Lore

Save Your Budget from a Rainy Day

We’ve been running AdWords campaigns for a Charleston based restaurant that has an awesome outdoor patio, which is located on a street with heavy foot traffic. A healthy percentage of their business comes from individuals simply walking by the restaurant or from individuals searching for breakfast or lunch spots online. About ~50% of those searches are coming from mobile devices reinforcing the fact that these individuals are on the go looking for somewhere to grab a quick bite.

As you could imagine, their business is heavily reliant on the weather being nice – foot traffic, outdoor patio, people on the go with mobile devices. In fact, we discovered this to be true by comparing revenue on rainy days to revenue generated on days where there was no rain. On days when rain fell, revenue was in fact down. So what can we as digital marketers do with this information?

Queue Google’s AdWords Scripts!

AdWords has a great tool (er, function) referred to as a Script, which allows you to pull in third party data to dynamically change settings with in your AdWords account. In this particular scenario, we implemented the AdWords Weather Script, which pulls information from the OpenWeatherMap API. At a simplified level, we are running this weather script on the hour every hour. The script checks the weather at OpenWeatherMap and if there is a return of precipitation, we run a command that decreases our keyword bids by 50%. The script then runs again in another hour and if there is no indication of perception, the script reverts the 50% decrease back to the original amount.

You could imagine the amount of work it would take to change these bids manually when its raining and then revert the bids when the rain stops. The Script has helped save a tremendous amount of time from a management standpoint as well as budget for the client, which can then be used at better, more beautiful times of the day!

Have you used scripts within AdWords? If so, which ones?

Learn how to setup your own AdWords Weather Script here.