For those of us immersed in the world of Facebook advertising, one of the biggest draws is the unparalleled, laser-like level of audience targeting that Facebook’s ad platform offers. However, much like Gogle Ads, Facebook doesn’t provide an inbuilt option to weather target your campaigns, so for this you need to use a 3rd party weather targeting tool like WeatherAds.
For those of us unfamiliar with the concept, weather targeting simply means to target your audience based on their local weather, or to put it another way, trigger certain ads based on certain weather conditions. For example, a weather targeted campaign could show creative A wherever it’s sunny, creative B wherever it’s rainy, and creative C wherever the temperature drops below 30F. Hence at any given moment in time, different creative variants could be displaying in different parts of the country based on the localized weather in those regions.
The benefits of running weather adaptive Facebook campaigns are manifold – many brands have doubled or even tripled their conversions, clicks and engagement rates – whilst simultaneously lowering their cost per acquisition. For the 30% of businesses whose sales are directly impacted by the weather, being able to activate ads before, during or after specific weather events is an essential strategy for maximizing their key performance metrics across social.
Thankfully, WeatherAds makes weather targeting your Facebook campaigns easy like Sunday morning. With WeatherAds, users can assign weather based rules to their ad sets, automating ads to appear at those times and in those locations where the weather is conducive to clicks, shares, and conversions. The tool has a super intuitive, point-and-click dashboard, allowing users to add weather targeting to their Facebook campaigns in less than 5 minutes without having to write a single line of code.
Since Facebook is, to all intents and purposes, a visual platform - with a richer selection of image and video-based ad formats than Google’s Display Network - Facebook ads lend themselves particularly well to weather targeting. Being able to marry weather triggers with weather-based creative and copy within your ad units opens up endless opportunities for creative experimentation and optimization. From brand awareness to direct response campaigns, boosting posts to generating in-store visits, Facebook is the perfect channel across which to deploy weather triggered ads.
Which Brands Get the Biggest Lift from Weather Targeting Facebook?
There’s a huge swathe of businesses across countless verticals that are directly impacted by weather with regards to demand for their products or services. These include HVAC, home services, food delivery, restaurants, local tourist destinations, apparel brands, and many others. For more on this see our Guide to Weather Marketing.
On the other hand, even if your products or services are not obviously weather-sensitive, you can still use weather targeting to your advantage. Since weather impacts consumer behaviour, mood, and receptiveness to marketing messages, it constitutes a powerful signal to inform your media buys and contextualize your ads.
For instance, app companies, streaming services, and news portals can all use weather targeting as part of their customer acquisition strategy. One way they can do this is by targeting consumers experiencing bad weather, since they are more likely to be indoors, on their devices and in a more idle or ‘browsing’ state – making them more receptive to ads. One study found that social media posts reactions doubled on rainy weekends, and interaction increased by 90% when it was raining.
E-commerce stores can use weather targeting to offer coupons redeemable in-store on bright sunny days, (potentially targeting localized mobile users only), and online deals on wet weather days. Poor weather often leads to an increase in online store traffic for retailers, and weather targeted Facebook ads can be used to engage consumers online and funnel them to the webstore when bricks and mortar store footfall dips.
How to Create Weather Based Facebook Campaigns
Step 1
Creating a weather triggered Facebook campaign couldn’t be simpler with WeatherAds. The first thing to do is to create your free WeatherAds account and sync it up with your Facebook ads account. The integration process is quick and straightforward and will work with both standard Facebook accounts as well as agency-level business manager accounts.
Step 2
The next step is to import your Facebook campaigns into WeatherAds for weather targeting. Weather targeting for Facebook works at the ad set level, so make sure that your ad sets are already set up in Facebook and ready to roll, replete with your weather-relevant ads.
For example, if you want to trigger a sunny creative when it’s sunny and a rainy creative when it’s rainy, then you will want to create 2 ad sets within your campaign. Ad set 1 would have the sunny ad, and ad set 2 would have the rainy ad.
Once your ad sets have been created, and the appropriate budget, audience targeting, and placement settings checked, you’re ready to import them into WeatherAds to assign weather based rules (or triggers) to them.
Step 3
And now for the fun part! Simply create your weather targeting rules for each of your ad sets using the WeatherAds weather rules builder.
Step 4
Sit back, put your feet up and grab a beer whilst WeatherAds gets to work driving you a super high conversion rate on your newly launched weather triggered Facebook campaign. Once your targeting has been set live, WeatherAds updates your campaign around the clock based on latest weather data, automating ads to play/pause at city level depending on what your audience's weather is doing.
Weather targeting for different campaign objectives
App Installs
An app company can automate their Facebook App Install campaigns to appear only in those locations where the weather is bad – with the knowledge that consumers will be more likely to be indoors and using their devices recreationally. Here’s a great example of a taxi app install campaign that could use inclement weather triggers to boost app downloads.
Traffic
An online retailer can display ads for stock that chimes with their audience’s weather - for instance, ads for warm winter jackets triggered by cold temperatures or snow, and ads for raincoats triggered by rainfall. Photos, videos and carousel ad formats all work great with this objective.
Video Views
Video is a great medium in which to get your message across – and becomes all the more powerful when coupled with weather targeting. When BMW ran a weather triggered Facebook ad campaign for their X-Drive model, they achieved ~30% uplift in engagement when snowing, and a 16X total ROI from the campaign.
Retargeting
Supercharge your remarketing campaigns by coupling them with intelligent weather triggers. Whilst remarketing works great, it can quickly lead to ad fatigue, also known as ad blindness. This is why adding weather based rules to your remarketing campaign can really increase conversions whilst lowering your cost per conversion/ acquisition. This ad for an air conditioner could be paired with a temperature trigger of over 85F.
Store Visits
Store visit or local awareness ads are ready made for weather targeting. A restaurant or café can run a weather targeted store visit Facebook campaign with several creative variants playing on the viewer’s current conditions. For example, one ad triggered by hot weather could say “come in to your nearest store and cool off with a frappé”, and a second variant synced to cold weather could say “come in and warm up with a hot cappuccino”.
Event responses
Event response campaigns fit hand in glove with weather targeting. Why not promote your event based on the weather that is forecast at the event? For example, a music festival could leverage a promising weather forecast as a marketing opportunity to drum up bookings. Alternatively, promoting the event during spells of pleasant weather - when people’s thoughts turn to going outdoors - is another strategy.
Key Takeaway
Regardless of what type of business you are, or indeed what your Facebook campaign objective is, it’s likely that you can benefit from weather targeting your Facebook campaigns. Since weather impacts consumers on so many levels, both emotionally and physically, on top of being a critical driver of sales for 30% of global products and services - most companies stand to benefit from leveraging real time weather to contextualize and personalize their social media marketing campaigns. If you’d like to bounce some ideas around about running a weather triggered ad campaign across Facebook, Google Ads, Display & Video 360 or Instagram please send us an email or schedule a time to chat.
