If you are running the marketing campaigns for big resellers or brands, you might not know that the weather can have a great influence on the customer's buying behavior. If you are selling products that are bound to a certain season or weather type, like bathing suits or snow shovels, you can probably profit a lot from weather based ads.
Mobile Weather Based Advertising
What Are Weather Based Ads?
With weather based AdWords campaigns you can control when and where your ads are shown depending on the weather. For instance, you could only show ads when the sun is shining in your city. The variables you can set are the temperature, weather type (rain, snow, sun, etc.) and location.
McDonald's, for instance, can show ads for McFlurry in cities whith sunny weather and ads for coffee in locations with cloudy weather and low temperatures.
Not only does this work for the food & drinks industry but also for the automotive, clothing & fashion, travel, hospitality, leisure & entertainment, health & beauty, pharmaceuticals, home & garden, energy, insurance and electronics industries.
Why Does Weather Matter?
Everyone is always aware of the weather and it has a big influence on human behavior. The weather is the second biggest influencer of consumer’s behavior after the state of the economy. When Sainsbury’s examined the relationship between weather and sales numbers in the UK, they found that just a few degrees rise in temperatures in early spring will produce a 200% increase in BBQ product sales.
According to a report in the Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services, exposure to sunlight increases our willingness to spend money by up to 56%.
Willingness to pay in sunlight
Also, sales change when temperature changes. Weather Trends 360 reports that just one degree could make a difference.
Weekley sales increase/decrease when temperature rises/drops
How do Weather Based Ads work in AdWords?
The WBAs work by following weather rules for each relevant situation. When the weather changes AdWords Robot will also make changes in AdWords based on the rules. WBA works with Display/Banners marketing campaigns, YouTube campaigns and all other AdWords based campaigns, like Remarketing.
For instance , when it is cold in [VIEWER'S LOCATION] and the user is in [VIEWER’S LOCATION], will be shown the ‘cold’ banner. Similarly, when it is sunny in [VIEWER’S LOCATION], the users will be shown the ‘warm’ banner.
In this case we show the best banner for each the weather situation. For example, below you can see two banners for McCafé products. When the temperature falls below a certain point, the users will see the ‘cold’ banner, and when the temperature is above that point, they will see the ‘warm’ banner.
You can have many more rules for each set of banners, all based on the weather now or in the near future. For a supermarket, this means that it could advertise BBQ products for a sunny upcoming weekend, or ingredients for a nice home cooked meal in case of a rainy weekend.
For each location of a country and for each weather type you can create different weather rules. The banners will not modify your targeting options and will only be shown on the networks you used before.
Who Can Profit From Weather Based Ads?
The weather has a bigger influence on your revenue than you might think. It applies to almost every type of product you sell. For instance: tourist attractions are more popular in sunny weather, food delivery services have more customers in bad weather, ski-related products are only profitable when it is snowing, and there are many more!
These type of ads are specifically interesting for large brands that do business in multiple countries or cities and create emotion in certain weather conditions. For instance, if you are selling ice cream, you can profit from this system by only showing ads in the locations where the sun is shining.
Example of Netflix
How Can You Profit From Weather Based Ads?
With WBA, your target audience will be narrowed down even more which means that your ads will be even more relevant. . If you add WBA to your existing ad campaign, it will not modify any of the options you have previously set (days, location, time interval, etc.), but instead it will add another condition: weather. If this condition is met (either sunny, rainy, cloudy or snowy) the ads will be promoted.
This will result in higher conversion rates, lower costs and an overall higher revenue!
Weather statistics can show what metric to focus on. Check out this video for more information:
Case Study
Lingerie and swimwear shop Bravissimo compared their sales data to weather information and discovered that their sales increased when the sun was shining, regardless of the temperature. They ran a 3 month AdWords campaign based on sunshine in certain locations.
With this campaign they saw their revenue increase by 600% en their conversion increased by 103%! [case study]