What to Expect For Ad Revenue Seasonality Trends

It’s the end of May, and as we look ahead to the summer months, it’s important to understand what seasonality trends to expect for your ad revenue. Ad seasonality refers to the impact on advertiser spend and ad revenue by consumer events and the seasonal trends in the ad industry.

We’ve discussed some of the more obvious RPM seasonal trends in the past, like how Q4 is the peak money-making time for publishers and why January is a bit slower, but let’s look at the trends of a full year. If you need an RPM refresher, read our previous post on What is RPM and How is it Calculated.

This seasonality is driven by two main factors: RPMs and traffic. These are interlinked factors that are tied to seasonal periods of time throughout the year. These periods can be related to cultural holidays (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukah, Ramadan), commercial holidays (Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day), or ad hoc events, like the Olympics or election years.

Advertisers typically forecast their spend based on monthly and quarterly goals. As a result, we typically see spend lower at the beginning of a month or quarter, and higher at the end of a month or quarter. Advertiser spend also increases significantly for money spending events like Amazon Prime Day, Back to School, Black Friday, Christmas, graduations, and Valentine’s Day. For each of these events, publishers (depending on content niche) will see a corresponding increase in RPM.

Brands also have annual budgets for media spends. Media buyers typically break that budget up into quarters, with the highest amount of spend allocated for months with high spending events. Q1 generally is given the least amount of budget, with Q4 given the most. It’s also typical to see each quarter (and month) start out slowly and build up as the weeks pass. This is so they can monitor the success of the campaigns and re-adjust budgets as needed. And as the year passes on, advertisers are eager to use the remaining budgets so spend increases and therefore RPMs increase.

Ad Revenue Seasonal Trends

We’ve made it through January, historically the lowest RPM month of the year. February and March likely saw an increase for your earnings and while better than January, April may have seen lower RPMs once again, due to end-of-quarter budgets. This month should have seen a nice increase, same with June but the “summer slump” months follow directly behind.

January and July are often the slowest months for publisher revenue earnings. For some ad agencies, the end of their fiscal year is June and for others it is December. This would explain the increase in spending in June, as they try to use their budgets. The increase in December spend would be not only because of the end of the fiscal year but because it’s the largest shopping-related month of the year. Because of this, January and July tend to be the two slowest revenue months for publishes.

Q1 Trends

January revenue may be the lowest you see all year, due to traffic decrease as well as consumer spend decrease. At the end of January, you may see a bit of a lift for the Super Bowl. Valentine’s Day is in February, St. Patrick’s Day, spring break and sometimes, Easter happens in March, so you can expect to see a bit of an RPM lift during these months. Again to reiterate, seasonal events can lead to increased content performance and search interest, which can increase traffic but much of what controls RPM trends are the actions of the advertisers.

Q2 Trends

April through June can vary from month to month. June is typically one of the higher months for RPMs, as the fiscal year is ending for many ad agencies. It’s also the last month in Q2, so advertisers are looking to use their allotted budgets. The summer slump can be a real thing for many bloggers and finding content opportunities to match summer search trends, such as vacations, activities for kids, DIY projects, swimwear trends, can offset the slow traffic.

Q3 Trends

The summer slump continues through July but steadily gains traction as we move into August and September. Back to School hits in August and advertiser spend begins to pick up. September picks up even more, as advertisers are preparing for Q4 holidays.

Q4 Trends

This is go-time for the average publisher! Publish more content, refresh last year’s top performers and let the ad revenue soar! From October to December you can expect to see a significant jump in RPMs, as ad spend is at its highest due to all the shopping-related events, an increase in search traffic, and end-of-year spend.

How to Respond

#1 In slower months, like January, it’s a great time to make any technical changes to your site that you held off on in Q4. It’s typically not recommended to make big adjustments to your site (ie redesign, migration, massive layout changes) during your heaviest traffic months.

#2 A lot of what was mentioned before, with the different holidays and events, is assuming that your blog even covers these topics. Depending your niche, you may have to get more creative on how to include relevant seasonal content into editorial flow. But we would encourage you to try, as the online interest around those topics skyrockets around each event. And to go a step further, get creative with it. There will be one million ‘gifts for your husbands’ out there, find a way to make it more specific and unique, like ‘gifts for the men and women who love to camp’ or ‘gifts for your video gaming husband’. Long-tail angles can pay off in a big way!

#3 Make sure you’re looking at your traffic to see what performed well last year during these time periods. If you can refresh a piece of content from the year before, it’ll give you more time to create new content and get more value out of content written in the past.

It’s important for all publishers to understand the seasonality trends of ad spend across each month. This way, you won’t be taken off guard when your January or July numbers are low and you’ll also know how to prepare to capitalize on time periods of high advertiser spend.