Emperor Augustus & Your SEO Traffic

In 2019, the fourth Thursday of November fell on the 28th, pushing Sunday and Cyber Monday into December — the 1st and 2nd. In 2018, November 22 was the fourth Thursday, leaving an entire week of post–Black Friday revenue attributed to November. When the busiest day in online spending moves into the next month, November traffic and sales can appear 15–20% worse than the previous year, while December deceivingly appears better to the same degree — simply because of where the fourth Thursday fell. This happens again in November 2023 vs. 2024 and 2025, when Cyber Monday falls into December two years in a row, which hadn't happened since 2013 and 2014, when Thanksgiving also landed on the 28th and 27th.

10 years of Thanksgiving

Year	Thanksgiving
2016	Nov 24
2017	Nov 23
2018	Nov 22
2019	Nov 28 — Cyber Monday Dec 2
2020	Nov 26
2021	Nov 25
2022	Nov 24
2023	Nov 23
2024	Nov 28 — Cyber Monday Dec 2
2025	Nov 27 — Cyber Monday Dec 1

I observed this while optimizing SEO & PPC in-house for a fast-growing retail e-commerce site. After the retail rush subsided, I kept coming back to the idea of how the days and weeks fall into the monthly calendar. I've played the in-house / agency / owner musical chairs for 22 years, and the one constant throughout has been monthly and weekly traffic and revenue reporting. I felt compelled to dig deeper into why these large percentage swings occur simply because of how days and weeks land inside months.

SEO reporting — weekly vs. monthly

Agency life revolved around weekly and monthly reporting for clients. Larger, high-volume clients received weekly reports; lower-volume clients received monthly ones. Each Monday began the iterative process of pulling the past week's data and comparing it to the week before, or to the same week a year earlier. Sometimes traffic was up, sometimes down, and each report ended with a few paragraphs explaining the “why” of the fluctuations.

Early in my career, running weekly reports felt daunting — populating impressions, traffic, CTR, conversions, and revenue for every channel, campaign, or keyword each week, then writing it up, seemed tedious. And it was. The monthly reports felt tedious too, but there were only 12 a year, not 52. Over time, though, I grew to prefer the 52 weekly reports. They made life easier — for me and for the clients.

It became second nature. I had a system: logins, templates, tabs, and formulas to quickly populate the data with a mix of semi-automated exports and copy-paste. By mid-afternoon Monday I knew where everyone stood. In the heyday of PPC growth from 2002 to 2007, it was more often good news than bad — but either way, I knew it before anyone else.

When traffic is down, marketers instinctively question a campaign, the ad messaging, seasonality, or whether a tracking tag broke. When traffic is up, we're quick to credit our ad copy, keyword research, or audience targeting. The analysis tries to explain the “real” reasons in a few paragraphs.

SEO data analysis — monthly vs. weekly

For the “analysis” section, there are no shortcuts and no copy-paste. Each fluctuation over a certain threshold needs an explanation. Sometimes it's a runaway keyword with negative ROI. Often it's administrative — a broken tag and missing data, or an expired credit card that shut a campaign down. Maybe the site was down briefly for maintenance, or a DNS issue lingered for four days. Maybe it's early November and retail season kicks in. Any of these can drive the swings in a weekly or monthly report.

Over time, the analysis section was far easier for weekly reports than monthly ones. Processing the data every week simply cultivated a deeper intimacy with it. After four or five months, I'd notice when something didn't feel right: “This campaign has always had 400–450 clicks, but this week it's 750 — what happened?” Or the reverse: “This keyword averages 150 clicks a week and only had 30.” Did it drop in the SERPs? Was there an algorithm update? A page error? A lost backlink? Whatever it was, it's much easier to pinpoint knowing it likely happened in the last seven days.

Monthly analysis is harder. It's trickier to find the culprit in a 31-day window than a 7-day one, and harder to remember what happened three weeks ago than one week ago. And if the problem hit early in the month, you may go 25 days before noticing — losing weeks of performance before you can fix it. If your best campaign underperformed for three weeks, don't be surprised when the year-end, year-over-year report is off by ~6%. Three weeks ÷ 52 = 5.76%, and Excel rounds it to 6%.

Eventually I realized each month, year over year, had slight but similar fluctuations — regardless of industry vertical or market strength.

The moon, the sun & Emperor Augustus

There was another reason monthly reports were harder. How many hours had I spent over 20 years tussling with clients over a sudden 4%, 8%, or 16% swing from one month to the next? Those conversations were tougher for monthly reports because weekly reports eliminate the uncontrollable variables caused by nothing more than the moon — and yes, some Roman politics. Comparing one month to another shows useful trends, but it carries a caveat: months have different numbers of days and capture different parts of the weekly ebb and flow, which for B2B can be significant.

I'll leave the full history to the Roman calendar, but the current number of days per month was set in 46 BC, when Julius Caesar updated the older lunar calendar to the 365¼-day solar calendar we use today. He renamed Quintilis to July (his birth month) and dictated that January, March, May, July, September, and November have 31 days, with February at 29 (30 every fourth year), leaving April, June, August, October, and December with 30. After Caesar's death, Augustus took over and Sextilis was renamed August in his honor — and, as the story goes, he took a day from February for August so his month would match Julius's, and shifted days among the later months to avoid three “long” months in a row.

So if your February traffic is down 10% from January, it's (at minimum) because February has ~10% fewer days (28 vs. 31). As a baseline, March will be ~10% higher than February, while April will be ~3.2% lower than March (1/31). July will be ~3.2% higher than June; October ~3.2% higher than September; and December naturally ~3.2% higher than November — for which you can thank Emperor Augustus. Maybe.

B2B: weekends vs. weekdays

Monthly swings get more complicated for B2B businesses, which see bigger gaps between weekday and weekend traffic — and an even larger gap in conversions. Say a B2B site gets 100 visits a day Monday–Friday and 5 a day on weekends. Ten weekend days at 5 visits is 50, plus 21 weekdays at 100 is 2,100, for 2,150 in the month. The same 31-day month with only four weekends (8 weekend days) totals 2,340: (8×5) + (23×100). Then 2,150 ÷ 2,340 = 91.8%.

In other words, a 31-day month that happens to have four weekends instead of five can show an ~8.2% swing in traffic purely from how weekends fall. August 2022 had 8 weekend days, August 2021 had 9, and August 2020 had 10. If nothing else changed for that B2B company, you'd see an apparent ~4.1% rise from 2020 to 2021, another ~4.1% from 2021 to 2022 — about 8.2% from 2020 to 2022, all from the calendar.

Conclusion

The next time a client, boss, or CMO asks why traffic and sales are off by 4%, 8%, or even 16% — check your calendar first. You might be able to blame it on the moon, or on Emperor Augustus.