spending your entire budget is almost impossible.
However, during seasonal “booms”, it can be helpful to set up impressions, including for the most general commercial keywords. A surge in interest in particular products allows you to better “guess” user intent, even if it is not apparent from their search queries. Also, do not forget that broad match leads to ad impressions for queries with errors. When the entire audience is more likely to convert, it is better not to miss this segment.
Important point: if you decide to use this display tactic, be sure to set daily budget spending limits! “Broad” phrases can still be quite expensive – don’t let them spend a month’s worth of funds in one day.
Update Your Ads
Make your ad titles and text relevant to the upcoming event. Add keywords such as “festive,” for the holiday,” “the best gift for her/him,” “the best way to open the season,” etc. During the holiday season, everyone is preoccupied with finding gifts for their loved ones – and in most cases, they have no idea what to buy them exactly. That’s why “hints” in ads using the word “gift” can work in your favor. If you struggle to adjust the strategy, you can contact a marketing agency.
If you also advertise on display networks, consider updating the images in your ads to feature symbols of the upcoming holiday or season. They will attract more attention from users, mainly if they advertise limited-time promotions and special offers.
Target a Specific Product
Any store has products with the highest demand. See which products/services sell best on Black Friday, Christmas, New Year, etc., and launch a campaign specifically for them.
Add Extensions to Ads
Users’ attention is attracted not only by an informative title, but also by additional information about discounts, promotions, and special offers. Use extensions to increase the CTR of your ad and make it stand out from the competition.
You can not only add the price of the product in the ads, but also set up the “Promotion” extension. It contains information about the event, the discount amount (in monetary terms or as a percentage), the discounted product, and the promotion’s expiration date.
Use Additional Links
One ad — one offer. However, you can inform the user about your other offers and redirect them to different sections of the site. To do this, set up additional links for campaigns in Google Ads. As a result, you will receive several offers in one ad.
Increase Your Budget
During the “hot” seasons, it is worth increasing your advertising budget – perhaps even significantly. To adequately assess the effectiveness of such measures, you need to track conversions on your site using Google Analytics. Paying more for each click, you should not increase the average cost per conversion (CPA), as this will reduce the campaign’s effectiveness. If you use the intelligent strategy of assigning an average cost per conversion in Google Ads, you do not need to adjust this price either.
Use Automated Strategies
Stop manually managing and trust machine algorithms. Google Ads has automatic strategies that take into account seasonal fluctuations in demand and adjust bids accordingly. All you have to do is choose the right goal, and the system will suggest a suitable automatic strategy.
For Google Ads campaigns, you can set seasonal adjustments that will decrease or increase the bid during a specified time interval. Such adjustments are available in the target return and target cost-per-conversion strategies. It is recommended to set them for up to 7 days (for promotions, sales, and other upcoming events) when a sharp change in the conversion rate is predicted.
Add a Timer
Google Ads users have access to a countdown timer that can be placed in the ad text. The timer displays the number of days and hours remaining until the end of the seasonal promotions and discounts. The fear of not having enough time to buy a product at a reasonable price is traditionally a strong motivation for purchasing it.
Conclusion
Adapting advertising to the season not only attracts attention but also significantly increases audience engagement, which has a positive impact on sales dynamics. Every business can benefit from competent planning of advertising campaigns that takes into account seasonal factors. Seasonal marketing: advertising adaptation is not just a fashionable trend, but an effective tool for increasing audience engagement and improving financial performance. If you haven’t yet incorporated seasonal changes into your advertising strategies, now is the time to consider new approaches and adopt modern methods.
