Boost Your PPC Campaign Performance Using Promotion Extensions

With Black Friday here, Cyber Monday approaching and the build up to Christmas on our doorstep, ensuring the best deals are seen by potential customers is key to the success of many ecommerce websites.

If you’re an online retailer wondering how this is all possible, promotion extensions are the answer! In this blog, I will explain how to get your website promotions in front of potential customers on Google.

What are Google Ads Promotion Extensions?

Promotion Extensions are a clickable link beneath your main ad text, which highlight special promotions your business has to offer. Like other extensions in Google Ads, these add value by providing the additional information you need to stand out in a crowded online marketplace. These can also increase your click-through-rate, which is a huge boost for ads.

By displaying your best offers in ads, your business is giving people more reasons to purchase their desired product from you and can increase the number of searchers who actually click on your ad from a given search query. What’s more, Promotion Extensions are super-easy to use!

What are the benefits of using Promotion Extensions?

• Increase your ads performance: Many advertisers, including our ecommerce clients, are using Promotion Extensions alongside their current ads to increase CTR, sales and revenue. These can also help boost your keyword quality scores, a key metric in the PPC auction process to determine your ad rank and improve the relevance and potential engagement of your ads.
• Save time: Whether your business is running a sale for just a few days or displaying offers for a longer-term promotion, such as 10% off orders over a given price, Promotion Extensions are quick to set up and easy to manage. These can be added at account, campaign or ad group level in Google Ads and are easier to update than creating new ad copy for each specific promotion.
• Flexible Scheduling: Promotion Extensions can be set up in advance for specific dates. This could include larger global events such as Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Boxing Day sales or any other specific dates in which your website is running special offers. You can also schedule days of the week and times of the day that you would like your offer to show, to focus your offers at key times of day and week depending on your target audience.

How do I set up Promotion Extensions?

You can set up Promotion Extensions in the Google Ads interface by following these simple steps:

1. Go to the Ad & extensions tab in your Google Ads account and select Extensions from the menu at the top of the page.

2. Click the  button and select Promotion extension from the drop-down list.
3. This will then display the following, where you can enter all the details of your promotion, including occasion, language, promotion type, URL and much more.

4. Using the Advanced drop-down feature also allows you to set the running dates of the promotions – when they start and pause. This varies from the “Display promoted dates” option which is only used to visually show the offer dates in your promotion extension – this is a crucial difference when creating your extensions.

Tips on using Promotion Extensions

• When setting up Promotion Extensions, it’s important to remember that you must choose which pre-set option is relevant to your offer.

Your options are:

1. Monetary discount: A set amount of money your product will be discounted by, i.e. “£X off…”
2. Percentage discount: A set percentage that your product will be discounted by, i.e. “X% off…”
3. Up to monetary discount: A maximum amount of money off your product i.e. “Up to £X off…”
4. Up to percentage discount: A maximum percentage off your product i.e. “Up to X% off…”

• You also have the option of setting up further promotion details, including promotional codes and discounts on orders over a certain price.

Start and end dates for promotions can be set in Google Ads to ensure that you only show your offers when they are valid

• Although you can run Promotion Extensions for any occasion, there are also pre-populated options to choose from:

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• When entering the item description for your offer, you need to keep this short and sweet, as you are limited to 20 characters.

• To ensure your Promotion Extension is approved, you must include the correct URL of the promotion on your website. This is the URL that users will be taken to when they click on your extension.

Advertisers will quickly see the benefits of using Promotion Extensions within Google Ads campaigns. As your confidence grows, you will feel empowered to run these extensions more frequently in line with your website’s own promotions, rather than just relying on events such as Black Friday to use them.

If you would like any further support on managing your ecommerce PPC accounts, including the use of Promotion Extensions, contact us online or call us on 01536 316100.