![Columbus Digital Marketing Agency – Voted Top 1% in U.S. [Media Captain]](https://www.themediacaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/thegem-logos/logo_64daab7912fe21e04611b4e4462e5ea5_1x.png.webp){kind=logo}
The goal of any online advertiser is to get in front of your customer when they are ready to buy. With the right weather based advertising strategy, you can serve more relevant ads, get more qualified traffic, increase conversion rate and generate new business.
If there’s an unexpected downpour with heavy winds on the horizon and you’re a roofing company, you can increase your bids and budget to get more exposure with Google PPC Ads [continue reading to learn how to do this].
In this article, I’ll be focusing on PPC advertising based on the weather. I will also hone in on service-based businesses. While weather-based advertising can work across many industries, we have a great deal of experience working with service-based companies, so we wanted to focus on this sweet spot.
Aligning PPC with the Weather:
Below are reasons PPC advertising works so well when you marry it up with the weather.
- Quick set-up
- Budgets and bids can be adjusted in real-time
- Messaging can correspond to the latest weather conditions
- Landing page can align with ad copy and latest weather conditions
- You can staff your team in advance to prepare for increased leads
Capitalizing During Peak Weather Conditions
Most service-based businesses don’t have a strategy in place to capitalize on weather conditions and seasonality. By bidding strategically and staying proactive with your PPC accounts, you can populate towards the top of Google and Bing for coveted search terms during the most important times, when it’s time to capitalize on the weather. [Read success story of Feazel Roofing].
Our Authority on the Topic
Our digital marketing agency works with 20+ service-based businesses. From roofers to plumbers, painters, lawn care companies, concrete lifting and leveling, and much more. We know how important seasonality and weather are for service-based businesses.
We’ve developed a simple process to capitalize on the right weather conditions for the right businesses.
Table of Contents for Weather Based PPC Blog
- Examples: Weather Conditions
- We listed different service based businesses and how they benefit from different weather conditions. This provides a high level overview on the importance of seasonality and bidding based on weather conditions.
- Creating a Strategy
- Your service based business needs to plan in advance and budget accordingly. This will allow your PPC advertisements to populate at the most opportune months.
- Real-Time Tactics
- From bid adjustments to the ad copy and landing page, we detail what to optimize with your PPC based on the weather conditions in a real-time manner.
- Conclusion
- We summarize key findings from the article.
Examples: How Weather Impacts Different Service-Based Businesses
A farmer pays attention to the weather because it has a profound influence on the growth, development and yields of a crop.
Service-based business owners pay close attention to the weather also since it drastically impacts the day-to-day of their business. Yet we often see a disconnect between the PPC strategy and weather-based events.
Below are examples when service-based businesses need to be more aggressive with their PPC advertising:
- Roofing Company
- When there is a storm, wind, and rain, increase your bids and budgets!
- Plumbing Company
- When there is heavy rainfall, increase bids and budgets for the sump pump business!
- Snow Removal
- When there’s heavy snowfall, increase bids and budgets!
- Pool Cleaners
- When the warm weather arrives, increase bids and budgets!
- HVAC
- When the weather starts getting warm or cold, increase bids and budgets for each respective service!
Some of the examples above are more seasonal where you would increase budget and bids based on the time of the year. Other events are more in real-time, like snow removal and roofing. In the latter instances, you need to be more tactical to make bid and budget adjustments when needed.
Creating a Budget Based on Seasonality
Your service-based business should create an advertising/budget calendar for when you’ll increase and decrease your budget based on your busiest times of the year. Whether you manage this in-house or work with an online advertising company, it’s important to get organized so you are spending more money during the peak times of the year, when your customers are more likely to convert.
Scenario One: Bidding Based on the Overall Season
Below is an example of a pool cleaning business. This showcases how your business should plan in advance with its advertising budget based on seasonality. Keep in mind, if your ads are not doing well, you can always pause them. On the contrary, if your ads are doing great, you can easily increase your budget. That’s the beauty of PPC advertising!
- Overall budget of $10,000
- Based in Columbus, Ohio
- More aggressive budget at the beginning of the season, since they know pool owners will hire companies on an ongoing basis for the entire season.
- Scale back advertising as the summer progresses, since most of their repeat business was established in late spring and early summer
- They still advertise with retargeting in colder weather months
- With PPC you only pay when someone clicks on your ad. You never know when someone could be doing research.
Bidding In Real-Time
If you are a roofing company, storms can be big paydays. If you are proactive with your PPC strategy, you can increase bids by 20% and budget by 20% when there is rain on the horizon. The same holds true for a snow removal business. Below are tips to improve real-time bidding strategy for service based businesses:
- Increase bids and budgets at opportune times based on the weather
- Create ad copy that resonates with the weather conditions
- Create a landing page that corresponds with ad copy
Below is an example of an ad copy that would work great 24-48 hours in advance of a snowstorm. The media hypes up these storms so people will start looking well in advance!
If you know that a snowstorm is coming on Wednesday, you can go into your campaigns and ad groups and increase the bids. This is the simplest way to go about doing this, just don’t forget to document your changes and revert back so you aren’t paying more when the weather conditions aren’t ripe for your business. There are many ways to adjust bids in advance. You can contact our agency if you would like more assistance formulating a game plan.
What we recommended above is a manual way of adjusting bids and budgets. There are scripts for weather based conditions. Most service based businesses don’t have the capacity to handle this as it’s overcomplicated. In this article, you’ll see that PPC experts advise against Google Ads weather script. “One of the many issues with using a weather bidding script for AdWords is that it is a massive headache to set up and maintain.”
Weatherads.io offers monthly packages to automate the entire process. This starts at $99/month. If you have a larger budget with a lot of campaigns, it’s worth considering weatherads.io.
In Closing
Weather-based advertising isn’t only for Google Ads. You can implement similar tactics for Bing and Facebook Advertising.
Just like a retailer wants to get in front of their customers leading up to Christmas, your service based business needs to have a similar mindset when it comes to weather. Make sure to budget accordingly based on seasonality and more real-time events.
