As much as you can have the best business with products/services which are market leaders in their respective sectors, you will still, unfortunately, be at the mercy to external factors which will have a direct impact on the sales of your products and services. The same can apply to pay per click advertising campaigns, where external factors can affect the performance and ROI of a campaign. Most campaigns out there, in PPC, will be seasonal campaigns, which means they will naturally be affected by, well, the seasons, as well as other external factors. Learning what the main factors are that can affect your campaign will help to prepare you, not only for an effective contingency but, for capitalizing on changes to such external factors.

The Weather

Based on what the weather is around the area you are targeting will have a huge influence to the success of your PPC campaign. For example, the better the weather, the less likely people are online and the less likely you are to target the demographic you have specified in your campaign. Therefore, it would be more beneficial to reduce your daily budget on good days of weather as opposed to increasing it on bad days of weather, such as when it is raining and cold outside. The same principle can also apply to the likelihood of being at a computer station as opposed to on mobile devices.

World/Local Political News

It is important to stay up to date with what is happening with world leader’s and local councils alike, since this will provide a good mindset as to how web users are likely to interact online, depending if your demographic is likely to stay up to date with political news. For example, on voting days, you might want to reduce your budget since the mindset of your targeted traffic will be much different to most days of the year. As well as this, when a big change does happen, such as a new leader has been appointed, you could look to incorporate such news into your campaign to keep your campaign looking hot and fresh.

Social

Social factors are, by far, the largest external factors that affect PPC campaigns. From social media platforms to WhatsApp to even watching and interacting around your favorite TV programs, making sure you stay up to do with what is going on socially with your demographic is key to maintaining a high conversion rate for your campaign. A great example of this is of a UK TV reality show called ‘Love Island’, where one of the winning candidates, Kem, was eagerly snapped by a online clothing store to model some of the clothing on the website. From doing this, the online clothing store rocketed in sales, simply because of the social integration the online clothing store could incorporate into their PPC campaign, to attract an emotional response from the web user (since they have been watching the winner, Kem, for the past several weeks prior to viewing the PPC search advert).