Should you adopt seasonal bidding strategy to increase profit and revenue for e-commerce?

This article discloses strategic points to consider when adopting a bidding strategy for e-commerce. This article is written for the strategic and the specialist within a e-commerce function of an enterprise.

1. Shifts In Return on investment due to Seasonality
Seasonal shifts can affect the paid search or conversion rate due to affected bidding landscape. For an e-commerce company this can result in missed opportunities. If not monitoring and understanding these shifts one can mistakenly make strategies that do not account the seasonality thus not receiving the desired effect of marketing efforts.

2. Promotional Changes
Seasonality produces constant changes to promotional offers and the introduction of new inventory or services. Seasonality means also changes in promotions and offers, missing seasonality in this aspect can negatively impact a businesses performance.

3. Latent Conversion
Whenever looking at conversion time and seasonality one must also remember to take into account latent conversions. Customers might not be ready to purchase at the first visit to your store, this is true especially with more expensive items for sale.

To make sure you really make use of seasonality as a marketer consider following aspects;

A. Take Weather Bidding in Consideration
Weather or not you are selling goods which are seasonal you might want to consider how seasonality might impact your sales. Consider being an e-commerce selling construction tools. People might be more prone to taking on construction projects especially concerning house improvements during the dry season of the year. This might be the crucial period for you to win most of the auctions. If you are limited by budget consider what time of the year you would like to be featured the most.

B. Deep analysis into latent conversions and communication of vital business insights
Agencies with programmatic solutions and possibility to custom fit their analytics and bidding offers are optimal in order to track and optimize for seasonality. Make sure not to get stuck and focus on sessions on current conversion rates, keep in mind the latency of e-commerce trade.

For many E-commerce companies Black Friday is important.  Looking at last year conversion data, avg position and spend typically show you that when the traffic picks up the bidding in Google Ads is not fast enough to follow and when the traffic slows down the bidding is not fast enough to respond and lower the bids. This means you miss the opportunity in the beginning and you waste budget in the end. 

Key parameter to analyse when you need to be super fast is avg position. Select the top 10% of the products and ad groups and keep a close eye on them if you need to monitor this manually.

C. Forecast performance based on data, adjust bidding strategy
To account for changes in return on advert spent or conversion rate, advertisers need a bidding solution that automatically adjusts bids according to the expected shift in seasonal performance.

Make sure you work with an agency that uses time and seasonality booster in their offer both  as strategic advice and bidding mechanics. More advanced agencies offer bidding schedules and seasonality tracking in order to make sure that you leverage on all possible opportunity for revenue increase. Keywordio has integrated weather bidding software that automatically adjusts bids in your favour depending on what goods or services you sell.