PPC features to make your ads stand out

It's Black Friday – everyone is looking for a great deal. Are your ads doing the best they can to make your promotion stand out from the crowd?  Here are three AdWords features you can use to bring you success when the big day arrives:

Feature 1 - Countdown ad customiser

Adding an end date/time for your offer will help instil shoppers with a sense of urgency to take advantage of your deal. Having the ad show how long is remaining on the offer definitely looks great but updating it manually is a tedious and inefficient task.

Instead, you can use a handy bit of code in your adcopy that will automatically countdown the days/hours and minutes for you!

The countdown code can be used in either the headers or the main description of the ad.

The code to enable this function is:

{=GLOBAL_COUNTDOWN("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss","language",daysBefore)}

Don’t worry, you don’t have to memorise this code! Handily, when you type that first { bracket, AdWords will now show you a dropdown menu where you can select the countdown function and the customiser builder will appear:

Simply fill in your language option, choose the dates of your promotion and the builder will insert the correct code into your ad for you.

Feature 2 - Price extensions

Of course, as a good PPC manager, you already use price extensions for your e-commerce site (you do right?) However, it’s a good idea to ensure you update the prices in your extensions when it comes to a big sale such as for Black Friday or Cyber Monday. You don’t want all of your sales messaging to go for nothing just because your unit price looks high compared to competitors in your price extension.

Feature 3 - Promo extensions

Promo extensions are not something you will use all the time for obvious reasons, but they add a very large callout to highlight your offer as you can see in the screen grabs below.

You can use this extension for your normal promotions throughout the year, but for significant events, Google has added a list you can choose from that will add the holiday name in bold text to the add, such as the Black Friday show above.

The holidays you can choose from (in date order) are:

• New Years
• Valentines Day
• Easter
• Mothers Day
• Fathers Day
• Labour Day
• Back to School
• Halloween
• Black Friday
• Cyber Monday
• Christmas
• Boxing Day

Be aware the promotion extension is only available through the new beta AdWords interface.

Hopefully, these features will help you build a successful AdWords sale campaign. Remember these tips will work for any promotion, not just the big holidays!

Is the rest of your site ready for Black Friday? Check out our other articles for tips on getting the best from your SEO & ensuring your website can handle the traffic.

Good luck!