How Weather Conditions Affect Online Behaviour

Today in London the UK Searchconference takes place. It is a gathering of winners and judges from the UK Searchawards. One of the winners was Fast Web Media’s Weather Fit who won the best PPC Management Software. Tom Smith, director of search at Fast Web Media, talked a bit about the the tool but more importantly showed how the weather conditions impact online behaviour.

The Tool

WeatherFIT is and annotative cloud based software package that allows you to deliver online adverts or content based on localised climatic conditions. It takes into consideration the local weather conditions and locations around the UK to allow you to control which campaigns should show you location based on real-time weather data, improving the ROI of your pay ppc advertising campaigns.

How do they do this?: They combine API’s and then start excluding. It looks at weather conditions.

Why should weather matter?

The weather has impact on what people do online. You can see trends around what sells during different weather conditions.

Heatwave’s for example make people withdraw more cash, because they want to go out for drinks. Google Insights shows that water pistol searches increase when it gets warmer. The problem: the weather isn’t the same everywhere. It is very difficult to control that. So they built weather fit for their client Bravissimo.

Weatherlift does planning in the US based on weather. They examined online demand for sunglasses. During a 92-day period in 2011 they looked at three different cities. They found a lot of information on sunglasses and cloud covers. They found a negative correlation on all of them.

Another research was done by David McDermot who presented at A4U last year. They looked at the major cities, corresponding weather and sales and looked for correlations. They found that the higher the temperature the less we buy but once it gets really warm, the more likely we are to spend online.

They then looked at optimal temperatures for specific products. 11 degrees celsius for example is the best for selling jeans online. They found temperature definitely affects online buying activity. So short term digital strategies are perfect for playing into weather conditions.

Searches for sleds and swimming suits in the UK in 2012.

Concluding

So weather conditions play a big role in how people behave online. It can really make a difference of when you play on this. It is also another example of how taking a closer look at the actual user will give you so much more insights that your marketing efforts are much better.