Seasonal Peaks in Google Ads: Plan Q1 Already in Q4

In many industries, a large share of the year's searches comes within a few weeks. For several of them the rise begins in Q1. If you start your campaigns when demand has already peaked, you have less time and campaigns without any history.

Search volumes in Google show month by month when the rise usually comes. This post is about how you read them in Keyword Planner and Google Trends and turn them into a plan.

My recommendation is that you use Q4 to read the monthly search volumes and decide the budget for Q1. Campaigns and landing pages should be ready a few weeks before searches start to rise.

What the season looks like in a few industries

The table shows some keywords where the pattern has been the same for the last three years. The figures are based on Google's monthly search volumes in Sweden.

Industry	Keyword	Searches start to rise	Most searches
Accounting and tax	hjälp med deklaration (help with tax return)	January and February	March
Property maintenance	sandupptagning (grit sweeping)	February and March	March or April
Tyre workshops	däckbyte (tyre change)	March and September	April, and October or November
Restaurants	påskbuffé (Easter buffet)	February	March or April depending on Easter

Two things stand out in the table. The rise usually begins one or two months before the peak, and a holiday like Easter moves the peak from year to year. Tyre changes also have two peaks a year, which calls for two plans. For hjälp med deklaration, searches in March are more than ten times higher than in November.

Read the volumes in Keyword Planner

Keyword Planner is under Tools in Google Ads. According to Google's help page on Keyword Planner, you need an account with billing information.

1. Select Get search volume and forecasts and paste in the keywords that lead to business for you.
2. Choose Sweden or the places where you have customers.
3. Choose a period of at least two full years so that you can see whether the pattern repeats.
4. Download the list. The file has one column per month, and those columns show the season.

The column for average monthly searches is an average over twelve months and therefore hides the season. The figures are also rounded, and accounts that advertise little may see ranges instead of exact numbers. The shape of the year is still visible.

According to Google's help page on forecasts, the forecast in Keyword Planner takes seasonality into account while the historical figures do not. If you already have Search campaigns, Performance Planner can also produce a forecast per month and quarter.

Compare the years in Google Trends

Google Trends shows interest in a search on a scale from 0 to 100. The value 100 is the highest point in the period and area you have chosen. These are relative figures, not numbers of searches.

1. Search for your most important keyword in Google Trends.
2. Choose Sweden and the period past five years.
3. Check whether the peak comes in the same month every year or moves like Easter.
4. Add a couple of related keywords and see which one rises first.

According to Google's FAQ about Trends data, searches made by very few people show as 0. A broader keyword then works better. Use Trends to see the shape of the curve and Keyword Planner to see how many people search.

Your own figures from last year also tell you a lot. Open the campaigns in Google Ads and segment the results by month. You can then see when the clicks and enquiries came and whether the cost per click rose as more advertisers joined the auction. In Google Analytics you can see in the same way when visits from search increased.

Turn the curve into a plan by quarter

Once you know when the rise begins, you count backwards. Ads are usually reviewed within one business day according to Google's help page on ad review, but other things take longer.

• Smart Bidding can need up to around 50 conversions to calibrate to a new goal according to Google's help page on Smart Bidding learning. More on bidding in the post on bid strategies in Google Ads.
• A new landing page can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks before Google has crawled it, according to Google's documentation for site owners.
• The budget for Q1 needs to be decided before the campaigns are built.

If the landing pages should also appear in the ordinary search results, that is one more reason to build them as early as Q4. We describe that work on the SEO page.

This is what the plan looks like for an industry where the rise begins in Q1.

Quarter	What gets done
Q4	Read the monthly search volumes and decide the monthly budget for Q1. Write the ads and build the landing pages.
Q1	Start the campaigns a few weeks before the rise. Follow spend day by day and read the search terms.
Q2	Compare the outcome with the plan and save the figures for next year.

Let the budget follow the searches. An example: if 40% of the year's searches for your most important keywords come in March and April, a reasonable starting point is to put roughly the same share of the year's budget there. How to work out the daily budget is explained in the post on a budget that lasts the whole month.

The ads also need to follow the season, so that someone searching for help with their tax return sees an ad about exactly that. How to write them is covered in the post on good ad copy for Google Ads. If you start a brand new campaign for the peak, the same advice applies as in the post on short campaigns for events and seasons.

Three questions to answer in Q4

1. In which month did searches start to rise last year and the year before?
2. How large a share of the year's searches came in Q1?
3. When does the budget for Q1 need to be decided, and by whom?

Next step

We pull the monthly search volumes for your most important keywords and draw up a plan by quarter for Google Ads with budget and start dates. The plan is based on the same figures you can check yourself in Keyword Planner.

In which month do searches in your industry start to rise?