In case you hadn’t noticed, the holidays are fast approaching! You may have already made your seasonal adjustments to your budgets and bids, but have you added any holiday extensions?
In the past, to advertise holiday promotions you would have had to either create a new text ad or update an existing ad. Creating a brand-new ad presents a problem because it takes time for the ad to build up history and might not perform as well during the sale week. Updating an existing ad would reset that ads quality score to zero and could negatively affect the performance during the holidays as well as after when you update the ad again.
For these reasons, extensions help advertisers promote their messages without hurting the performance of their campaigns or having to create special text ads for short sale periods. You can still create a new sale ad that you might want to run alongside other ads with the best historical performance.
There are three primary types of extensions you can use to boost your holiday promotions this season:
- Structured snippet extensions
- Sitelinks extensions
- Callout extensions
Structured Snippets
Google just released an update to the structured snippet extension, specifically designed for Black Friday and Cyber Monday. If you have any specials you are promoting during these weeks it is a good idea to add each extension to your campaign. The extension will provide an extra line of the free real estate that you can use to promote your special offers. These Black Friday/Cyber Monday extensions are located under structured snippets at the bottom of the list.
The Black Friday extension is scheduled to run from November 20 – 27th automatically. Compared to regular structured snippets, you only have to add 1 value instead of 3. Avoid using punctuation because using one exclamation mark will get your extension disapproved. It is also a good idea to go back and verify that your extension is approved. Here’s an example of what a Black Friday structured snippet could look like:
The Cyber Monday extension works the same as the Black Friday promotion, except if you have them both enabled the Black Friday extension will trump the Cyber Monday and only run through November 28th. Again, you will want to avoid using punctuation or capital letters to prevent the extension from being disapproved. Here’s an example of what a Cyber Monday structured snippet could look like:
Sitelinks Extensions
If you have a specific landing page that promotes your Black Friday sales, you can create a sitelinks extension, which leads the searcher to this page. You will want to schedule this extension to show during the promotion dates. You can use sitelinks to create any holiday message and use the schedule to test different promotional messages. Here’s an example of what a Black Friday sitelinks extension could look like:
Callout Extensions
The callout extensions are another place you can add your holiday messages. You can set-up the special offer messages and schedule those to run during the sale date ranges. This can be used to promote any holiday throughout the year. Here’s an example of what a Black Friday callout extension could look like:
The holidays will come and go before we know it, and there is no better time to ensure you are advertising all the promotions you have available.
