When the weather outside leaves much to be desired, many prefer to stay home and order delivery rather than venture out into the rain or snow. With colder temperatures, demand for taxis and wool sweaters rises, whereas summer sees jumps in demand for ice cream. For many businesses, weather is a significant factor that can affect their sales and, as a result, is one worth taking into account when communicating with their audiences.

The good news is that Yandex.Direct now offers a tool that makes this weather-based situational marketing both simpler and more effective. Weather-based bid adjustments allow you to automate your communications with your audience to always present the most relevant offers. Such bid adjustments could be of service to real estate developers, who during sunny periods could show what a bright and lively neighborhood their apartments are located in, and when it’s rainy and cold, emphasize the warmth and coziness the apartments they are selling.

How it works

Bid adjustments currently work for Text & Image ads, display, Outdoor and video advertising, and even in “Preferred deals” in Yandex.Direct. We plan to add them to other campaign types over time.

Bid adjustments make it possible to raise or lower bids from -100% to +1200% for several meteorological factors: air temperature, precipitation and cloud cover. Yandex.Direct gets meteorological information about the ads' display area directly from the Yandex.Weather service, which uses Yandex's own Meteum technology to create accurate forecasts.

This type of bid adjustment can be applied at the ad group level. When you set up your campaign, we recommend using different creatives for different weather situations.

Let’s say that there are two ad groups: one with ads for Hawaiian shirts, and another for raincoats. The first ad group should be active when it is nice out, whereas the second is better for bad weather. In group 1, we would set the highest positive bid adjustments for when the air temperature reaches 25 degrees without precipitation, whereas group 2 would have positive bid adjustments for cooler temperatures and rain.

These new bid adjustments reduce the amount of manual work needed to respond to the current weather. Let’s say that a long weekend is coming up. You can set up two separate creatives, for warmer and cooler weather. With no additional changes to your campaign, you can rest assured that your offers will be relevant to the users that see them, no matter how the weather turns out.

Weather-based bid adjustments can be useful for all types of businesses: whether demand is seasonal (clothing, footwear, tires) or situational (delivery, taxis), for businesses related to entertainment (shopping centers, games, music, cinemas), larger advertisers (real estate, automotive, FMCG) or smaller businesses (services). Of course, this isn’t a complete list: try out new adjustments, experiment and don't forget to tell us about your results!

To find out more about weather-based bid adjustments, read the corresponding section of the Help guide.