Seasonality Planning Strategies
During seasonal times, it’s important to focus on campaign efficiency while also connecting with your potential customers.
Three strategies help Seasonality Planning:
- Smart Bidding,
- Performance Planner
- Recommendations page
Smart Bidding
Setting the right bids for every customer can be both challenging and time-consuming. Smart Bidding learns at the query level to set auction time bids and help you navigate the complexities of dynamic markets. It reacts quickly to changes during seasonal events, as well as to budget and target updates while giving you the control to achieve your marketing objectives.
In cases where you expect to see significant changes in conversion rates or conversion value in a short period of time due to a promotion or sale, you may want to additionally adjust targets to ensure you capture the full opportunity.
To prepare for these seasonal events, you can adjust your CPA or ROAS targets manually, or use seasonality adjustments. In both cases, you’ll want to review past performance. If you’re working with a newly-created campaign, check similar campaigns in your account. With manual adjustments, change your targets by the same factor that your conversion rate is expected to change in advance of the event.
For example, if you expect your conversion rates to double, double your CPA target, or reduce your ROAS target by half in order to maintain a constant CPA or ROAS.
With the Seasonality Adjustment Tool, you can set a time and date for when you expect to see a short spike in conversion rate.This will inform Smart Bidding when to change its bidding behavior. It’s recommended to only use this tool for events like Black Friday, which sees sudden conversion rate spikes. Once Smart Bidding is set up, ensure there’s enough budget runway to maximize performance and capture increased demand from seasonal events.
Performance Planner
To help you do this, you can use Performance Planner. Performance Planner allows you to forecast the impact of different spend scenarios on key metrics for upcoming periods and identify optimal target bid and budget settings for your always-on campaigns.
Performance Planner forecasts take into consideration historical campaign performance and seasonal trends for your target market and region. As a best practice, engage in budget planning early and run a quarterly plan to ensure your investment is sufficient to support your seasonal business objectives.
Plan budgets more frequently on a monthly or biweekly basis throughout the seasonal period to ensure bid and budget settings remain optimal. Since Performance Planner will reallocate the budget across campaigns, only include campaigns with a similar marketing objective in a single plan. And select the key metric you want to plan for. During seasonal times, consumer intent can be higher, which can lead to a significant uplift in conversion rates.
To improve forecasts, you can adjust conversion rates by–
- One, Planning Based On A Conversion Rate Similar To The Same Time Last Year;
- Two, Setting A Custom Conversion Rate Adjustment At The Plan Level;
- Or Three, Individually Defining Conversion Rates For Relevant Campaigns In Your Plan.
Once you’ve selected a Smart Bidding strategy and planned the right budgets, you’ll be able to use the Recommendations page to optimize on an ongoing basis.
Recommendations Page
You can identify new customers and maximize on shifts and traffic with the ad keywords and match type recommendations for search campaigns, adapt your messaging with better theme ads, and ensure your ads run on your busiest days with the budget raising and reallocation and Smart Bidding target adjustments
