The kids are out of school (and shuttled right into camp). College students leave term paper deadlines behind them. Workers of all stripes pack their families up in the jalopy and drive’em down to the shore for a couple of weeks. What do these people have in common?
They’re NOT parked in front of a computer.
Although it’s not true across the board – some college kids, for instance, are in summer office jobs and internships that make upperclass courses look tame – even geeks start itching to “get off the grid” when the mercury starts to rise (as Robert Scoble points out). That contributes to the Summer Slump, when online traffic and ad spending traditionally takes a hit.
A lot of web publishers are feeling it, as this Webmaster World thread attests (thanks, SEW). Their wisdom for beating the heat? Offer content (or products) that will appeal more to summer searches; use the downtime to create killer content so that it’ll be there when the clicks return in the fall; if you can’t beat’em, join’em (hit the beach and live like a retiree for a couple months).
You might reason that SEMs are squeezed also. Well, not as much as you’d think. Although e-tailers are in a downturn, they know that they’re looking forward to less summertime business and adjust their online ad spending accordingly. We benefit from their foresight, and campaign performance remains steady, since there’s still generally enough inventory to make up the difference.
Still, like heading into the sunshine shirtless without slathering on some SPF 30, it’d be silly to go into the season without taking some precautions. We invest in summertime keywords. We retool creatives for the season, and keep up creative testing in different markets. But its been our experience so far that the dreaded Summer Slump is more like a blip.
