What is It?
Seasonal Performance Trends is an insight-driven analytics tool designed for Google Ads users with significant account history. It decomposes your key performance metrics like Cost, Clicks, Conversions, and Conversion Value, into two clear components: Change in Baseline and Seasonal Trends. By visualizing and separating these effects, you can easily spot both the general direction and typical “ups and downs” in your KPIs over time.
Why Use It?
Most PPC marketers lack ready-made solutions for separating and quantifying seasonality and trends in performance data. This tool is built specifically to:
Clarify long-term changes versus repeating cycles in your account results. See if changes in performance are due to permanent shifts or predictable cycles.
Empower you with fast, presentation-ready insight charts.
Support informed decision-making around budget allocation, campaign timing, and strategic planning. Instead of relying on guesswork or “gut feeling,” you can get objective data to back up your recommendation and make more confident decisions about when to increase budgets, launch campaigns, or adjust strategies.
Get exclusive analysis and guide clients or stakeholders with unique, proactive PPC strategies.
Selecting a Time View
The tool allows you to view charts for yearly, monthly, or weekly cycles. Your choice should reflect your analysis goal:
Yearly: Ideal for spotting high-level Q4/Q1 spikes, holidays, or annual lulls.
Monthly: Detect patterns like seasonal sales pushes or end-of-month budget surges.
Weekly: Expose recurring weekday vs. weekend behavior or short-term pulses.
Selecting the right period ensures your charts display the optimal amount of detail for precise planning and recommendations.
Reading the Charts
Seasonal Trends
This chart visualizes how a metric typically moves versus its baseline across the chosen cycle.
Peaks indicate when performance usually “runs hot”, which means it's a good time to ramp up spending or launch promotions.
Troughs reflect expected quiet periods, where you should consider shifting budgets, testing creatives, or focusing on efficiency.
You will also see a "Today" mark that indicates today’s typical seasonal position, helping you contextualize current results vs. historical averages.
Change in Baseline
This chart displays how the overall baseline for your metric is changing, independent of regular seasonality.
A rising baseline indicates that your core metric is steadily improving, and you should consider increasing investment.
A Flat baseline means that current performance is steady, and you should consider maintaining the current strategy.
A Declining baseline means performance is weakening, and you should evaluate ways to improve or adjust budgets.
AI Summary
Each chart in the Seasonal Performance Trends tool comes with an “AI Summary” feature that you can access using the "Summarize with AI" button. Optmyzr AI will interpret the chart and provide an easy-to-understand, plain-language summary of key findings so that you can:
Quickly grasp the main story told by the complex seasonality and trend charts.
Uncover actionable insights and recommended focus periods without having to do manual analysis.
Make these summaries part of client-ready reports or presentations.
Use Case
Suppose you manage PPC campaigns for a major retail client. You want to plan your strategy for the summer months and the end-of-year shopping season. Using Seasonality and Performance Trends, you analyze historical conversions across the last five years.
Step 1: Analyzing Trends
You start with the trend chart for conversions and notice a consistent upward direction over several years, indicating strong long-term growth in account performance.
However, in the most recent quarters, the trend line flattens, signifying slowed momentum or even a plateau. This prompts you to dig deeper into possible market changes or saturation.
Step 2: Exploring Seasonality
You switch to the seasonal chart and focus on the monthly cycle.
Every July, the tool highlights a pronounced lull in conversions. Despite an overall growing trend, July is consistently below the baseline.
Conversely, there’s a clear spike in November and December, with December averaging about 30% above the usual conversion rate during the rest of the year.
Step 3: Strategic Planning
Instead of treating every month alike or overreacting to a single month’s underperformance, you use these insights to set realistic client expectations: “While the account is growing, July is always slow; let’s not panic, but ramp up initiatives as we head toward Q4’s peak.”
For July, you might want to reduce ad spend, shift focus to branding or testing new creative, or promote slower-moving inventory.
Ahead of November and December, you might want to increase inventory and budget, ensuring maximum visibility and sales during the most lucrative period.
By dissecting both the trend (overall direction) and seasonality (recurring ups and downs), you deliver clear, actionable strategies that optimize results throughout the year.