Google Ads Seasonality Adjustments

Seasonality bid adjustments are a newer feature in Google Ads. They allow advertisers to inform smart bidding settings of possible changes in conversion rates. For example, let’s say there’s a particular holiday sale coming up, and you know historically that that holiday sale has had a much higher conversion rate. Well, we can feed that information into our smart bidding settings, just so you can proactively prepare your bid strategy for that particular sale. So in this video, we’re going to show how seasonality bid adjustments work, and how you should approach this strategy when setting them up within Google Ads. 

I know in most cases, when we’re making bid adjustments, we like to go to one of the options here on the left hand navigation. The options for keywords, audiences, your demographics, locations, ad scheduling, all those bid adjustments are typically done within those settings on the left hand side. That is not where seasonality adjustments live. This is because seasonality adjustments focus on changes in your conversion rates. 

So to get to seasonality adjustments, let’s go up to our tools and settings. And then under the shared library, we want bid strategies. Now you may want to click on this portfolio bid strategy, but then we see options for automated bid strategies within Google Ads. And that’s not what we’re looking for. If you are interested in learning more about these bid strategies, you can check out the video right here that Michelle just recently made. 

To find seasonality adjustments, we want to go over to the left to advanced controls. And still we’re not quite there yet because they’re going to start us off on data exclusions. We want to go over and select seasonality adjustments, and first we’re going to see a helpful warning from Google. In the intro, I briefly mentioned that seasonality adjustments are to help inform your smart bidding. That is very important to keep in mind. So to repeat, as of now, seasonality adjustments will only work for campaigns that are utilizing smart bidding. 

And as it says right here, smart bidding already considers seasonal events in their optimizations. So we should only use seasonality adjustments if you’re expecting major conversion rate changes during a short period of time. And these can be different depending on what industry you’re in. Potentially what types of sales or promos that you run, there could be a variety of factors in play here depending on what account you have or why you may have a seasonality adjustment in place. 

In this video, we’ll go through one example. So let’s get in and start creating a new seasonality adjustment. To make things easy, let’s just name our adjustment really quick. I’m trying to get ahead of the game. In many cases, your website or your campaigns see a conversion rate adjustment during the main holiday kickoff season. So this is one example if you’re an e-commerce business of a seasonality adjustment that you may want to add to your Google Ads account. 

I’m going to skip the optional description. And the final portion of the setting is to select a start time and an end time. So let’s go and do that. In 2021, Black Friday is the last Friday of the month. And then I want to go down and choose Cyber Monday. Besides just the dates, you want to make sure that you’re selecting times with those dates that make sense for when this adjustment should start and what exact time on the date it should end. 

Now choosing exactly when this adjustment should start and end is going to vary on your account. Very soon, we’re going to get to the conversion rate portion of this that would affect when you would want to start and end this adjustment. So hold on. But after the settings, we can scroll down a little bit and get to the scope.

The first portion we see is campaign type. And by default, all campaign types are going to be selected. Now when we say all campaign types, it’s just Search,Display, and Shopping. As you can see in this sentence right here, Video and App campaigns aren’t available. Yes, those campaigns can use smart bidding, and those campaigns also can have conversions with conversion rate adjustments. But for now, they’re not available for seasonality adjustments. 

If you don’t want to have all campaign types, you can go over uncheck all campaign types, and then just select the campaign types that you would want to run this adjustment for. So if I’m selecting Search and Shopping as my campaign types, the seasonality adjustment would apply to any campaign under those campaign types that are using smart bidding. If I go down and select specific campaigns, you see that the campaign type option went away, It can only be one or the other. You can’t select just Search within the campaign type and then pick certain Search campaigns. 

Within that setting, you will have to go to specific campaigns, click on the select campaigns link, and then just choose the random campaigns that you want. But if you change your mind, you can always go back and cancel. Go back up to the campaign type, and it’ll remember the campaign types that you originally had selected. The last option in scope is to choose the devices that the seasonality adjustment should be applied to. 

There are the three that we’re familiar with: computers, mobile phones, and tablet devices. Since we can’t use seasonality adjustments for video campaigns, TV devices are not included. We’re going to come back to devices in a little bit. So I’m going to leave all selected for now. The last part that we get is to choose the conversion rate adjustment. Let me hop in to one Google Analytics account, and I’ll go over just one example of how you can use seasonality adjustments. 

So the seasonality adjustment we were setting up in Google Ads was to prep for the Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend in 2021. And to get the information of how I should adjust my conversion rate, I’m going to look back at 2020. What happened last time when this particular promotion or sale was running?

There are many ways that We could look at this. So right now I’m pretty much mimicking the same days of the week of the sale, Friday through Monday. Maybe the date range for your account is too small, and you need to look at a wider date range set to really get an understanding of how conversion rates changed. But just for the sake of this demo, I just want to get some sort of comparison in there just so we can show you how you can finish your seasonality adjustment. 

So in this case, I took that date range of the Black Friday to Cyber Monday of 2020. I’m only comparing it to the previous days before. Again, not exactly how I would do it, but I just want to get something going. And we see that the e-commerce conversion rate was up 60%. In this weekend, this particular site had some good sales going on. They saw a boost in transaction order value. Revenue was up a ton. We know this is a strong time of year for this particular account.

I understand that I’m looking at the entire site. This isn’t just the increase from paid media or just my Google Ads campaigns. So if you want to go ahead and look at campaign by campaign, because we do have the option to select specific campaigns for seasonality adjustments, there’s no right or wrong. It’s only going to be what’s right for your particular account. 

But let’s just say my Search and Shopping campaigns can pretty much mimic what we see in the overall site around 60%. I’m going to take that number. We’re now back in the Google Ads, I can put 60%, and then I can go and save this adjustment. Before I create it, we’re going to get one final confirmation screen. Confirm when I want to start it and the time. Confirm when I want to end it as well as the time. It’s letting me know three days, and there is that large conversion rate adjustment. 

But with an adjustment this big, I want to guarantee I’m informing my smart bidding to expect this type of change for the Black Friday/Cyber Monday season in 2021. If everything looks good, we can create the seasonality adjustment. And there it is. If we want to go over and click on the box just to highlight this one I created, you can remove the adjustment if you want, or you can click Edit to make certain adjustments. 

And here are some ways we can get a little bit more specific with our seasonality adjustments. I know earlier I said we get back to devices. So let’s talk about that example. Let’s say you already know that the conversion rates for each of the device types within Google Ads are consistently different even during this holiday weekend. So I can go back into Google Analytics. 

And now I’m just going to look at my mobile users. Luckily, this account already has the mobile segments set up. I’ll apply it just to get rid of all users. And there we see mobile conversion rate is just under 47%. So if I want to go back into Google Ads, and for whatever reason I want to change the seasonality adjustment to be just for mobile phones. I want to go and change the conversion rate adjustment, and this is with the understanding of when I’m doing this. 

I’m editing the seasonality adjustment I already created. There isn’t a way for us to copy current seasonality adjustments, and then edit the new one that we copied. You’ll have to create a new seasonality adjustment for any difference that you want. So if you wanted a different Black Friday or Cyber Monday adjustment for each of the devices, you’re going to have to create three separate seasonality adjustments. 

If you want to get really specific and go down to the campaign level, you can see how many seasonality adjustments you would have to create. It really does not take a long time, but I would recommend you only do it if it makes sense. Again, if the conversion rate difference is going to be noticeably different depending on what type of setup you’re trying to create. I’m just going to select everything again, just to keep things simple. 

And I understand I was only pulling information from Google Analytics. There can be other factors that you want to take into play when considering the increase in the conversion rate adjustment. Let’s look at the past year hat we had. 2020 was not a typical year. I might want to keep an eye on year over year conversion rate differences between 2020 and 2021. Because we’ve had such an odd year, maybe I can’t trust last year’s data. I might have to use differences in performance throughout the entire year. 

Or another option would be using your internal CRM data to have a better understanding of how your performance might change. That’s why I really want to stress, and I know I’ve said it a bunch of times, the performance review example I pulled up within Google Analytics is very high level and very amateur. I’m not saying that’s the way you should do it every single time. Just make sure you’re looking at it from all angles before you enter in your conversion rate adjustment. 

But if things change, you can do exactly what we’re doing right now. Edit a current seasonality adjustment and feel free to adjust it however you need to before your sale or promo actually kicks off. I know I talked about increasing the conversion rate all the time, but that isn’t the only option because not every seasonality change is going to have a positive effect on your account. 

So if you have any specific campaigns or product categories that you know just aren’t working at specific points, you can also set up seasonality adjustments to inform your smart bidding when you have noticeable conversion rate decreases. But I’m going to switch this one back to increase. I checked all devices again. So I’m going to leave it at 60%, and then I’ll save it one more time.

Everything still looks good, and now I have something in place for Black Friday to Cyber Monday of this year. Now I know if anything major changes, I have the option to remove the seasonality adjustment completely, or I can edit it to better fit what I want to do with my smart bidding. 

The Black Friday/Cyber Monday weekend is probably one of the easiest examples that we could use, but think about all the different times of year where you could see adjustments. It doesn’t have to be exactly a sale or promo. And this always doesn’t have to be only for e-commerce accounts either. Think about your particular business and where you’ve seen major shifts in conversion rates at certain points of the year. Is this something that happens consistently? If so, consider using a seasonality adjustment to better help inform your smart bidding. And if you’ve used seasonality adjustments before, let everyone else know in the comments below how this feature has worked for you.

Written by Joe Martinez