You scratch your head, unable to fathom why your Google Adwords campaign hasn’t changed, yet your business hotline has stopped ringing.

Perhaps Google has installed a new feature on Adwords that you don’t know about, although this is unlikely.

Has your Adwords manager or consultant perhaps tweaked the settings for a trial period? A good feedback loop between you both is essential after any Adwords adjustments to see if these have directly affected customer phone calls and real business.

Sometimes, it just isn’t down to Adwords alone.

Think about your target customer; could it be that they are not in a buying state of mind at the moment because it’s cold outside?

It might sound far-fetched, but sometimes drilling down into your customer’s mentality further can uncover some clues.

Let’s look at the phrase ‘garden services’ and see if we can discover and prove a yearly trend on seasonality from which we can draw some conclusions.

First, open Google trends

Next, type ‘garden services’ as a phrase and set the drop-down date range to ‘Past 5 years’ and change the country to “United Kingdom’ (or your country of choice).

You should then see this trend graph appear:

The conclusions we can draw from this graph are that it would seem that more and more people are paying others to look after their garden for them as people have more potentially disposable income or reduced interest in doing it themselves.

Almost year on year, the search phrase ‘garden services’ has increased in the spring and summer, then dropping off to its yearly low point in December.

It would seem that the peak period for people being in the mindset and actively searching Google for this phrase, to tame their wildly-growing garden is early spring to late spring.

If your Google Adwords account has stopped registered increased click activity, and your costs have also naturally reduced, we must always think about what might be happening in real-life terms, beyond the screen.