Google Ads Seasonality Adjustments: The RIGHT Way to Set Them Correctly (Not What Google Recommends)

This is Austin from Grow My Ads. And in today's video I'm gonna talk about seasonality bid adjustments, how to set this up correctly. I've seen in the past seasonality bid adjustments get set up incorrectly and then budgets get blown way too early in the day on those big sales days like Black Friday, Cyber Monday and then they end up losing out on a significant amount of sales. Google's definition is pretty simple and really the mechanics of this are way too simple. So I'm going to give you the pro tips on how to set a seasonality bid adjustment correctly so you end up making and maximizing the most out of these big sales days and don't end up losing money, you end up making more. So let's go ahead and dive in. All right, let's start with Google's definition real quick. Basically they're saying, you know, seasonality adjustments are an advanced tool that can inform smart bidding of expected conversion rate changes. Do not use this for long periods of time. They say events should be within a one to seven day period. May not work as well for longer periods of time. We only use seasonality adjustments for like the biggest sales events. So that's gonna be Black Friday, that's gonna be Cyber Monday. And if you work with a company that, or you are a company that may do like Valentine's Day sales, like flower companies, use it then. But we're talking like huge spikes in your, in your data, right? Of, of conversions and conversion rate. You're going to know that in your business only use it for that. If it's just like a really like small 10 off deal or sale. Don't even play around with it. Doesn't mean anything. So it's got to be in my opinion, huge days, huge sales events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday. This is when you really want to dive into actually setting this up. So how it works, this is what I disagree with and this is what I'm going to show you how to set correctly and how to avoid inside of an actual account. But let's just start with the definition real quick. So they're saying when you create a seasonality adjustment, you're scheduling a conversion rate adjustment, increase or decrease, right? So if you're expecting conversion rates to increase by 50% during a three day sale, Google saying, hey, you can just go ahead, create a seasonality adjustment that increases the conversion rate by up to 50% for, for those three days and then your campaign will optimize the bids during the events and then after it will return to their pre Adjusted performance, no negative adjustment is needed. So if you have a three day event in this scenario and you know your conversion rates can increase by 50%, they're saying just put a 50% conversion rate increase into your seasonality adjustment. That will trigger the smart bidding. Then to know during this event, which is in the future, you would set this up, you know, a few days before or a day before this particular sale you're pinging to the smart bidding conversion rate is going to go up 50%. So smart bidding now knows as soon as that event day starts, it's going to start being more aggressive because it knows it's been pinged that conversion rates are going to increase. The problem with that system is it actually isn't very smart. What we have seen is if you put a percent increase for the conversion rate and I'm going to show you all of this inside of a live account, it increases your average CPC basically by that percent. So for example, if your average CPC is $1 and your conversion rate is going to increase by 100% for a sale event, that you're going to have Black Friday. So you go in and you put 100% conversion rate increase into your seasonality bid adjustment for that Black Friday sale event, what you'll actually end up finding is your average CPC goes from $1 to $2. And so the system itself isn't really smart. It just seems to whatever percent you give, it just jacks up your average CPC by that AM. Now you do want that, you want to be more aggressive. However, you don't want to just blindly or basically throw in a conversion rate number from what I've seen. So I'm going to show you inside of real account how I would look at the data, especially for Black Friday, and then how I would actually use that data to formulate the percent that I'm going to put in for the conversion rate increase. So let's go ahead and dive in. Okay, so I'm inside of an account to get to the seasonality bid adjustments. First you go tools and settings and then you're going to go shared library. You're going to go to bid strategies. Then once you're inside of bid strategies, you're going to go to advanced controls. This will bring up the seasonality adjustments. Here you simply click and adjustment type. They have a budget and conversion rate. I'm recommending the conversion rate budgets you should manually be doing or setting auto rules. So here as an example, we'll just do this Black Friday test. So you set the day and Time for us. We're going to do November 24th. That's going to be Black Friday. And then I'm going to have this actually end on November 24th as well. So we're going to go basically 12am to 12am for the full day. Now I recommend you do this by the campaign level. So you should actually be looking at specific campaigns and how they perform based off of these sales. I'm using Black Friday as an example in this account. So I would be looking at, and I will show you this too at Black Friday numbers from last year. And then I will be looking at or I would be looking at which products seem to have increased more if I have those campaigns split out. I'm not going to go that in the weeds for this video. But that's how you should be looking at it. I don't really like just a blanket sort of account level one, if you do have differences in conversion rates by product categories or campaign types, so here you can actually go and hit specific campaigns. I'm not going to do that for now. I'm just going to do basically all of those. You can also do this by settings or sorry by devices. Most of that though you don't need to worry too much about if depending on how you have your campaign set up. All right, so this is the big thing, conversion rate adjustment. Enter an estimated based on or an estimate based on expected conversion rate changes. Again they show you, for example, if your conversion rate increased by 50% during a three day sale, add up to a 50% conversion rate adjustment. This will help you adjust, optimize your bids. So they're saying, hey, if it's going to go up 50, just type in 50. So that is not what you want to do. So I'm going to show you in this account. We're going to go back to some of the data here. Okay, so I'm inside of last November and here's Black Friday. You see a giant spike up in our revenue for that particular day. Now how would I go about setting my seasonality bid adjustment? So first I'm going to start looking at what was my conversion rate increase. So we had a 3.36% conversion rate on that day. Before that I was around A2.2%. Obviously it varies so sometimes I'll look at then the week. So 2.13, it dipped. We had some dips there. I would say probably anywhere from. Let's go daily again. So here we were at 2.28. The day before we had 2.20 and then 2, 2, 2, 2. So these days before I would be kind of using some form of an average here and so I would be looking at. Let's just do two point. Yeah, 2.2 is a good number to use. So we went from 2.20. Yeah, 2.20 to a 3.36. So we'll calculate that. So I had about a 52% increase in my conversion rate. 52% increase in conversion rate. But I don't necessarily want to add 52% as my conversion rate adjustment. So I'm going to show you how I look at this now. Average cpc, what did my average CPC jump up to? So I went from about a 25 cent average CPC to a 31 cent average CPC. So 25 cent to a 31. Calculate that. So I had a 24% increase in my average CPC. Then I also want to look at impression share normally by top percent. Now in this account we, you know, we do very well on this. We do kind of dominate this particular industry. So you don't see a massive jump here. But in other accounts I also look at what's my impression share at the top percent for those big sales days before and after. So, you know, on the day, what, what was I at and what was my average before then? Why do I do that? So I just showed you my average conversion rate jumped 50% but my average CPC back then only jumped 24%. And I didn't really lose out on impression share. So if I went in and simply went back to the bid adjustment in this case. So let's go back into setting that up and we go conversion rate. If I set this to 50 because that's what my conversion rate jumped to, I actually would end up now paying more than what I did last year when I don't need to. So in this particular case I'm actually going to lean more conservative, especially because I had the, the impression share that was very high as well. So instead of doing a 50% in this case, I probably will just do a 30% because that's what more than likely is going to jump my average CPC. So last year it jumped by 25% and we still had that large increase. So I'm going to be a little tad more aggressive than that and do about a 30%. So when you're setting these, don't blindly just go based off of the conversion rate increase. You should also be looking at what was my impression share in the top spots then. Because if you are too conservative then, and if you look at the data and you are actually lower on your impression share on that in those top spots then you're going to be too conservative when you could have actually spit more on an increase in your average CPC if your ROAS increase was high too. So that's the other thing that you should be looking at is return on ad spend. So here again, we actually didn't see a huge jump. We went to 15.36, so 1500% we were down. But there you look at their account, they average about a thousand percent. So we jumped up a little bit there. You know, let's say my ROAS doubled that day and my impression share in the top percent was lower than what it was again. I had about a 94 impression share there from a 25 increase in average CPC. So I would be looking at those numbers and in that case, let's say my impression share in the top, my top impression share was lower then in that case, I know, hey, my ROAS increases pretty significantly so I actually can afford this year to spend a little more 25%. So maybe in those cases I would increase closer to a 50%. But these are the numbers you should be looking at because what happens is if someone came in here and blindly threw in 100% impression share conversion rate increase, all that's going to do is literally double up your bids, right? And then if you're capped by budget, if you're not running essentially an unlimited budget on Black Friday for your campaigns, I have seen then Google's bidding algorithm get way too aggressive, way too early and it blows most of it by 11am you do not want that. So you have to be looking at these numbers and formulating a conversion rate increase percent that makes sense based off of the numbers you're seeing in the previous sales events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. I hope that makes sense. If you have questions, put them in the comment section. We'll gladly answer. This is how we look at season bid adjustments. We don't just go in and blindly throw in the percent increase because that can impact you negatively. So we want to look at it a little more in the weeds of the data to formulate a good number for us. Hope that helps. I'll see you guys on the next video. Thanks.