Google Seasonality Adjusters Deep Dive

A feature that is designed as part of Google’s Smart Bidding algorithm for Google ppc

In Google ppc, specifically Google Shopping Campaigns there is an ability to set Seasonality Adjusters. It’s a feature that is designed as part of Google’s Smart Bidding algorithm and was introduced back in November, 2019.

Available for all Shopping Campaigns

Google Seasonality Adjusters were only available for Search and Display Campaigns. It was touted as something that was going to be really useful for Black Friday promotions, but they quietly rolled it out for all Shopping Campaigns.

A period where you want to invest more in Google ppc or maybe a promotion where you don’t want to overspend will be the sort of thing that the AI will eventually pick up on, but you want to have some influence on that.

Google ppc How does Seasonality Adjustment work?

So essentially what you do is say that from 9:00 AM on Wednesday, I’m expecting my Google ppc conversion rate to increase by 25% and it’s going to stay like that for the next 72 hours or something. That’s the kind of thing that you can do.

So what’s been useful is we get to periods where maybe someone’s just come off sale, or they’re about to come off sale. For that last 24 hours you want to give it a bit more momentum, a bit more of a push, and then the day after you want to say actually I want to slow things down again.

Google ppc Short bursts for sale periods

With Google ppc you can say, for the last 24 hours, we expect our conversion rate to be 20% higher, but then the 24 hours after that maybe it will be 30% lower. Even for things like short bursts for sale periods, but the way that they talk about it in their literature and conversations with Google ppc, you can potentially use it for an entire week.

So if you get into that point towards the end of the month, you’re wanting more sales from Google ppc, perhaps you’ve got some budget leftover, that you can use it for . This can help you manipulate the situation a little bit.

Google ppc Adjusting over 30 different ROAS targets 

The main reason we like it is that I was adjusting over 30 different ROAS targets to try and get some momentum. Now, because I’ve set those up I don’t have to have to change all the time. This is a way of giving it a little bit of an adrenaline shot, if you like.

Google Ads Seasonality Adjusters is a really nice feature and it’s what the AI was kind of missing going through last Black Friday, Christmas period. We are really pleased that they’ve got that available now.

Information to the AI to improve your Google ppc Campaigns

It’s exclusively for Smart Bidding and it’s a great way of giving information to the AI to improve your Google Campaign. If you’re still on Manual Bidding and you want to recreate these situations that I’ve just been describing, you would still have to do that manually.

“learning mode”

We have experimented with it for a while now, going back about a month it seems to work well. Our Google Agency Representative said it was good to change it up, but if you make too many adjustments to your ROAS targets, it puts the AI back into what they call “learning mode.”

It’s kind of like Google’s message to sort of say, “Okay, just for the next seven days, don’t blame us if your performance goes a bit weird. We’re figuring out what you’ve just asked us to do.”

Seasonality will not put you back into the learning mode because it believes it’s only for a temporary period. It’s adapting what you’ve told it to do already and making a seasonal adjustment on top of it. So it’s a really nice way of avoiding going back into learning mode as well.

Credit to Rob Watson, Head of Google ppc Marketing Platform Strategy at Supplyant. For interest on this please contact us