Why Google Ads’ Seasonality Adjustments Aren’t For COVID-19

Coronavirus has taken a toll on almost all business’ marketing efforts and their reporting numbers. Conversion rates have varied across the board with businesses either seeing large increases or noticeable declines during this time. This viral pandemic makes it difficult to predict how to adjust campaigns and strategy. Google Ads’ seasonality adjustments may be an easy answer on how to adjust but is not the right tool to face COVID-19.

When to Use Google Ads Seasonality Adjustments

Google Ads’ seasonality adjustments can be used for search, shopping and display campaigns. Google Ads uses seasonality adjustments for smart bidding, informing bidding systems about expected conversion rate changes. This is ideal for short periods of time between one and seven days for events like special promotions, sales, and product launches. This allows users to set adjustments easily if you know the event will impact the conversion rate. Seasonality adjustments for smart bidding uses historical data to predict performance outcomes. When data changes quickly machine learning can lag updating any bids. With seasonal bid adjustments, advertisers can manually and quickly adjust the prediction modeling for a short period, and the smart bidding will revert back once that period ends. This is a convenient option for advertisers in paid digital efforts.

Why This Isn’t for COVID-19

These seasonality adjustments are not meant to predict conversion rate fluctuation for longer periods of time. COVID-19 has spanned much longer than anyone planned for and is hard to predict for any person, making it even more difficult for any machine learning system such as Google Ads seasonality adjustments. Seasonal bid adjustments wouldn’t be optimal for other longer events such as holiday season promotions.

When looking to adjust your campaigns to COVID-19, you can still adjust your smart bidding budgets as Google suggests. It is important when adjusting your bids or campaigns to consider other parts of your business such as profitability and sales cycle shifts and how this may impact which keywords you are targeting or any budget changes.

Need guidance on how COVID-19 is impacting your business and how you can optimize your PPC campaigns to come out of it even stronger? The Top Floor team can help, let’s get together!