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A Guide To Promoting Your Promotions On AdWords

  • Written By Ali
  • Posted December 14, 2017
  • 5 minutes Read Time

With huge promotional events like Boxing Day and January sales just around the corner, now is the time to make sure that your PPC adverts stand out from the rest – although you may have wanted to get ahead of this in time for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Sorry about that. This article will hopefully give you some insight on the new Promotion Extensions available for search campaigns and Merchant Promotions for shopping campaigns so you’ll be all set for the busy winter period and the year ahead!

Promotion Extension

The new beta interface of Google AdWords has been around for a while now and we hope that you have been busy getting to grips with it. There are still some usability issues to be ironed out but on the whole, I love it!

In addition to the makeover, our friends at Google keep unveiling new features for us marketers to get our hands on all the time at the moment; the latest being Promotion Ad Extensions, the new search ad extension which allows you to highlight any promotional offers you are running including the total discount available and the dates that the promotion is active for. This is the perfect way for you to add any promotional information to your ad copy without using any of the limited space available in your headlines, URL or description.

The great thing about Promotion Extensions is how simple they are to set up so there is no reason to not include them when you are running any kind of online discount. It seems like a no-brainer to me. Once on the campaign/ad group that you want to apply the extension to, simply click on the Ads & Extensions tab, click the large blue + symbol and then choose the Promotion Extension option from the drop-down menu. This opens a new area which shows various options you can apply for the Promotion Extension including the discount or deal that you are promoting, the promotion type, promotion dates and when you want it to start and stop appearing with your ads.

 

I love the idea of this new ad extension as it makes the promotion easier to see from a user perspective allowing you to easily highlight your deals without using up any of the characters within your ad copy. As with all ad extensions, it also gives you more ‘real-estate’ on the results page which is always a good a thing! We would certainly encourage you to give these a go and see if it helps drive good quality clicks through to your site during the sales season.

Merchant Promotions

The Merchant Promotion feature allows you to show online promotions in your Google Shopping ads, formerly known as Product Listing Ads (PLAs). The promotion is shown as a tag icon at the bottom of the product area, and when a user clicks on the tag they are shown the campaign name, expiration date and the promotion type (monetary discount, percentage discount, free shipping etc…). Like the Promotion Extension, the Merchant Promotion is a great way to drive quality clicks through to the site, but unlike the Promotion Extension, it’s slightly more tricky to set up.

For this example of how to set up Merchant Promotions, we will assume that you already have a fully configured Google Merchant Centre account which is successfully pulling through items to your Google Shopping product feed, and have also set up a Google Shopping campaign within your Google AdWords account…

First things first, log into your Google Merchant Centre account and click on the three dots drop-down button at the top right of the page. Then click on Merchant Centre Programs, opening a new page which shows lots of interesting features that you can install and run through Google Merchant Centre. Click on Merchant Promotions as this is the feature that will allow you to add promotions to your shopping ads. You will be directed to an application page which you will need to fill and complete to be given the use of Merchant Promotions within your account. Please bear in mind that this is an application and it can take time for Google to respond and approve your request. When you get the green light from Google, head back to your Google Merchant Centre account and you will see that a new Promotions option has appeared. This is where you can now set up and apply the promotions to your products.

Once on the Promotions page, you will see two options, Feeds and List. Both offer a different way to apply the promotions to your adverts, but we will focus on Feeds within this article which is where you create and upload Feeds containing all the required attributes for Google Merchant Centre to apply the promotion to the correct products. To do this we would suggest that you follow this very simple guide from Google.

The next time that Google reindexes the products on your Google Shopping feed, the new promotions that you have set up will be included.

So there you have it, two fantastic features to help you shout about your promotions through Google AdWords! If you have any questions or comments please feel free to add them to the comments section below.

Ciao for now.