Maximizing Shopping Ads with Promotion Extensions
In the highly competitive atmosphere of Google Shopping it’s important you do everything possible to make your products stand out from the rest. If you haven’t already, make sure you’ve optimized your merchant center feed according to this helpful article. Once all the items on that list has been crossed off you should be good to go with regards to your ads appearing in the Shopping results. But why stop there?
If you want a more noticeable ad there’s one more feature you should be using – Merchant Center Promotions. You might have heard of Promotion Extensions in Google Ads and the concept here is similar. By adding promotions to your ads, you effectively increase the amount of clickable parts of your ad and draw more attention to it since it has a promotion that other ads aren’t utilizing. But there’s a catch. The guidelines for Merchant Center promotion extensions are much more strict than their counterpart in Google Ads and Merchant Center is sort of quick to reject your promotion. I say “sort of” because the review process usually takes 2-3 days as opposed to the Google Ads process which can finish in less than a day. So it’s best to make sure everything is right the first time because you may miss out on precious days when your promotion is actually running.
In my experience the most common reasons for rejection are the following:
- 1. Promotion needs to be explicitly stated throughout the purchase process. This means the promotion must be visible on the product page, cart, and checkout pages.
- 2. Promotion details need to mirror with what’s stated on your website. If the promotion is a free backpack, but your promotion extension says “free bag” it will get rejected.
You don’t always need to run promotion extensions, but certainly take advantage of this useful feature when possible. As you can see in the ads below these extensions can make a huge difference to consumers when bombarded with products from other competitors. I hope this helps you get started maximizing your Shopping Ads. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions or comments regarding this useful feature!