The Promo Is Over, but the Ad Still Promises It: What to Check

It happens like this: the promo ran until the 31st, the product was pulled earlier, and the ad about it was forgotten. A person sees the discount, clicks, and you have already paid for that click. There is no discount on the site, so they close the page. The money goes not just to an off-target click, but to a click that spoils the impression of your store.

Below: what Google’s policy says about it, where in your account the expired offer hides, how to set dates for a promo and what Google’s help pages do not promise outright. We checked menu names and policies on November 5, 2026 against Google’s help pages in English. Where the help pages are silent, we say so directly.

Why this is not a small thing

Money first. You pay for a click on an ad with a promo whether or not the promo is still valid. The person came for the discount, did not find it and left. No lead, and the money is spent.

The second reason: it may be a violation. Google Ads policy has a section called “Unavailable offers” (part of the Misrepresentation policy). Promising products, services or promotional offers in the ad that are unavailable or aren’t easily found from the destination is not allowed. Among the examples, the policy names “promoting a deal that is no longer active” and promoting a price that is inaccurate. For violations, Google promises a warning at least 7 days before suspending an account. So suspension without a warning is not foreseen. But how quickly and how strictly the system reacts to an ended promo specifically, the help page does not say.

Where a promo lives in your ads

A promo rarely sits in one place. Go through four spots.

1. Ads. In your account open “Campaigns”, then “Ads”. In headlines and descriptions look for “−20%”, “until the 31st”, “Black Friday”, “free shipping”. Fix anything that is no longer on the site.
2. Assets. These are add-ons to ads: the “Assets” item in the “Campaigns” menu. Expired promotions and other add-ons with dates may be sitting there. Google’s help reminds you that a promotion asset can be added at the account, campaign or ad group level, so look at all three. We described how to check this in the article “From October 12, Google Adds Your Discounts to Ads by Itself”, which also covers discounts Google takes from your site on its own.
3. Product feed. If you advertise products through Merchant Center (where products are uploaded for ads), an old discount may sit in the feed itself. More on that below.
4. The site itself. The banner is gone, but “−20%” stayed on a category page or in an old article. Ads and site must match. If the product was pulled from sale before the promo ended, read “Out of Stock? Don’t Delete the Page”.

The “Promotion” asset: how to set dates

Google Ads has a separate asset for promos. It shows under an ad in Search and on YouTube and costs nothing extra: you pay only for clicks.

How to create it according to Google’s help:

1. In the “Campaigns” menu, go to “Assets”.
2. Click the plus button and select “Promotion”.
3. Choose the language, currency, promotion type (monetary or percentage discount), the product or service name and the final URL.
4. In “Promotional details”, enter the requirements, for example a promo code or a spending limit. In “Promotion dates” (optional), enter the dates you want to show in the ad.
5. In “Advanced options”, change the dates and times when the asset may show. There is also “Days and hours”.

If you pick an occasion from the list (for example, “Black Friday”), its dates become the showing period: you can narrow them but cannot go outside them. For your own dates, deselect the occasion and enter the start and end dates.

What the help page does not say. It does not state outright that showing stops by itself after the end date. The dates in advanced options are described as the dates and times when the asset may be eligible to show. It is logical that it should disappear after the end, but we do not claim that as known behavior. Practical conclusion: set the date, and on the day the promo ends, check anyway. There is another automatic rule, but it is about something else: occasion-specific promotion assets must be created or edited within 6 months of their start date, and those not modified for 6 months stop serving automatically. It has nothing to do with the end date.

A countdown in a headline: where sources differ

There is one more way to show a deadline: a countdown in a headline. You type “{” in the headline text, select “Countdown” and fill in “Countdown ends”. According to Google’s help, the countdown starts 5 days before the end date by default.

What Google says. “Ads with countdown customizers automatically stop showing after their specified end date.” To keep the ad serving, you need to unpin or change the headline with the countdown. For responsive search ads, the help page advises adding at least 3 headlines without a countdown.

What practitioners relay. In the write-ups we read, it is different: after the date the countdown simply disappears and the ad shows with ordinary text. The sources we took this from are not confirmed by Google’s help. So go by the help page: an ad with a countdown may stop exactly on the day the promo ends, and if the campaign must keep running, prepare headlines without a countdown in advance.

A campaign built for one promo only

If the whole campaign was created for a promo (for example, “Sale until the 31st”), the easiest thing is to give it an end date. In the campaign settings, expand “Start and end dates” and choose an “End date”. According to Google’s help, the campaign will end on that day at 23:59 in the time zone of your account. But if the same campaign also sells regular products, do not do this: it will stop entirely.

Stores: the discount in the feed

A Merchant Center feed has the attribute “Sale price” [sale_price] and next to it “Sale price effective date” [sale_price_effective_date]. According to the help page, it specifies the period during which the sale price should be shown. Format: the start and end date and time separated by a slash, for example 2026-11-01T00:00+0200/2026-11-30T23:59+0200. If you do not include a time, the sale price starts at midnight on the start date and ends at 11:59 PM on the end date, and if you do not include a time zone, UTC is the default. So without a time zone, the start and end of the discount will shift by 2–3 hours relative to Kyiv time. That is our conclusion from two rules in the help page, not a separate warning from Google.

What to check in 10 minutes

1. Open “Campaigns” → “Ads”. Do headlines and descriptions contain discounts, dates and promo codes that are no longer on the site?
2. Open “Campaigns” → “Assets”. Is there an expired promotion left? Check all three levels.
3. Open your site in an incognito window: home page, categories, cart. Does the discount match the one in the ad?
4. If you have a feed, check that “Sale price” has end dates.
5. Set a calendar reminder for the last day of every promo: “change the site and the ad”. For large sites, practitioners build a watchdog script that opens pages from a list every day and looks for stop text like “promo ended”. For a small business, a calendar and one person responsible for that day is enough.

Summary

An expired promo in an ad costs you twice: you pay for the click and lose the buyer. In Google’s policy, advertising a deal that is no longer active is named directly as an example of an unavailable offer. For a promo there is the “Promotion” asset with dates in “Advanced options”, but the help page does not promise that showing will stop by itself. So on the day the price changes or the promo ends, change not only the site but also the ad.

How we work with search and product advertising, see the sections on search ads and Merchant Center.

Want a free audit of your Google Ads account? Send us a request: we will look at your account and tell you whether anything expired is still hanging in it.