See a Sample Report (PDF)The off season is when search is cheapest and the decisions that fill your spring are being made. Both of those are true at the same time, which is the whole argument, and most companies here do the opposite.
We see the same pattern every year on Long Island accounts. Demand softens, the budget comes off, and the account goes quiet until the phone starts ringing again. By then the customer has already picked three companies to call, and the picking happened during the months you were not there.
Two Curves That Do Not Fall Together
Demand falls in the off season. Competition falls faster.
A share of your competitors switch their campaigns off entirely. Others cut budgets to the point where they stop winning the top positions. The auction thins out, and the same keyword that was expensive in May costs less to win in December, against a smaller field.
Meanwhile the searches that remain skew toward research rather than purchase. Lower intent per search, and higher value per impression, because research is where the shortlist gets made. A homeowner reading about replacement windows in January is not buying in January. They are deciding who to call in April.
If you are not in the results during the research, no amount of April budget puts you on the list. The list was written without you.
What the Off Season Money Should Buy
Four things, and only the first is a direct lead play.
One: hold the position you already have. Not full spend, enough spend. A campaign that stays on keeps its history and its Quality Score and its position. A campaign switched off gives all three back and pays to rebuild them at the exact moment they are most expensive. Reducing the budget is a dial; pausing is a switch, and the switch costs more than it appears to.
Two: buy the research queries. Cost questions, comparison questions, "how long does it last", "is it worth it". These convert poorly this month and well in four months, through a brand the reader already saw. They are priced on this month's conversion rate, which is the arbitrage.
Three: build the pages that need time. A town page published in November has the whole winter to be crawled, indexed and start earning position before the season. The same page published in April is starting from zero in the month you needed it.
Four: fix what cannot be fixed when you are busy. Tracking, call routing, the form nobody has tested, the landing page you have been meaning to rewrite. Every one of these is invisible while broken and none gets an hour in June.
The Case for Not Going Dark
Worth stating plainly, because "pause it for the winter" sounds prudent.
A paused campaign is not a paused relationship with the auction. It is an absence. Your impression share goes to the competitors who stayed on, some of whom will hold it into your season because they accumulated data and position while you were away. Restarting means a learning period, which means a stretch of worse performance, which lands in the month the work has to come in.
The honest exception is capacity. If you are booked solid and genuinely cannot take another job, spending should come down, and that is correct for the right reason. But bring it to the level that keeps you findable rather than to nothing, and be specific about what the remaining money buys.
How to Set the Off Season Number
Three steps and none of them require new data.
- Find your trough from last year's revenue by month. This is your window and it is probably narrower than you think.
- Decide the smallest daily budget that keeps your core terms serving. For most local trades this is a surprisingly low number, because the competition is thin in exactly this window.
- Put the difference into the durable things above, rather than back in the bank. A dollar that buys an indexed page or a fixed conversion action is still working in June. A dollar you did not spend is not.
The test for any off season dollar is whether it buys something that survives the quarter. The Q4 version of this argument is here, and the planning version is here.
Spring is won in the winter, in this market, in these trades. The companies that have the best Aprils around here are not the ones who spent the most in April.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Is it not wasteful to advertise when nobody is buying?
- People are researching, which is where the buying decision gets made. The waste would be paying for the same position in April against a full field of competitors, when the shortlist has already been written.
- How much should the budget come down in the off season?
- Far enough that you are comfortable holding it, and not to zero. The wrong question is what can I cut. The right one is what is the smallest spend that keeps me findable, and then whether the money above that buys anything durable.
- Does this apply to emergency trades that are busy in winter?
- Reverse the calendar, not the principle. Every trade has a trough. Whenever yours is, that is your cheap window and your competitors are pulling back in it.