How to use Google Ads Promotion assets (a step-by-step checklist)

With Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and the holiday season fast approaching, you’re probably knee-deep in holiday account planning.

Today, we’re zeroing in on a Google Ads feature that you can use all year ‘round, but may be particularly useful to you and your customers during the holidays: Promotion assets.

Promotion assets (formerly known as promotion extensions) are an optional addition to your Search or Performance Max campaigns. They allow you to highlight special deals, sales, and discounts your business is currently running, alongside your standard ad headlines and descriptions.

Promotion assets can show on Google Search, and on Google Maps if you have a local promotion offer.

While you absolutely can edit your search ad text to include promotional messaging, promotion assets offer a few unique benefits. Specifically, they:

• Stand out in search results: Promotion assets may be bold or have a box around them, so they can really capture a user’s attention and increase your click-through rate.
• Allow for flexibility: You can highlight deals and offers without constantly editing and re-submitting your core ad text. You can even schedule them to go live (and turn off) in advance, which saves you lots of time.

To show special deals and sales with your Shopping ads, you need to set that up in Google Merchant Center rather than Google Ads. These are called Merchant Promotions, and they run through a separate system.

If you’re an ecommerce business, head over to Merchant Center to set up your deals and promotions.

To create a new promotion asset, go to Assets > Assets on the left-side navigation in Google Ads, tap the + button, and choose Promotion.

You can add promotion assets at the account, campaign, or ad group level.

If you define multiple assets across the various levels, Google will use the most specific level available. For example, ad group-level promotion assets would be selected over campaign-level promotion assets.

Part of creating a promotion asset is selecting an “occasion” for your promotion. While you must select from Google’s list of occasions, there is a wide variety of options.

Some are seasonal (like Halloween or Valentine’s Day), but many are generic and flexible, allowing you to run promotions year-round. For example:

• Fall Sale
• Winter Sale
• Spring Sale
• Summer Sale

This means that although you need an “occasion,” promotion assets are not just for big tentpole holidays. Any kind of business can have promotions, sales, and discounts throughout the year.

To ensure your promotion assets get approved, and provide a good user experience, you need to pay close attention to several “fiddly” details. Inconsistency between your asset and your landing page is a common reason for disapproval.

Here’s a checklist of some of those details:

• Language and Currency
• Discount Type: For example
  • Monetary Discount: e.g., “$20 off”
  • Percent Discount: e.g., “20% off”
  • Up to Discount: e.g., “Up to $100 off”
• Item Text (20 Characters): This is where you specify the actual product or service on sale. Keep it brief and relevant, e.g., “shoes” or “house cleaning.”
• Final URL: This link must take the user directly to the specific promotion for that specific item. Do not link to a generic homepage.
• Promo code (optional)
• Minimum order value (e.g., “Valid on orders over $50”) (optional)
• Terms and Conditions (optional)

Promotion assets give you three layers of scheduling control. While we appreciate Google’s thoroughness, the use cases can be a bit confusing! Here’s what you need to know:

1. Promotion Scheduling: the dates your promotion is active

Understandably, the promotion asset is only eligible to show when the promotion is actually running. This means you cannot advertise a promotion before it has started or after it has ended.

2. Asset Scheduling: the dates when your promotion asset can run

This controls when your promotion asset will be eligible to run, which may or may not be the same as the actual promotion dates.

• For example, if your business is running a sale for six weeks but only wants to advertise it via Google Ads during the last two weeks, you can set the promotion asset to be live only during those final 14 days.

3. Ad Scheduling: time of day and day of week

You can set additional scheduling rules to show your promotion asset only on specific days or times of the week (e.g., only during evenings or on weekends).

This article is part of our ongoing Search Engine Land series, Everything you need to know about Google Ads in less than 3 minutes. In each edition, Jyll highlights a different Google Ads feature, and what you need to know to get the best results from it – all in a quick 3-minute read.