If you expect your conversion rates to change significantly during a short sales or promotional period (for example, Black Friday), you can create a seasonality adjustment to improve bid optimization during the event.
Seasonality adjustments instruct your ROI bid strategies (bid strategies that optimize conversions and revenue) to make specified adjustments to bids during the promotional period.
Seasonality adjustments only impact bid strategies with conversions and revenue goals. Seasonality adjustments don't impact bid strategies with a position or clicks goal.
Best practices
- You only need to create a seasonality adjustment event if your sales or promotional event is longer than 6 hours and if you expect a significant change in conversion rate (more than ±30%).
- Set the seasonality adjustment percentage to the estimated change in conversion rate during the sales or promotional event. For example, if you estimate the conversion rate will be 1.5 times higher than the historical average, then you could consider setting the seasonality adjustment to as high as Increase by 50%. In this example, 50% would be considered a very aggressive setting, so you should consider choosing a lower percentage.
When you set a seasonality adjustment, you should expect your bids to increase proportionally. For example, if you set the seasonality adjustment to Increase by 50%, you should expect your bids to also increase by 50%. So, we recommend that you be conservative when setting your seasonality adjustment percentage.
- If you're creating a new bid strategy, create the bid strategy at least 4 days before the sales or promotional event starts. If you're applying the seasonality adjustment to an existing bid strategy, create the seasonality adjustment at least 6 hours before the sales or promotional event starts.
- Budget bid strategies don't support seasonality adjustments. If you're using a budget bid strategy, use custom allocations for an anticipated sale or promotion instead.
Search Ads 360 applies adjustments in each bidding period
When you create a seasonality adjustment, you can specify a period ranging from 6 hours to 14 days. Search Ads 360 applies adjustments for each bidding period. If the adjustment event is expected to start soon, Search Ads 360 might schedule the next bidding period to occur sooner than usual. Bid optimization will begin within 2 hours after the seasonality adjustment event start time.
Bid strategies continue to change bids during and after events
The seasonality adjustment event is applied to all entities that are managed by the bid strategy, such as campaigns, ad groups, product groups, and shopping ads. After the seasonality adjustment event ends, the data from the event time period will be excluded. The bid strategy will use the remaining data to continue to evaluate and adjust bids.