Getting Started With AdWords Promotion Extensions

What Is The Promotion Extension?

AdWords offers several ad extensions which add information to your ad when displayed on search results pages. Sitelinks are those little blue links. Location extensions display the address of the advertiser. Not only do these help your ad occupy more space and be more relevant/attractive (to win those clicks) they also boost your Quality Score in AdWords, helping your ad show higher or at a lower cost/click. Here’s where you find them:

Now let’s get into how you can create one for your own account.

Creating Promotion Extensions

The Promotion Extensions allows an advertiser to display a current promotion and has several options:

• Occasion – Currently there are 12 choices: New Year’s, Valentine’s Day, Easter, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Labor Day, Back to School, Halloween, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Christmas and Boxing Day
• Language
• Currencyy
• Promotion Type – Currently you have 4 choices: Monetary discount, Percent discount, Up to monetary discount and Up to percent discount
• Item – You’re limited to 20 characters of text
• Final URL
• Promotion Details – You can choose between None, On orders over, and Promo code
• Start/End Dates

The interface looks like this:

After you’re done, but before clicking the blue “Save” button at the bottom, you can see previews of your ads with a promotion extension showing. Here are the desktop and mobile renderings of the promotion we set up above:

As you can see, the extension is clickable and will take people directly to the Final URL you specified. Especially in competitive industries, this is a very attractive addition to you ads. But how effective?

Why Use Promotion Extensions

I prefer to let the numbers do the talking. This is a promotion that one of my ecommerce clients ran from March 7-11. The top row shows overall account performance and the bottom row shows the performance of ads when the Promotion Extension was displayed. You quickly see that the CTR is nearly 2X when the extension shows, the cost/conversion is lower and conversion rate is higher.

However, keep in mind that promotions are inherently discount-oriented. You’ll also notice that revenue/conversion is lower for when our Promotion Extension was shown.

Conclusion

For advertisers that regularly run promotions this is a fantastic feature that is well worth a trip to the new AdWords interface. If you haven’t tried it yet, then I recommend testing it out for yourself.