Promotion Assets

A promotion asset highlights a specific discount or offer in your Search ad. Google formerly called these promotion extensions. You choose a promotion type, either a monetary amount or a percentage discount, and enter the product or service name, a final URL, and the language and currency. You can add details such as a special code or a spending limit. The asset shows the offer in the ad itself, so a searcher sees the deal before clicking. Promotion assets are free to add, and clicks are charged at the same rate as the headline. Because the discount appears in the ad itself, it can lift clicks from price-sensitive searchers who would otherwise scroll past.

Dates are the control that makes promotions work. You can pick an occasion, whose name will appear in the ad, and each has preset date ranges. Google lists Black Friday as October 15 to December 15 and Christmas as November 1 to January 15, while some occasions such as Back to school and Mother's day have no fixed dates. Under advanced options you can narrow an occasion's dates but not extend them. To run on your own dates, deselect the occasion and enter a start and end date. You can also limit eligibility to specific days and hours. Google also notes some occasions are unavailable in certain languages, so check your options before planning a campaign around one.

Several rules affect delivery. Occasion-specific promotions must be created or edited within 6 months of their start date to serve, and promotions left unmodified for 6 months stop serving automatically. Promotions set at the ad group level override campaign-level ones, which override account-level ones, and occasion promotions take priority over non-occasion promotions at the same level. For clicks, you are not charged for more than two clicks per ad impression. In Performance Max with store goals, local promotions should include an expiration date, how the offer can be redeemed, and conditions. Set the level deliberately: an ad group promotion for one product should not be overridden by an old account-wide offer.

Mistakes follow from timing and accuracy. Forgetting the end date leaves a promotion running after the deal has finished, which sends people to a page that no longer shows the offer. Changing the landing page without updating the asset does the same thing. Running a small promotion with a big occasion label looks like a stretch and can disappoint. Incorrect capitalization, symbols, or phone numbers in local promotions can cause disapproval. Also, if the discount is not the reason people would click, other assets will earn more of the space. Run a final check on the landing page and the code at checkout before the first day, since a broken code ruins the offer.

This week, list the offers you actually plan to run in the next quarter and match each to an asset with a real start and end date. Use an occasion label only when the offer genuinely ties to it. Check that the landing page states the same discount in plain words and that the code works. Set a calendar reminder to review the asset a day after it ends. After the promotion, compare click rate and conversion rate during the dates with the weeks before, and note the lift for next time. After the offer ends, record clicks, conversions, and revenue in a simple note, so next year's plan starts from real numbers.