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At first, I thought it was curious that my paid search campaigns would show relatively consistent patterns on a monthly and yearly basis.  Trends that I blogged about before some 2 years ago, still hold true today while others have become even more obvious.  Needless to say, knowing about these trends gives you a significant leg up on the competition, and verifying which patterns exist for your industry is as easy as tuning your campaign reporting to historical dates in the past.

The Holiday Phenomenon

The first obvious paid search pattern is what I like to dub, “the holiday phenomenon”.  It’s where advertisers should notice obvious changes in PPC campaigns during a day off, religious holiday, or bank holiday.  Web analytics can sway either way during a holiday, depending on your industry.  Obviously, B2B advertisers will show highly reduced conversion rates, but not necessarily lower click through.  Depending on demographics and target markets, overall search impressions may go down, but click through may go up.

Your shot at converting those B2B holiday visitors may be terrible on the holiday itself, but keep an eye on your “days til first purchase” metrics and do some simple subtraction.  You may be surprised to note the same holiday visitors liked what they saw.

The holiday phenomenon amongst B2C advertisers is usually always bad.  My recommendation for retail advertisers online is to pause or reduce maximum CPC bids during holidays.   People are usually too busy spending time with family or enjoying the day off to shop online.  Heck, if you’re a bricks and clicks company, you may be better suited increasing promotions to in-store only traffic drivers.

Converting B2C holiday visitors usually runs the same rate as normal weekend traffic.  Average the metrics for your PPC campaigns on successive sundays for a few weeks and compare with holiday visitors to your site.  Adjust bids accordingly.

If you’re a global advertiser, make sure you take international holidays into account.  This past Monday, Canadians were at home celebrating Thanksgiving, and with a strong Canadian dollar, I wouldn’t be surprised if more than a few of us didn’t hop the border to do some shopping, in store or online.  Note to self: getting a little blue box for the wife from Tiffany’s might be really cost effective right now…

Monthly Budget Losers

Here’s a question to advertisers that rely on agencies:  Do you ever ask how they keep on budget each and every month?  Is your agency sacrificing impressions and clicks by stopping your campaigns short by a day or two each month?  Be sure to ask, because patterns indicate this might be the case.

For those of us that manage our campaigns very closely and maximize impressions and clicks each month, it’s rather obvious that competition tapers out right before the end of the month.  Impression share soars, position decreases (a good thing, say from position 3 to position 1.2), CPC decreases, and conversion usually goes way up.  Why is that?  You got it, competition drops out.

Advertisers who have been at this game for a while know this to be true, so I’m not really letting the cat out of the bag here, but I feel that agency clients should know the truth as well.  Because although it’s a nice little factoid to know to look for, it means someone is getting screwed.

Big Shopping Days/Weeks

I don’t have to tell online retailers that there are some serious swings in search volume, qualified traffic, and conversion rates during shopping seasons.  Back to school time, black Friday, the week before Christmas, Valentine’s, are all seasonal cash cows online.  What may not be that obvious to most is that search terms change dramatically during these same periods.

Search terms can include anything from the name of the season, to “free shipping”, or time sensitive keywords such as “before december 24″, etc.  Advertisers that put effort into going after the long tail of search can win big, and little guesswork is required.  If you’re a seasonal advertiser with more than a few months under your belt, you can learn a few things by reading through logs and generating a few ad hoc “Search Query reports” in Google Adwords.  Now’s the time to do the research, and plan high quality landing pages.

So, I hope this post has helped at least a few advertisers gear up for the holiday season.  The retail industry is showing signs of life lately, and might be in the throws of a sustainable upswing, so make sure your paid search campaigns are ready.