Don’t you just love summer time?
It’s the time of the year when traffic and conversions take a hit, and even a big hit depending on the market that you’re in.
If you’re new to the game and have hit the Summer Slowdown for the first time then rest assure that profits will pick back up in the fall.
Here’s some tips on how to best deal with the summer slowdown :
- Don’t Panic or do anything rash, such as completely pause your campaigns or make drastic changes that you can’t undo. It’s really easy to lose perspective when your profits take a dip. Instead of trying to fight market trends its better to go with the flow.
- Use the Adwords Ad Scheduling Feature to adjust your bids down by 10%, 20%, or even 30% (across the boards) depending on how much of a slowdown you’re seeing. This will improve your profits and ROI. And what’s cool about Ad Scheduling is that you can easily restore your original bids once the market rebounds in the fall.
- You may want to consider holding off launching new campaigns during the slowdown period, since it will be much more difficult to make them profitable. Keep researching new markets and offers, setup your landing pages, and your campaigns, but wait until the markets swings backup to launch your campaigns. I’m sure there’s also markets that do well over the summer, you can also consider focusing on those.
If you have solid campaigns running on autopilot like I do here’s what I suggest: drop your bids and take the rest of the summer off!
My wife and I are off to another mini vacation tomorrow, it’s an amazing resort on a tiny island only accessible by boat. I’ll tell you all about it next week!
adwords ad scheduling summer slowdown
Good advice. Things do seem to be slowing down a little bit. Helloooo Content Network.
Trends are always fun…
We’re up to around 25 affiliate sites through organic search. Once they start making money we’re going to kick the PPC on. The affiliate sites are in competitive verticals, but very high paying verticals I think they will do super good once they get settled in.
Best,
Tyler Dewitt
To be honest, I haven’t seen a slow down in profit in any of our sites. We have been seeing drops in traffic though, but this is more across all traffic sources.
I do agree with your “take the summer off” advice. If it ain’t working out a.t.m. take some time to relax and get energized for the next season
Hope you have a good trip Amit!
Yes it’s very slow for most of my stuff. Three days ago I checked all my sites to see if my Aff Links had been hacked!
Can you clarify :
“Use the Adwords Ad Scheduling Feature to adjust your bids down by 10%, 20%, or even 30% ”
Do you mean limit the time ads are displayed by 10.20 or 30%?
Whic I can see being done via scheduling.
Or do you mean to lower CPC bids by 10,20 or 30%?
Which I don’t see can be done via ad scheduling.
Thank you.
Hi Kevin,
Yes, I mean lower your bids by 10-30%, and it can be done with advanced ad scheduling feature..
-Amit
Hey amit…
I’m reading your blog every week and i really like your way of thinking (mindset) and tips.
One thing i’m still struggling to figure out is how to pick a niche?
Your wrote previously that to find new niches you go to affiliate summit and chat with affiliate program managers.
Do you have any more tips about finding good niches? I’m roaming through categories and have no idea what to start with.
I see lots of successful programs (for example on CJ) but all of them are at the top position in Google, MSN, and yahoo PPC ads for almost any related keyphrase i can think of.
Should that discourage me? and if not what kind of a landing page should i build to a site with 1000′s of products?
Really hope you can help me with those issues.
Thanks.
You’re right – things are slowing down a bit for us too. I figure its the summer. People would rather be out. Extra slow week this week (4th of July); seems that a lot of people are on holiday…
Since this Monday traffic is been slow and profit margins have dropped, both on search and content network. I thinking this is because of US July 04 week?
I envy your lifestyle
I want to do that too (Soon). It’s a great inspiration of what can be done with aff marketing.
I haven’t noticed much of a drop in my market, but it’s good to know, good post. Enjoy the trip.