PPC Seasonality Trends

It’s getting into that time of the year for several of my clients that start to see large success.  In October, November, and December  I typically see a large growth in traffic for certain terms that I have up.  You’re getting into the Christmas holiday season of PPC.  This is a very good season considering that September is one of the hardest months of PPC for most of my clients.  Numbers are low, sales are down, and really no one is buying a whole lot.
If you have been working on an account for along time you will get to know what months suck and which months are your killer months.  If you haven’t figured this out, you can quickly check trends in your Google Analytics account.  You should see a trend throughout the whole year which months you have more traffic and which months you don’t have a whole lot of traffic.  In the example below is an account that I work on that gets fairly consistent traffic but you can see which months I really don’t get much traffic (or sales for that matter).

During the holiday and summer months we typically have very good months.  We sell a seasonal product that typically does very well from June – August, then we get Christmas sales in November and December.  This is very important to help you manage my PPC accounts.  If I am bidding a ton of money during the months when I’m not selling anything I realistically won’t get ANY sales even though I’m spending good money during those times.  This isn’t to say that it won’t give me a better chance of getting sales.  It should get you a few.  Knowing when the best times of year to sell your product and really push your product will help you to sell more in the long run.  Instead of wasting money on keywords that won’t make you money, save that money and push your PPC hard during the times of year when you know that your product sells better.