Your digital advertising campaign has been launched. Keywords – Relevant. Bids – Competitive. Budget – Generous. Past performance – Strong. And yet – it’s suddenly crashing. Why?
When your paid media campaign drops in performance but there are no red flags as to why, seasonality may be the answer. Seasonality, however, is hard to prove – and even harder to prepare for. Like with current events, the best solution for the dips is to be as proactive as possible. The below steps should be utilized as a guide when creating and optimizing your campaign to ensure even spend and manage client expectations of media performance.
1) Aggregate your agency data
Simply informing a client that seasonality is the cause of campaign decline can feel like an excuse without hard data to justify the reasoning. Do you aggregate your agency data? If not, you may be missing out on valuable information. As you accumulate data across verticals over years, you should start to see trends within industries across certain time periods. Having past data can help manage new client expectations if you’ve already worked with similar verticals, and it can also help you decide how to best allocate budgets across time periods. Google Analytics and MySQL are ready-to-use platforms that can work as databases that also allow you to easily manipulate data to see trends.
2)Third-party data
If you are working with a new vertical that your agency has minimal experience, or if you simply don’t have the bandwidth to set up a database, third-party data can help tell the story of paid media campaign performance. Website Magazine offers a great overview of seasonal vertical trends and Google has a useful guide to bookmark. While not directly related to seasonality, WordStream offers Google Ad benchmarks, such as CPC and CTR. If you notice your CPC and CTR starting to creep away from the benchmarks, seasonality may be at play.
3)Client Awareness
If you aren’t aware of what seasonal trends may affect your campaign, your client may. Recently a weight loss client of iCrossing saw a drop in Google conversion rates, despite a previous strong year-to-date performance. The client confirmed that even without advertisements, they typically saw less people signing up during the summer. Ideally, seasonal trends should be addressed in kick-off calls before a paid media campaign is created, as seasonality should be part of your overall strategy.
4)Cultural awareness
Our weight loss client also recently experienced a dip in performance the first week of July in tandem with the Fourth of July holiday – a logical correlation. However, that client is a U.S. based client – which means trends in the U.S. will shape performance. For campaigns we run for a U.K.-based client that focuses on recreational and entertain activities, we often see a drop in performance during bank holidays. As a global company, we must also be aware of how holidays and yearly cyclical trends can affect our performance, even outside the United States. Again, these are considerations best laid out in the planning stage – how will our paid media ads be affected by the targeted local culture and customs?
5)Short-Term vs Long-Term Seasonality
Fourth of July. Bank holidays. These are examples of short-term seasonality. Clients will want to know the why behind these brief dips, often exposed through weekly reporting, but often a media manager does not need to make large adjustments to compensate. Since these are short-term changes, the overall campaign will usually not suffer as performance bounces back quickly. In fact, with short-term seasonality changes, it can be harmful to try to compensate for the brief dips with bid adjustments and budget reallocations, as it disrupts algorithm learnings. Think carefully before taking action to adjust for a decline in performance.
Long-term seasonality, however, is something that requires adjustments - otherwise, a campaign can face a myriad of consequences, including higher conversion costs and budget overages. Long-term seasonality is related to how spending patterns are affected by larger time periods. For example; people aren’t likely to search for winter wear in the summer months and are more likely to search for travel accommodations close to holidays and vacation times, such as spring break.
6)Budget Allocation to Accommodate Seasonality
So what is the solution for long-term seasonality? For an iCrossing financial services client, who often saw the most online traffic during typical working hours, we noticed a yearly trend from our own accumulated data: interest in the financial product often dropped in November & December, as office workers were less engaged during the work week. A typical way to compensate for seasonality is to simply roll underspend to the next month or reduce the next month for overspend, but while the client allowed budget to be moved month-to-month, they didn’t allow budgets to be moved between quarters. Therefore, underspend in November and December could not be allocated to January. Thanks to our historical data, we knew the best decision was to front-load the budget in October. The volume of conversions would come down in last two months, but by spending less and spending on most efficient parts of campaign, we mitigated an increased CPA as well as avoided having a budget surplus.
Digital advertising campaigns allows quick access to data, but if the data is not analyzed and used to direct strategy on the campaign, valuable dollars are being wasted – especially when it comes to seasonality. According to a McKinsey Company survey, U.S. credit card spend fluctuated up to 30% month-to-month in 2021 – you don’t want to miss out on revenue because your campaign is not set up to accommodate for these kinds of fluctuations.
Contact us to speak with one of our Media experts about preparing your digital marketing strategy for seasonality.