Promotion Assets

A shopper searches for a t-shirt in March and clicks an ad promising 20% off with a Labor Day code. The sale ended in September. The code is dead. The brand is still paying for the click.

A promotion asset is the Google Ads format that produces that line of copy. It attaches a discount to a search ad — a monetary or percentage amount, an optional occasion label, a promo code, a minimum-order threshold, and a date range — and renders it as an extra row beneath the headline. It sits alongside sitelinks and callouts as an account-, campaign-, or ad-group-level asset.

The stale-code failure, in the teardown corpus

Fresh Clean Threads’ Google account carried the exact signature of a promotion asset gone stale: an occasion label, a code, and a validity window, still live long after the window closed. Two active search ads were serving “Labor Day · 20% off All Orders Code LDW20 · Valid Aug 26 - Sep 2” on their last-shown date of March 14, 2026 — six months after the promotion expired, per the Fresh Clean Threads Google teardown.

The same pattern repeats across the series. MUD\WTR had six Black Friday ads from its November–December 2025 campaign still showing in March 2026, more than three months after the event, in its Google account.

The teardown notes the identical lag on Little Sleepies’ Black Friday creative and Graza’s Friendsgiving ad. That recurrence across four brands is what makes it worth naming.

A correctly maintained version looks different. Magic Spoon ran a New Year promo — “10% off · Code MAGICNEWYEAR” — as a discrete, occasion-tagged offer on Google while running zero discounts on Meta, in its Google teardown. The offer is dated to the occasion it belongs to, which is the state the FCT and MUD\WTR assets drifted out of.

Why an expired promo keeps serving

The failure is not neglect alone. The asset can be configured to outlive its own displayed dates, and Google’s documentation describes exactly how.

A promotion asset has two separate date controls. “Displayed promotion dates” set the window a customer sees; “Asset scheduling dates” set when the asset is actually eligible to serve.

If displayed promotion dates are provided but asset scheduling dates are not, the promotion asset “may continue to serve even outside of the Displayed promotion date window” until it is stopped or paused, per Google’s promotion asset documentation. The displayed date is cosmetic. The scheduling date is the switch that most accounts leave unset.

This is the detail the setup guides bury. A Search Engine Land checklist documents the two-date split and the more than 30 occasion labels an asset can carry. The split is precisely where the LDW20 code slipped through.

What the asset can render

Beyond the code and dates, a promotion asset can display the discount as a fixed amount, a percentage, or an “up to” figure, and can attach a minimum spend or a promoted item. The occasion label is optional — more than 30 are available, from Black Friday to Back to School, with “None” for a standing offer that maps to no holiday.

Placement is hierarchical. An asset set at the account level applies everywhere; one set at campaign or ad-group level narrows it. That hierarchy is why a single forgotten asset can surface across many ads at once, as the six MUD\WTR Black Friday placements did.

The Shopping-ads boundary

Promotion assets do not reach Shopping ads. A brand running Shopping inventory sets its deals in Google Merchant Center instead, through a separate system called Merchant Promotions, documented in Merchant Center Help.

The two systems are governed differently. Merchant Promotions carry their own eligibility rules and time limits and do not inherit the asset-scheduling behaviour above. A brand that manages Search promos as assets and Shopping promos as Merchant Promotions is maintaining two expiry calendars, not one, which is part of why the stale-code case is so common in accounts that run both.

Seen in these teardowns

• Fresh Clean Threads Google Ads — “Labor Day · 20% off · Code LDW20” still serving in 2 ads on March 14, 2026, six months expired
• MUD\WTR Google Ads — 6 Black Friday ads still showing in March 2026, three months after the campaign
• Magic Spoon Google Ads — MAGICNEWYEAR occasion-tagged 10% offer on Google, zero discounts on Meta