Google launches special Black Friday, Cyber Monday deals ad unit

By Ginny Marvin

Published: November 15, 2018 at 2:20 pm

To help retail advertisers increase their exposure for their Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals this year, Google has launched a new experiment with promotion extensions in Google Ads.

What’s the experiment? Now through Nov. 27, Google may serve a specific Black Friday promotion ad format when people search for the following Black Friday and Cyber Monday related keywords and their variations: “black friday deals”, “black friday <product name> deals”, “black friday <company name> deals” and their variants.

The ads are powered by promotion extensions, which debuted around this time last year.

The ad unit, like the example below, will display at the top of the search results for English speaking users. Users will see a list of offers that link to each retailer’s website.

How to participate. It’s pretty easy to get in on this experiment. What’s less easy is guaranteeing your promotion will display in the list. There are really just two steps to getting started.

First, add promotion extensions under the Black Friday or Cyber Monday labels in the Google Ads interface. Then, create ad groups to target the Black Friday or Cyber Monday keywords listed above and include relevant ad copy.

Why it matters. Google says 100 percent of searches for “Black Friday” happened between Nov. 19 (Sunday) and 25 (Saturday after Black Friday) last year. This experiment could help new potential customers discover your brand and offers in the highly competitive days leading up to Thanksgiving when consumers start searching for deals.

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Contributing authors are chosen for their expertise and work under the oversight of the editorial staff. Search Engine Land is owned by Semrush. The contributor was not asked to mention Semrush; the opinions expressed are their own.

About the author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin was Third Door Media’s former Editor-in-Chief (October 2018 to December 2020), running the day-to-day editorial operations across all publications and overseeing paid media coverage. Ginny Marvin wrote about paid digital advertising and analytics news and trends for Search Engine Land, MarTech and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, Ginny has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.