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"it's seasonal" is the most commonly accepted excuse in paid media.

sometimes it's true. sometimes it's a convenient explanation for a data or structural problem that nobody wants to dig into.

here is how to tell the difference.

real seasonality looks like this: your search volume data in Google Trends shows a consistent pattern over multiple years. your conversion data from the same period last year shows a similar drop. your competitors' impression share also drops (they're scaling back too).

fake seasonality looks like this: performance dropped in a way that doesn't match previous years. it only dropped in certain campaigns, not across the account. your search volume is flat but your conversion rate fell. your spend is the same but your CPCs went up without an explanation in the auction data.

the most common thing I find when someone says "it's seasonal": a conversion tracking change happened around the same time. a tag broke. GA4 Data Manager migration created a gap. consent mode started modeling instead of observing. the dashboard shows lower conversions, someone calls it seasonal, nobody looks at the tracking.

the check: before attributing any performance drop to seasonality, run a conversion audit and verify the tracking chain is intact. if the tracking is clean and the trend matches previous years, it's seasonal. if the tracking changed around the same time the performance changed, fix the tracking first.

/conversion-audit: https://paidmedialab.com/pack

saku