Q4 is here!
The most important part of the year for every eCommerce business.
Some of our clients make more than 65% of their yearly revenue during this period so you want to make sure everything in your Google Ads account is ready and prepared for the most important time of the year.
With the advent of Performance Max campaigns and Smart Bidding, the options to directly influence campaign performance have become limited.
However, one critical function remains invaluable for Black Friday and other seasonal events: Google Ads Seasonality Bid Adjustments.
Table of Contents
- What are Google Ads Seasonality Bid Adjustments?
- How to Set Up Seasonality Bid Adjustments
- Calculating the Correct Seasonality Bid Adjustment
- Using the Free Seasonality Bid Adjuster tool
- Seasonality Bid Adjustment Formula
- Finding the correct Baseline CVR
- Finding the correct Expected CVR
- When to Use Seasonality Bid Adjustments (and When Not To)
What are Google Ads Seasonality Bid Adjustments?
Google Ads seasonality bid adjustments let advertisers, so you and me, temporarily increase or decrease bid amounts to optimize for expected changes in conversion rates during short-term events, like holidays or sales periods.
The keyword here is "expected changes in conversion rates"
If you expect a significant increase or decrease in conversion rates during a particular period, you can use this feature to send an extra signal to the bidding algorithm.
Think of it as adding a “boost” to your bidding—like nitrous for a car!
1.0 How to Set Up Seasonality Bid Adjustments
1. Navigate to Google Ads > Tools > Budgets and Bidding > Adjustments.
2. Click the blue “+” icon to create a new adjustment.
3. Ensure you’re on the Seasonal tab.
You can also apply Seasonality Adjustments at the Manager level.
See the step by step guide from Google.
After creating the adjustment, select the period when you want it to be active and the campaign types in which you want to apply it.
2.0 Calculating the Correct Seasonality Bid Adjustment
To determine a seasonality bid adjustment, estimate how much your conversion rate (CVR) will vary during a specified period (such as a holiday).
This adjustment is essentially a multiplier applied to your bids to respond to expected changes in user behavior without permanently altering your automated bid strategy.
If you have historical data you can use the previous years to find your expected conversion rates.
2.1 Using the Free Seasonality Bid Adjuster tool:
Happily the PPC community has all kinds of helpful people and one of that helpful guys create a tool that a can help you set the correct adjustment for the upcoming sale periods.
The only thing you need to do is to download your dataset from Google Ads, which we will explain further in this blog, but you can also follow their tutorial.
Put the numbers into the tool and that will tell you what you can set as the seasonality bid adjustment in your Google Ads account.
The tool is free to use and it's working like a charm.
2.2 Seasonality Bid Adjustment Formula
To set your seasonal bid adjustment, you can use the following formula:
Bid Adjustment (%) = (Expected CVR / Baseline CVR - 1) x 100
- Baseline Conversion Rate: Your typical conversion rate during non-sale periods (rest of the year)
- Expected Conversion Rate: The conversion rate you expect during the seasonal period (e.g., holiday sales).
Example:
Bid Adjustment (%) = (3% / 2% - 1) x 100
Bid Adjustment (%) = 50%
So in this case the adjustment you need to enter into Google ads is 50%
2.3 Finding the correct Baseline CVR
The bigger part of the work is to find out what is your baseline CVR.
The best thing is to download a weekly report from your Google Ads account from the running year, so for me it will be 2024.
To do that just simply go to Campaigns > Report Editor and create the report from the screenshot below.
After you have this you can just the the avg. of the whole year and that is your baseline cvr.
2.4 Finding the correct Expected CVR
This is a bit more tricky to find.
In order to be able to do this you will need to have historical data.
Let's say now that we want to find the correct seasonality bid adjustment number for the upcoming Black Friday period.
You need to do the following:
- Download a weekly CVR overview from your Google Ads account for as many years as you can and where you had a Black Friday sale
- Find the baseline for each year (See above how to calculate that)
- Isolate the sale periods
- Calculate the difference between the baseline compared to the sale period for each year.
This will give you a rough idea on what you can expect this year.
3.0 When to Use Seasonality Bid Adjustments (and When Not To)
It’s also helpful to highlight when seasonality adjustments make sense and when they might not.
For instance:
• Ideal for Short-term, Predictable Events: Like Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and holiday sales.
• Avoid for Longer Events: Adjustments may not work as well for prolonged sales periods. So that means don't use them for more than 2 weeks of time.
• After the sale period: Many people don't know but you can also set negative seasonality adjustments. With this you can signal to Google that the sale is over and it's time to slow down the campaigns. ,
Conclusion
So there you go!
As we enter the busiest time of year for eCommerce, taking advantage of Google Ads Seasonality Bid Adjustments can make a significant impact on campaign performance.
It gives us back the sense of control in an ad account where we can "force" Google's bidding algorithm to go harder or slower depending on our needs.
Just make sure you calculate the correct baseline and expected CVR and you are good to go.
Also I would just recommend to use the seasonalityadjuster tool and save a lot of time.
If you have any questions feel free to drop them below!
