Joy to the world, Black Friday promotion extensions have come! While you were sleeping, Google released a brand new ad unit aimed at helping advertisers run more effective holiday campaigns. So if you’re an advertiser that’s been carefully preparing for Black Fiveday—the five day span between Black Friday and Cyber Monday when search volume goes nutty—you now have another valuable asset to add to your bag of holiday marketing tricks.
Here’s the lowdown on Google’s latest ad innovation.
Black Friday promotion extensions…that’s a mouthful. If you’re not familiar with promotion extensions, Google introduced them around this time last year. Promotion extensions give advertisers a way to highlight specific promotions in their text ads without cutting into their valuable character counts.
Promotion extensions were originally manufactured as an answer to increased search volume around the holidays—they replaced the Black Friday and Cyber Monday structured snippets of yesteryear. And, by allowing advertisers to highlight the relevant specifics of their promotions—things like minimum order values, promo codes, guaranteed delivery dates, and shipping details—promotion extensions give you more opportunities to attract prospects with various value props. The proof is very much in the pudding in this case: WordStream clients average a nearly 10% click-through rate when using promotion extensions, higher than both price and sitelink extensions:
As you might imagine, both Black Friday and Cyber Monday are among the “occasions” on which you can already choose to run promotion extensions. Google’s new ad units, however, are slightly different than your run-of-the-mill promotion extension. Rather, they are powered by promotion extensions, and appear as a wholly unique ad unit in the SERP:
If you choose to take advantage of this unique ad format, your ad will show up at the very top of the SERP under “Black Friday Deals.” You’ll have the option to use this new ad unit from now until November 27th, officially.
According to Google, 100 percent of searches for “Black Friday” last year happened between November 19 and November 25, so they are using historical data to pretty tightly define the time parameters of the experiment. The Black Friday ad unit runs on keyword variants related to Black Friday: “black friday deals,” “black friday jeans deals,” etc. To create one, start by adding promotion extensions under the Black Friday or Cyber Monday lables in the Google Ads UI:
You are then going to want to create ad groups specifically geared toward targeting those Black Friday-related terms—unless you’re already bidding on them in an existing ad group, in which case it is perfectly fine to implement them there.
If you haven’t already, give this new ad unit a shot. We know ads with promotion extensions perform better than those without. Odds are your competitors are going to be taking advantage of them come Black Friday, so you’ll need to do the same to stay competitive. And if not, you’ll soar past them to the top of SERP!
And if you’re way behind on holiday campaign preparation, check out our Black Fiveday Checklist to get the full lowdown on how to catch up.
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