Does the Weather Affect Your Online Sales

I thought I'd just quickly mention a bit of a phenomenon that I've noticed with some online stores that I have back-end access to. The weather on any given day seems to affect the traffic and sales conversions on certain stores more than others.

As an example, one of my stores is Farang Thai Language Shop which is an online retail store for people who want to learn Thai. This store is aimed at Australians and with Thailand now such a popular tourist destination for Aussies, more of us are developing an interest in the Thai language.

With this site I am seeing a fairly clear correlation between nice warm or hot weather and an increased number of sales and website traffic. If we get a week of good weather in say Sydney it appears more orders are generated from Sydney addresses. The same can be said of all major cities.

I think warm weather works for this site because Thailand itself is very hot - the place most people will probably use their new Thai language skills. This must remind people of a possible or planned trip to Thailand, driving them to act.

Does this mean those of us managing PPC campaigns should also be taking the weather into consideration when managing PPC budgets day-to-day? Another factor to consider - that's all we need!