This guide is here to help you learn about the importance of seasonality as well as provide you with tips on how to get more from your Google AdSense account and site during peak seasonal traffic. This guide is filled with easy, actionable insights you can start implementing today.

Here’s a sneak peek of what will be posted over the next couple of weeks to prepare you well for this busy time of the year. Let’s get holiday season ready!

• Pre-holiday season: How to prepare? 
• During the holiday season: How to maximize the opportunities 
• Post holidays: Looking at 2020 

Defining seasonal periods 

What is seasonality?

Any predictable fluctuation or pattern that recurs over a calendar year is defined as seasonality. It can be categorized into 3 types of events and holidays:

1. Cultural (e.g. Ramadan, Thanksgiving, Christmas) 
2. Commercial (e.g. Black Friday, Singles’ Day, Mother’s Day)
3. Ad-hoc events (e.g. Olympics, Elections, TV series) 

By spotting events and holidays impacting your audience, you can identify your seasonality opportunities to increase revenue and attract new users.

What drives seasonality? 

Publisher revenue is driven by two interlinked factors: RPMs and traffic.

Advertisers are willing to pay more for inventory, leading to higher RPMs. Increased traffic leads to more impressions. These two factors drive seasonal spikes and dips in publisher earnings.

Why is it important for publishers?

Seasonality offers publishers opportunities to attract new audiences and maximize revenues. The upcoming holiday season (October - December) is the biggest annual seasonal opportunity. Let’s explore why!

1. Large increase in internet traffic (higher query opportunity)
   Over the past 5 years, the holiday season internet traffic has grown as users flock online to purchase gifts for themselves and others.
   

2. Higher competition between advertisers (higher query opportunity)
   The holiday shopping season is the busiest retail period of the year. Advertisers spend more during this time to ensure their products and brands are well-positioned at key events like Black Friday and Cyber Monday. For example, consumers around the world and especially in Asia reportedly spent more than $1 billion in the first 90 seconds of Singles’ Day in 2018. Advertisers are eager to be there for moments like this.

Starting the holiday season marathon

Let’s focus on the upcoming season. The October-December period is a global seasonal marathon offering the greatest annual opportunity to maximize your earnings. In fact, this seasonal opportunity is increasing all over. In 2018, the average global interest in Black Friday grew more than twice over the previous 5 years. 

Get your calendar open and mark the following dates:

Let’s see what you can do to make the most out of your site and AdSense account before, during and after the holiday season.

In the blogpost next week we’ll provide you with tips on how to prepare your site and AdSense account for the rush of the holiday season.

This time last year, we committed to making AdSense more assistive and powerful. We're excited to announce a significant update to AdSense; Auto ads are now easier to use and come with better controls to customize the ad experience for your users.

What’s changing

Easy setup and management

- No more messing with ad codes! Auto ads now work through any AdSense ad unit code, so using them on your existing sites is as easy as turning them on in your account.
- For new sites, just add them in the Sites page, copy-paste the AdSense code and turn on Auto ads.

- For pages where you don't want to use Auto ads, add those URLs to your “Page exclusions” list. You can exclude individual pages or entire sections of your site.

- You can see the full summary of your Auto ads settings for each of your sites as an overview.

Greater customization

- You can preview how Auto ads look on your site before they go live.

- You can delete specific ad placements inside the preview using the “delete” button. Auto ads will immediately generate a placement in a new location for you to review.

- You can easily specify the Ad formats that Auto ads places on your site, including Matched content.

- You can control the number of Auto ads you'd like to show on your pages by using the Ad load slider.

Updated reporting

- We're updating our reports to allow you to easily see Auto ads and manual ad unit performance side by side for each of your sites.

Don’t forget to check your Auto ads settings in the new Ads > Overview page to see these changes apply to your sites.

Over the coming weeks, we'll email to let you know that your account has the new Auto ads, and provide further information.

Experiments are coming!

We've received many requests to make it easier to test Auto ads and get accurate performance metrics. We're currently working on creating a new experiment type to make this possible. 

Together with the changes highlighted above, and a new experiment type, you'll be able to see how Auto ads will look on a site, and test out the performance on a portion of the traffic of a site before enabling them fully.

This time last year, we committed to making AdSense more assistive and powerful. We're excited to announce a significant update to AdSense; Auto ads are now easier to use and come with better controls to customize the ad experience for your users.

What’s changing

Easy setup and management

- No more messing with ad codes! Auto ads now work through any AdSense ad unit code, so using them on your existing sites is as easy as turning them on in your account.
- For new sites, just add them in the Sites page, copy-paste the AdSense code and turn on Auto ads.

- For pages where you don't want to use Auto ads, add those URLs to your “Page exclusions” list. You can exclude individual pages or entire sections of your site.

- You can see the full summary of your Auto ads settings for each of your sites as an overview.

Greater customization

- You can preview how Auto ads look on your site before they go live.

- You can delete specific ad placements inside the preview using the “delete” button. Auto ads will immediately generate a placement in a new location for you to review.

- You can easily specify the Ad formats that Auto ads places on your site, including Matched content.

- You can control the number of Auto ads you'd like to show on your pages by using the Ad load slider.

Updated reporting

- We're updating our reports to allow you to easily see Auto ads and manual ad unit performance side by side for each of your sites.

Don’t forget to check your Auto ads settings in the new Ads > Overview page to see these changes apply to your sites.

Over the coming weeks, we'll email to let you know that your account has the new Auto ads, and provide further information.

Experiments are coming!

We've received many requests to make it easier to test Auto ads and get accurate performance metrics. We're currently working on creating a new experiment type to make this possible. 

Together with the changes highlighted above, and a new experiment type, you'll be able to see how Auto ads will look on a site, and test out the performance on a portion of the traffic of a site before enabling them fully.

Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of Marathi, a language spoken by over 80 millions people in Maharashtra, India and many other countries around the world, to the family of AdSense supported languages.

The interest for Marathi language content has been growing steadily over the last few years. With this launch, AdSense provides an easy way for publishers to monetize the content they create in Marathi, and advertisers can connect to a Marathi speaking audience with relevant ads.

To start monetizing your Marathi content website with Google AdSense:

1. Check the AdSense Program policies and make sure your site is compliant.
2. Sign up for an AdSense account
3. Add the AdSense code to start displaying relevant ads to your users

Welcome to AdSense! Sign Up now!

Today, we’re excited to announce the addition of Marathi, a language spoken by over 80 millions people in Maharashtra, India and many other countries around the world, to the family of AdSense supported languages.

The interest for Marathi language content has been growing steadily over the last few years. With this launch, AdSense provides an easy way for publishers to monetize the content they create in Marathi, and advertisers can connect to a Marathi speaking audience with relevant ads.

To start monetizing your Marathi content website with Google AdSense:

1. Check the AdSense Program policies and make sure your site is compliant.
2. Sign up for an AdSense account
3. Add the AdSense code to start displaying relevant ads to your users

Welcome to AdSense! Sign Up now!