New Google Promotions Extension To Help Drive Your CTR (beta)

Running promotions on AdWords has always been one of those time consuming, challenging tasks where you need multiple variations of adcopy, squeezing the main CTAs and a voucher code into limited space when it may only be running for just a few days. Even with the new expanded text ads, promotional sale driven copy was always a tricky one to handle.

Well, you’ll be happy to know that will soon become a thing of the past, that’s right, Google has a new extension on the horizon called Google Promotions. It’s currently only available on the new Google UI, so if you’re lucky enough to have an account which is eligible to test the new beta platform, then now is the time to start implementing this into your arsenal.

So, what are these AdWords promotion extensions?

The new extension is designed to increase your overall exposure and visibility on the SERPS by adding a distinctive price tag icon under your ad on Google showing a special offer you’re running in your online store which we’re anticipating will help drive up your CTR considerably.

One of the cool things about this extension, and where we’re going to see it become a major time saver in terms of account management, is that when setting up you’re given the option to give your promotion some extra relevance by applying special events, occasions or seasonality.

Further to this you’re given the option to decide on the kind of promotion you’re wanting to run so weather that be a % off, up to a % off, £xx off or up to a set £xx off. You’re then given 20 characters to give your promotion a title telling your customers what it is that’s on sale.

The extension itself seems to be available to display monetary values in either USD, AUD, CAD, EUR, GBP and NZD.

One of the great things that we’ve found so far about the new extension is the ability to add your promotion code right there in the copy without having to sacrifice any of that valuable character limit. The promo code sits neatly under the price tag icon and under the promotional tile, clear and visible for all to see. No more “Use Code BLACKFRIDAY10” in your adcopy giving you more freedom to pad out your copy with your real core call to actions about your items and or business.

The extensions can be scheduled, so you can set up your entire promotional calendar at the start of each quarter giving you more time to focus on optimisations to help drive more traffic and boost sales. This will be really handy especially for those who regularly run promotions at any given time during the year.

So once you’re all set up you able to see from the image below that the new extension really ads some valuable information to your copy, when combined with other extensions like your site links, callouts, and structured snippets you’ve got a solid ad.

*This is not an actual promotion

It’s believed that the new AdWords UI will be rolled out to all accounts later this year however from what we’re seeing so far after running this extension in several accounts over the past few weeks are significant increases in the CTR, in some cases over 10% higher than other ad extensions such as sitelinks. Of course this is all dependent on the promotion, however we’re very encouraged with what we’ve seen so far during these beta tests and what will be really interesting is seeing how these new extensions are impacting ad relevance and influencing quality scores over time.