Is Your Marketing in Sync with the Weather?

Picture this, you run a business as a lawn mower serviceman, or you run a fishing charter. When it’s sunny you’re booked out weeks in advance. When it rains, it pours… and by that I mean, no one wants to know you.

What if I told you you’re able to automatically set bids dependant on the weather? Would that be something you might be interested in?

That’s right, I said, automatically adjust bids dependant on the weather. When it’s hot and sunny you’re bidding for position one, when it’s cloudy you bid for position and when it’s wet you bid just enough to maintain your Ad-Rank and position. Now that all sounds pretty cool, right?

It’s essentially a script (piece of code) that you insert into your campaign which pulls weather data from Google. Using the script, Google looks into your targeted locations, finds information on what the conditions are in that part of the world and automatically adjusts things for you based on temperatures!

Now this isn’t something I’d recommend if you don’t have a web developer to call on or if you’re not too savvy with coding, etc. as it does require some ‘know how’. However, it can be an incredible tool if your business is truly weather dependant and you don’t want to be looking out of the window each morning to change bids depending on the forecast.

Now for the techy stuff…

The script makes a call the ‘Open Weather Map API’. It does this for every location within your campaigns targeting. The script takes the information from the API and calculates the conditions using some basic, pre-determined rules. If the rule is run and the script evaluates it to be ‘true’ then a corresponding locational bid multiplier is applied to the location targeting within the campaign and the bids are adjusted.

In simple terms, you say to Google (via a spreadsheet) if it’s raining in Sydney, lower my bids by 20% and when the API tells Google that this condition is met, your bids are automatically lowered.

The information your spreadsheet requires is:

• Campaign Name
• Weather Location (location you want the API to pull data from)
• Weather Condition (the condition that your camping requires a bid adjustment to take place)
• Bid Modifier (percentage you want your bids modified by when the weather condition is true)
• Enabled (lets Google know if you actually want the script run on this location or not)

It’s important to note that for the rule to run, you need to have geographic targets specified for where the weather location is pulled form. What that means is if you want to have bid adjustments in Sydney, you need to have the Sydney region targeted in your location targets. In addition, if multiple rules run on any one location, the final matching rule wins.

So how can we apply this to a real life situation?

Let’s say you run a ‘learn to surf’ business in a competitive environment. You need to bid high in order to keep your ads in a position that converts. It’s easy to assume that when the sun is shining and the temperatures are high, that you’re getting calls and bookings. The second the weather cools down or on any rainy summer days the calls dry up. Now you don’t want to pause your ads completely on the quiet days as it will have a negative impact on your Ad-Rank and position history. Using a tool such as this allows your bids to drop on the wet or cold days, putting your ads in a lower position. This saves you money and ensures you can still be found by people who may be looking to get in touch to book something in for when the rain subsides.

Most importantly, it allows you to know that your bidding strategy is in line with the way your customers find you and will allow you to focus your time and attention on other aspects of your campaign to help it to grow in the long run.

It’s all very new and exciting at this point in time and as a tool will not work for every industry. For the industries that can utilise it, this automated weather bidding strategy could be the difference between your campaign working well, and your campaign working amazingly! So speak to your Client Manager at SponsoredLinX today, or give us a call on 1300 859 600 if you’re interested in syncing your business marketing with the weather.

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