Improve Your Ads by Leveraging Seasonal Trends

The majority of products have seasonal trends.  You don’t see many people buying patio furniture in November or Ski Jackets in June.

That’s because the seasons or specific events change buying behavior. Consider these trends:

• Valentine’s week is the top week for flower sales
• Super Bowl week is the 2nd highest week (behind Black Friday) for TV sales
• In the US, July 4th week is one of the top weeks for outdoor grill sales
• Weight loss products spike in sales in January (New Year’s Resolutions) and late spring (Getting ready for swimsuit season)
• Golf club sales increase in June (nicer weather)

I’ve been tracking Super Bowl ads for TVs for 17 years; and in all of that time only one ad has ever mentioned football.  You can’t say ‘Super Bowl’ in your ad as it is trademarked; however, you can say ‘Watch the Game in High-Def’ or ‘Enjoy Your Football Party in HD’ as those aren’t trademarked terms.

Here’s the ads 5 days before the Super Bowl (it doesn’t matter if the query is LED TV, High Def TV, etc – not a single ad mentions the game):

 

This is the 2nd highest week for TV sales and no one mentions the event. This is a perfect opportunity to connect with users as the reason they are buying a TV isn’t mentioned in any ads at all.

While some events, such as Valentine’s Day leverage the holiday heavily in the ads; you also need to know when to stop advertising for an event. Here’s the ads on the 15th (the day after Valentine’s):

 

The bottom ad has been out of date for more than 2 weeks (Order before Feb 1st); and no one mentions ‘Forgot Valentine’s Day’. All the queries around ‘forgot valentine’s day’ bring up 0 ads. I’ve worked with florists in the past who really like this query as the average person conducting a search for ‘forgot’ Valentine’s spends more on flowers and gifts than someone who did their research and buying early.

When creating seasonal ads; it is useful to use ad rules to pause and enable ads based upon your seasonal events so that you’re not trying to remember to enable and pause ads.

Search is a crowded marketplace and you need to know how to stand out so that consumers who are buying are buying from you and not the competition.

One of the easiest ways to do this is by examining your peak sales periods for your top products and then creating ads to highlight the reason why someone is buying a product. By talking to the consumer’s needs and wants, you can more closely connect with the searcher and that will generally increase both CTR and conversion rates.