Not too long ago I was a resident of Sydney in Australia and was very much used to 12 months of beautiful sunshine with the odd cold or wet spell every once in a while. Now I have my roots firmly planted back in this wonderful country of ours it appears I am in the exact opposite situation. We are in the middle of what should be a lovely hot summer right now however it seems that the weather forecast is working overtime to confuse us about when the sun will be peaking through or when we need the reinforced umbrella at the ready.
Although this is a nuisance to most, what if your business is heavily affected by the weather? What if the amount or customers searching for your services halves during the rain, or even better, doubles? If you are managing a PPC (Pay-Per-Click) campaign and your search fluctuates with the weather, then it can be a really time consuming and stressful process to edit all the bids and even change the content and structure of your ads. I am here to tell you that there is a simpler way and I will show you how right now.
The basic idea is that you set up a weather script which AdWords then bids via so you can optimise bids automatically based on geo-location and weather forecasts. You start with a Google spreadsheet that has a complete list of all your campaigns and geo-locations. Once this is complete the script can call on the OpenWeatherMapAPI and can cross-reference the current weather conditions for each specified location and then apply the rules you have set.
Google’s example of this is if you are running a website for a theme park in Paris then you could set up a spreadsheet saying that if it is sunny to then increase bids by 20% in Paris. You can even specify what your definition of “sunny” is by stating that Sunny = Temperature between 20 and 35 degrees centigrade or likewise if your rule was to increase bids during rainy weather then Rain = Precipitation over 3mm in the last 2 hours, and so on.
The setup process for all of this will take you a little bit of time to fine tune and make sure that all of the data you are entering is entirely correct however once it is finally set up you should find that the script will save you a tremendous amount of time and hopefully help increase your return on investment in relation to pay-per-click advertising.