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Hi! This is Ogino.
In this article, I am going to talk about listing ads, using a business case that had strong results
because of the external factor, “rainy weather.”

Account Summary

The summary of the account is as follows:
Merchandise: Specializing in leaking roof repairs
Rendering Area: The Chubu area
Defined Conversion (CV): Submitting an inquiry form or tapping on the telephone number

Rendering Keywords: 雨漏り (leaking roofs) AND 修理 (repairs), 雨漏り (leaking roofs) AND
修理 (repairs) AND エリア (the xxx area), and others

Operation Policies

For this business case, the client was a repairman who specialized in leaking roof repairs. This is the
type of account that normally brings in a large search volume on a rainy day and is easily affected by
an external factor: the weather. For that reason, various adjustments were made, including raising a
daily budget or bid prices on a rainy day so that the account could attract as many clicks as
possible.

Click counts – days with and without rain

To see the difference in the click counts between days with and without rain, the operation of the
listing ads was continued without changing a daily budget of 8,000 yen for a month. However, the
bidding changes and exclusion modifications were made during the month.

The table below shows the result of the seven-day comparison between rainy and non-rainy days
in July 2017.

* The figures below reflect weekly totals.

Because the daily budget was 8,000 yen, and the total cost was 56,000 yen max for seven days, you
can see that neither a rainy day nor a non-rainy day exceeded the daily budget limit. Note that the
number of clicks were understandably lower on a non-rainy day. It was obvious that the budget was
not fully utilized.

As expected, there were close to twice as many clicks on rainy days compared to the non-rainy days,
and those clicks brought in CVs. With this result, I can say that the operation policy for this account
was on target as expected.

On first look, it may appear that the CV count is low if you look at the numbers only, but there were
those customers who called while looking at the website, supporting the thought that there may be
additional reasons for the click counts than what is reflected in the figures displayed on the ad
management screen.

Typhoon No. 5 Hits Nagoya

Do you remember Typhoon No. 5 that hit our sacred home Nagoya on August 7, 2017?
It was a massive rainstorm that day. One of my umbrellas perished.
Since the storm was as severe as to perish an umbrella, I made adjustments, such as raising a daily
budget higher than the one for a normal rainy day as well as the bidding price. These

adjustments were made so that the client's ads could be properly rendered in response to the
searches from those users who truly needed repairs.

Rendering Result

The account was operated with the same daily budget on August 7, the actual day that the typhoon
hit, and August 8, the day after. The results are as follows:

As I predicted, the client was able to get two CVs during these two days. I consider this CV count a
significant number because a significant number of inquiry calls came in from those looking at the
website, as mentioned earlier.

Knowing that the number of users who perform searches rises when it rains allows you to outdo your
competitors' moves by adjusting the basics, such as raising the daily budget or bid prices to
proper levels.

However, it is always best if you inform your client before you make any adjustments like the above.

Digression: Targeted Rendering According to the Weather by Google

This is an extreme digression, but there exists nowadays a type of ad that is linked to the weather
although it does not come up as a default function in AdWords. Simply put, this function enables you
to render your ads according to the weather data in your target region that you obtained by using an
AdWords script. If the weather condition matches, AdWords will adjust the bidding price and render
the designated campaign. Initially, this was something only Google has come up with; however,
Yahoo! Premium Advertising officially started offering these weather-based ad campaigns in July
2017.

How to set up such campaigns on AdWords is currently complicated, but if this function becomes a
default function in the future, it can be easily set up on the ad management screen, and the range of
your rendering methods will expand. I am looking forward to future releases. Please do not hold your
breath, though, because as of this writing, it is not a default function on AdWords.

Reference: AdWords Script/Yahoo! JAPAN

Summary

How was it?

Depending on your client's line of business, the increase/decrease in customers is affected by
external factors, such as the weather or seasons. One of the characteristics of listing advertisements
is that you can reflect the settings immediately on your account.

Therefore, it is critical to probe for better solutions by repeating various kinds of rendering
patterns. If you catch any factors, which affect trends, like the weather as shown here that increases
search volume, you can adjust your daily budget or bidding price according to those external factors
as a means to improve customer attraction.

This has been Ogino writing.