Black Friday Tips & How to Set up Promotion Extensions on Google Ads & Google Merchant Center

End of October and Black Friday creeps up super, super fast and every

single year, no matter how much you prepare for it, it comes up quickly.

So we're gonna try to help you prepare as much as you can.

I would say that my best tip that I give clients is to keep your.

Promoting as simple as possible because the more that you create in terms

of complications, , the harder it is for your promotion to be approved

through Google Merchant Center.

Hey everyone.

Welcome back to another episode of Gads Girls.

My is Mel joining us today we have Leandro, you know, and

then we also have Carmen she's another CM here at Solutions eight.

And she's also the manager of the copywriters.

Hey guys, I'm excited to be on the show with you guys today.

We're all together.

Finally, the three dads, girls.

The three of us, the three Canadian dad girls, Carmen's in Vancouver

and Landro and I are in Edmonton.

Right.

Canadians are taking over everyone we are.

YouTube channel is Canadian now.

Oh, I was gonna say, what are we talking about today?

Yes.

Awesome.

We are talking about the best topic that digital marketers all love.

Black Friday, . It's end of October and Black Friday creeps up super, super fast

and every single year, no matter how much you prepare for it, it comes up quickly.

So we're gonna try to help you prepare as much as you can for Black Friday,

especially if you're an e-commerce.

All right, awesome.

So we are looking at the Google Promotions for Merchant Center, I guess quick guide.

So this will tell you what's allowed, what's not allowed and just give you

some, I guess, general tips on getting your promotions approved within gmc.

So, I don't know, Carmen, do you wanna run us through it?

Sure.

So I'll just talk about the first one.

The simplest and easiest one is obviously giving a dollar value, a monetary

discount or a percentage discount.

So it could be anything from 20%, 10%, or even $40 off a given amount.

And then there's also the one where you can have a maximum discount that you give.

So you're giving a maximum of $40 off a certain promotion

that you're giving for black.

Would wanna go through the rest.

Yeah.

There's also a free gift option if you wanna add a free gift.

And we're gonna share this document with you in the description of the

video so you'll be able to access it.

I think this comes directly from Google, so they update it as they

every year with all the new topics.

Mm-hmm.

. We can scroll down a bit.

There's a lot of things that are allowed and a lot of things that are not allowed.

So this is why we recommend getting your promotion set up as quickly, as early

as possible before Black Friday because it can take a few days for these to get

approved and if they get disapproved, then you have to start all over again.

So it's important to follow these guidelines as closely as possible so

that you're not stuck the very last minute with the disapproved promotions.

So you'll see vague discount.

Store credit points back, doesn't work.

Some of these are pretty vague, like overly restrictive.

That's a very vague thing to say.

But you'll be penalized by, by Google if you follow these.

Yeah, it looks like if you're just offering a discount to, somebody who's

in the military that's not allowed or only offering discounts to people who are

paying with PayPal, that's not allowed.

So yeah, all promotions restricted to a subset of users, so you can't do that.

And then I did notice Yeah, there's another one.

Oh, I was reading a lot of people get really excited when they're putting

in the name of their promotions in GMC and they'll put, explanation

marks and they'll put like stars and things to grab people's attention.

But you have to be super simple.

You just gotta say what it is.

Be very clear.

Don't use any weird acronyms or anything or you will run the risk of

getting disapproved, unfortunately.

I would say that my best tip that I give clients is to keep your.

Promotion as simple as possible because the more that you create from

the complications, the harder it is for your promotion to be approved

through Google Merchant Center.

Mm-hmm.

. And also one thing that we talked about between the three of us is that you don't

have to run a sale for Black Friday.

You don't have to.

If you're a newer business and.

Putting up a 20% off your products is going to really hurt you in the long run.

It might not be the best option.

You could do something like add on a free gift where, it costs you 60 cents

to make it or something like that.

But it's still going to be that value add.

We have a, I have a tea client and I was on a call with them the other day with

John and they were just saying, you.

They're still like very new in the early stages.

But one of their tea boxes, boxes of different teas cost them very little

to make, but it would be a really great thing to add on when they're

selling, other tea products like their users, mugs, whatever it is, as car.

So tea, good time.

I was like, speaking of the Carmen, she's not drinking beer.

It's 10 in the morning here, but she's drinking green tea outta a.

Stein of tea.

Yeah, it's a leader Stein , literally from Germany that I

brought back a few years back.

Oh, nice.

another tip of Black Friday for if you work in an agency is

drinking helps , after hours.

I was just telling everyone here that I worked in a different agency

before and I got hired mid-November and right before Black Friday,

and I thought it was so weird.

Nobody was talking to me.

Everyone was just busy and.

There's just a weird environment and I realized quickly that, oh, it's,

black Friday Times, and agencies are very strange and stressful times.

So hopefully these tips will help you be a little bit less stressed.

The other thing is also not to try and launch a website or launch Google Ads

like literally during the month of Black Friday because I think you're just going

to stress yourself out way too much.

And then even your as is not gonna be approved in the end anyway.

Yeah, that's very important.

And I think also there's other things that you can do other than so you have to do

your GMC promotion, but you can also add extensions, promotion extensions within

Google Ads, which is very quick to do.

So I'm gonna show you guys how to set up a, what used to be called a

promotion extension in Google Ads.

So this'll apply to leg gen and e-commerce campaigns.

So if you go into ads and assets.

Now, so this is what is different.

It used to be ads and extensions, but recently they changed it to assets.

So there's all different types of assets that you can add to your campaigns,

but we're gonna talk about the promotion one, so you can find it here.

I'm gonna set up a different one.

So ad promotion, you can add them to the account campaign or ad group.

What I've found is if you add it to the account, you have to

also apply it to the campaign.

So that's super important.

It's easy to just add it to the account and assume that it's working,

but they have to be applied to campaigns or ad groups as well.

We're gonna create anyone, so there's all kinds of options here for whatever

type of motion that you're running.

And today we're gonna do Black Friday.

You choose your language, your currency, and then here is where you get to

choose what type of offer you're giving.

So whether it's a dollar discount, a percent discount, up to a dollar

discount, or up to a percent discount.

So these are the four options.

There's no real flexibility outside of these.

So today, let's say we're offering $20 off.

What's the right on Black Friday?

Let's do black high Feel.

Oh no.

John always picks the red high heel shoes.

. I should have done red.

Red would've fit red here.

So you only have 20 characters, so that actually ends up being really difficult.

Sometime is, is playing within that 20 character limit.

But you'll see here on the side preview exactly what it shows up.

So you can see that that's what's gonna show up on, like, bolted onto

your, your ads and then a final url.

Add that in there.

I'm just gonna.

Add a random one there.

Promotion details.

You could do either promo code or orders over.

So if you do a promo code, you can enter it in and it'll enter in the

exact promo code right there in the app and then orders over it.

Just help you just add that exact message right here.

So that gives you a bit.

More clarification, and here's somewhere that's really important.

So the displayed promotion updates, this is what shows up as the dates that are

your ads are actually going to show.

So let's say I'm choosing October 23rd to October 31st.

That's what's gonna show up here.

But that doesn't mean that the ads are gonna show up during these times.

This is simply the messaging on the ads.

So that's a big mistake that people make, is thinking that, okay, I've

set these dates, my ads are, my asset extensions are gonna stop.

On October 31st, but that's not the case.

So you have to go down into, advanced options.

And this is where you set the date range.

So this is super important.

So you can set let's say we want it to end on October 31st.

You can even play around with certain days of the week that they show or time of.

That's the time of day, but make sure that you have an end date.

Otherwise, these could continue to run forever and ever until you, you catch it.

So that is very important.

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And now back to your regularly scheduled.

What's um, interesting about this is within Google Ads, we really

only have the option to do monetary discount or percentage offset, right.

For this promotion extension up to, percentage discount.

Yeah.

So within the merchant center you also have, the free gift and shipping.

So I guess the promotion extension will only be applicable if you're

running the percentage off, right?

Mm-hmm.

. Yeah, carmen, do you wanna run us through how to set up the promotion

extension, or sorry, the promotion and dmc we did the extension already.

. All right, so lemme just share.

All right, so we're inside of, actually, I'll just back up a little bit.

We're inside a Google Merchant Center here, and if you go into marketing and

then click promotions here, this is where all of your promotions will lie.

And this is a page that I check quite often during Black Friday because I'm

like checking, Hey, is it under review?

Has it been banned?

And anyways, there's a lot of time spent here just praying to

the Google Market Center guides.

Okay, so after you click into the new promotion here, Go into country,

whichever country that you're trying to set up your promotion for.

So I'll choose United States.

The majority of our clients are there.

Language, English, and then, Here is where you get to play with the

different promotion categories.

There is, like I mentioned, the amount off monetary discount percentage off.

This is where you can have the free gift where inside of the promotion

extension, Melissa was just talking about does not have the free gift.

And here you can also offer free shipping.

So I guess I'll just go in and offer a free gift since we already did

the, A percentage discount with, so you gonna get free gift here.

Click on whatever your free gift description is, You can even

add a minimum purchase amount.

So say you only want to give people these black high heels.

If they buy a hundred dollars worth of products on your

store, you can create this as.

And then you also do minimum purchase quantity, but these

both, both of these are optional.

So you click next and then you get to take into this page here.

So it's important to note that you have to have a promotion title and promotion.

Id.

So if you don't have these, then Google Merchant Center won't approve it.

So I'm just gonna make mine up right now and call this Black

Friday twenty twenty three.

And then the promotion ID is what they determine.

Here.

If you wanna have specific products that you want to have a promotion on

instead of sitewide, then you have to add this, promotion it here, so that it's

associated with those specific products that you want to run the promotion for.

So I'm just gonna call it F 23.

So I talked about this one here where you have to have the specific promotion id.

Then you can also choose all products, which is when you have a

Sitewide promotion for your campaign.

And then you can also create custom filters, which I'm

not gonna go into today.

It's a bit longer.

And, but you can create custom filters for specific product categories that

you wanted to create a promotion for.

And then here you have the promotion code.

range of let's say 28th to 31st.

And again, you can change your start time and end time for these campaigns.

And then afterwards you just click create promotion.

And that's as simple as it is to create a Black Friday promotion

in Google Merchant Center.

Super simple.

I think people will very much appreciate that.

Thank you Carmen.

Alright.

Is there any other tips or anything we wanna kind of go over?

I think we've got, we did the promotion extension.

We did how to set it up in Google Merchant Center.

I think we're good.

We'll share this document in the descriptions for you guys to all read.

And if you have any specific questions or anything that we forgot to cover, just put

it in the comments and we will get back to you and answer them as quickly as possible

so that you're all set for Black Friday.

Awesome.

Well remember to comment, click, subscribe, do all of those things for

us, and we'll see you next time on another episode of The Dance Girls.

Bye.