Should I use Automated Bidding Instead of Weather Based Bidding?
If your or your client’s business is weather sensitive, we would recommend to target based on weather through WeatherAds, as weather will be the most salient factor in driving clicks, conversions and sales. If your business is only very marginally weather sensitive, then it is up to you to decide whether to go with the automated bidding strategy or a weather based bidding approach.
Won’t Automated Bidding have some weather Data Inherently Baked into it?
Whilst you could argue that Google AdWords' automated bidding algorithm may have some weather inherently baked it, it will be at the most basic level, and certainly won't factor in hourly, daily and weekly, localized fluctuations in the weather for each geo.
It will work on really broad seasonal norms and therefor can’t react in an agile way to changes in weather across different parts of the country, like WeatherAds does.
For example, let's say you are selling T-Shirts, and you run a Target CPA campaign in AdWords. CPA logic will say "Historically you’ve gotten more conversions from LA than from NYC in Spring (partly because it’s warmer in LA than in NYC in Spring) - therefor i'll increase the bids for LA"
However, what happens when NYC suddenly experiences a spell of great weather? CPA would not act on this - it won't factor in the real-time weather data within the algorithm - so you would miss out on a lot of traffic and conversions from NYC during the good weather.
Similarly, If LA had a rainy week, and NYC had a week of sunny weather - conversion optimizer would still be whacking up your bids for LA during the rainstorm, and ignoring NYC - just because seasonally speaking LA is warmer than NYC.
WeatherAds, on the other hand, reacts to real-time weather data with hourly refresh cycles. You can increase bids for everywhere experiencing the type of weather that will result in a surge of conversions for your brand.
If your business is affected by weather, it's much better bet to use weather based bidding as opposed to automated bidding, or at the very least test both to see which performs better.