How a promotion asset works
You describe one offer: what is discounted, how the discount is expressed — money off, a proportion off, or a price capped at an amount — and the dates it runs between. You can attach an occasion from Google’s list, a promotion code, and a condition such as a minimum order value. The asset then serves only inside those dates, so it switches itself off when the sale ends.
It sits with the other assets and can be set at account, campaign or ad group level. Google shows it when it predicts the offer will improve the response, which means it is a strong line competing with your other assets for the same space rather than a guaranteed addition to every ad.
Why promotion assets matter
An offer is one of the few things that can move someone who was only browsing. Putting it in the ad rather than behind the click means the searcher decides to come to you knowing the deal exists, and it gives an otherwise ordinary ad a reason to be read before the ones above and below it.
The dates matter as much as the discount. Because the asset stops on its own, an offer stays an offer instead of quietly becoming your standard price. That discipline is easy to lose when discounts live only in the ad copy, where somebody has to remember to take them out.
Where promotion assets go wrong
The commonest failure is a landing page that does not repeat the offer. A visitor who taps a discount line and lands on a page that says nothing about it assumes the ad was a trick and leaves. If offers are a regular part of how you sell, it is worth having landing pages built for ad traffic that can carry the same message the ad made.
Codes are the second trap. A code that has expired, is case-sensitive in a way nobody mentions, or is unknown to whoever answers the phone turns interest into complaint. The third is the permanent sale — an offer with no real end date, renewed forever, which trains regular customers to wait and stops working on anyone else.
How to act on it
Set the end date at the same moment as the start date, and only run an offer you would be comfortable defending to a customer who bought last week at full price. Check the whole path before it goes live: the ad line, the page, the checkout or the form, and the person who takes the call. If nothing on Google’s occasion list matches the festival or event you are actually running the offer around, leave the occasion blank and let the discount speak for itself.
Keep it separate from your standing price asset, which describes the normal rate. Afterwards, compare enquiries and orders during the promotion with a comparable stretch before it, and be honest about whether the offer created demand or discounted demand you already had.