For the past couple of years, automation has been taking over Google Ads accounts for things like Performance Max and automated Google ads bidding strategies. Meaning the amount of manual changes that we can make to accounts has decreased. Things like location adjustments, mobile bids and ad scheduling are all being overtaken by automated bidding strategies.
These automated Google ads bidding strategies often take a learning period to bed in and sometimes you need something more instantaneous, which is where seasonality adjustments come in.
What are seasonality adjustments?
The official Google spiel goes like this “Seasonality adjustments are an advanced tool in Google Ads that can be used to inform Smart Bidding of expected changes in conversion rates for future events like promotions or sales.”
Seasonality adjustments typically work better for more short term promotions, around 1-7 days but may be less effective for longer periods over 14 days.
How do seasonality adjustments work?
Seasonality adjustments artificially tell Google that the conversion rate is different to what it is. For example, if your current conversion rate is 2%, you can put a 50% positive seasonality adjustment in place to then tell Google that the conversion rate to expect is 3%. This is really useful in certain situations, like Christmas, when you’re anticipating a bumper period where your conversion rate is higher than it is.
Equally, if you’re expecting a bit of a downturn or a slow period for your industry, you can also put negative seasonality adjustments in place.
This then allows for the account to bid a little more conservatively, and you should see either your Cost Per Action (CPA) decrease or your Return On Ad Spend (ROAS) go up, because Google is being slightly more risk averse in terms of its bidding.
Now also available for budgets
Google has recently introduced seasonality adjustments for budgets as well. So if you’d like to spend more over a bumper period or if you’re going through a quiet patch and you’d like to spend less, you can do this in exactly the same way.
Keep it under 14 days
Bear in mind that seasonality adjustments are supposed to be used on a short term basis.
This can be done over hours, days, a weekend, but they do have a maximum of 14 days.
If you’re going through an extended period of sale or a prolonged low period where you’d like to keep those seasonality adjustments on, please don’t forget to renew them.
That’s seasonality adjustments in a nutshell. If you need any help with yours, or with anything to do with PPC, speak to Dark Horse.
