Weather often impacts the behavior of consumers. For example, rainy weather would lead to an increase in demand for cab and shuttle services. And, a heat wave compels people to stay indoors which leads to an increase in demand for air conditioning and similar services.
Not only the buying of products, but weather can also impact the moods of consumers. They might be interested in watching romcoms or sitcoms when the weather is pleasant. On dark cold nights, some may prefer fantasy while others may love watching horror movies. Similarly, during the summer or spring break, you’d see an increased interest in social activities for both kids and adults.
Now, suppose you are someone with a business that sells services or products that can be impacted by weather changes, like, cab services, cosmetics, apparel, streaming platforms, etc. You always want to reduce wasted ad spend. In that case, you know how important it is to stay on top of these changes and target the right audience for your ads.
In this article, you’ll learn:
- How weather-based campaigns work
- The benefits of running weather-based campaigns and
- How to do weather-based advertising
How does weather-based advertising work?
Let’s say you are a cafe owner and you have your specials of the day out on the display. On a rainy day, you’d put hot cocoa. And on a sunny day, you’d prefer to put peach iced tea as your special to attract customers.
Once they are in your cafe, they can order anything from the menu. The important thing here is to attract customers and make them want to enter your cafe, which you do by posting special, relevant messages on the display.
Similarly, when advertising, you can choose to manage campaigns based on weather. For example, you can have one campaign with cold beverages and another for hot beverages. And then on sunny days, you advertise the campaign with cold beverages.
The 3 levers you need to do weather-based advertising
- Target the right set of locations
- Have conditional changes in the campaign based on the weather for those locations
- Have a way to automate this process
3 benefits of weather-based advertising
1. Personalized campaigns
Weather-based advertising can help localize and personalize your ads according to your customer’s location and weather.
2. Relevant messaging
Weather-based campaign management can make sure that the end-user of your product or service sees a relevant ad that resonates with their mood.
3. Enhanced ad ROI
Personalized ads and relevant messaging can lead to an increase in leads, engagement, and then conversions.
Examples across industries
There are several industries that can benefit from weather-based advertising, and use this strategy to boost their campaign performance. Here are some examples.
Retail or ecommerce
Advertisers all around the world can use weather forecasting to show the right kind of ads at a particular location.
For example: showing ads for umbrellas on the days when the forecasts say it’s going to rain in 2 days. Or, showing ads for seasonal products like sunscreen around the time summer is about to start.
Apparel
Similar to the ecommerce industry, apparel stores — online or offline — need timely advertising based on the current weather conditions.
For example: showing ads for pullovers or sweaters for a colder week and pausing campaigns selling windcheaters for the weeks with no cold waves or rains in winter.
Cab services
In cities or places with unreliable public transport, a lot of people use third-party services to book cabs for commute. So, with the business knowledge of how the population of a certain area uses your services and the understanding of the current or future weather conditions you can manage your campaigns profitably. And you can also choose to target the right locations and set budgets for those campaigns based on demand and weather.
How to do weather-based advertising?
You can use the OpenWeather API to get weather updates for the locations of your choice and then add them to your campaigns as targets or exclusions.
However, manually doing that would be very time-consuming and also exhausting, as you’ll always need one or more team members to check the weather conditions and then make relevant changes to the campaigns.
There are some workarounds though, like using scripts. But then you need to maintain them and have your own API key for the OpenWeather API or, another very popular one from Optmyzr.
However, these are not simple and straightforward to implement. But if you’re an Optmyzr customer, we’ve made things easier for you with the ‘Optimize Campaigns by Weather’ tool.
Optmyzr Weather-based Campaigns
But why use day-to-day weather forecasting when seasons change over months?
Weather conditions can be added to work with the change in seasons by using automation to check the weather of upcoming days and accordingly adjust the target locations, campaign status, targets, etc.
There is one other reason why you should leverage weather-based advertising. With evolving global climates, there are some locations where the traditional summers now look like pre-monsoon seasons. As climates get warmer, it would make sense to look at the day-to-day weather conditions and then plan your strategy. That’s where weather-based advertising can help you.
There are even more applications for using weather forecasting conditions in PPC campaigns. But the important thing is to understand how it can be used as leverage for your campaigns.
We hope the ‘Optimize Campaigns by Weather’ tool helps you smartly execute your campaigns. But if you’d like to know more about it, please reach out to our support team at support@optmyzr.com. Or if you’re not a customer already, and would like to try it out, sign up for a 14-day free trial today.
