New Shopping Promotions Format

Promotion tags for shopping campaigns have been around for a while, giving advertisers an easy way to call out their special offers and let users know that they can get added benefits. The current promotion tags do a great job of standing out with an icon and the “Special Offer” text, but they tend to look generic across advertisers. This means that in the holiday seasons, everyone looks identical with the ongoing promotions to take advantage of the increased demand.

As of today, it looks like Google is starting to test out a new promotion format for a small subset of users. Instead of the promotion tag, users will now see text containing information about the promotion being run.

While these look eerily similar to automated extensions Google announced recently, the text appears to be changing based on the promotional text you manually input, although the text will not be verbatim. In the examples shown, Petco’s promotion actually said “Receive $10 e-Gift Card on Orders of $75+”, while Google made the promotion say “Free gift with…” and JCPenney’s ad just said “15% Off”, while Google made the promotion say “Code: 15% Off”. Clicking the text still shows the same promotional box we’ve come to know and love, so there’s no big changes here.

We’ll see if this new format sticks, but for right now, it’s a great way for advertisers to differentiate their promotion to users in what looks like a max of 14 characters. This is a huge advantage, helping customers more quickly see which promotions best suit their needs.