«

»

Print This Post Print This Post

Google’s New Ad Sitelinks & How You Can Get Them for Your Account
November 4th, 2009 | Amber | Google AdWords


Google Adwords has implemented yet another new feature for Adwords PPC advertisers, and this time it’s pretty cool. The new feature is called ‘ad sitelinks’, and it allows PPC advertisers with high quality ads to add four additional links under their main PPC ad. This allows users easier access to deeper content of your website.

The sitelinks also provide advertisers with a good way of promoting seasonal services or products. Unlike organic sitelinks, the advertiser can pick and choose which campaigns get sitelinks and what those sitelinks are and where they link to. So they can be changed out as frequently as you would like.

Of course this new feature isn’t available to all Adwords advertisers. Google is being fairly vague when they say their new ad sitelinks are “available to ads that meet our quality requirements”, but do not go into any further detail than that.

To find out if your PPC account qualifies for the new sitelinks, simple go into your Adwords account, click on a campaign, click the settings tab, and scroll down to the ‘networks, devices and extensions section.  If the sitelinks are available to you, there will be an additional ‘ad extensions’ option under this category. Simply click the edit button to add your sitelinks.

sitelinks

I think having the sitelinks is a great way to take users directly to a contact page or form page if that is your lead type. A few of my clients do qualify for the sitelinks and I’ll be adding them into today. My advice is if you do qualify, be sure to add tracking to the additional links so you can track data separately for the sitelinks to see if they’re actually helping.

Related posts:

  1. Ad Sitelinks – More than Meets the Eye
  2. Google Expands Search Sitelinks—Coming to PPC Next?
  3. Fully Utilize All AdWords’ Ad Extensions In Just 5 Days!
  4. AdWords Ad Extensions: An Overview
  5. Google AdWords-Testing a Click Count Feature?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 10:44 am and is filed under Google AdWords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://theppcblog.com Matt Umbro

    One of my e commerce accounts just qualified for sitelinks. A huge pro to sitelinks is a more targeted search for the user. For example, a user searching for Nike shoes could be a man or woman. Normally this user would just see an ad to buy Nike shoes, but with sitelinks there can be a link to each gender’s respective page. The landing page is that much more targeted.

  • http://www.searchenginesmarketer.com Mark Kennedy

    Nice post, Amber. One of my clients was eligible for sitelinks, so I turned them on today. I’m excited to see the results.

    However, one thing that concerns me. You have to be in the #1 position for the links to be activated. However, as you know, #1 does not always equal the best ROI. So it will be interesting to see if having sitelinks is worth being in the #1 spot. Or will the sitelinks increase the ROI for that slot.

    Sounds like a future blog post to me…

  • http://www.clicksandclients.com Paul

    Great advice on the separate tracking links.

    These are mostly showing up for branded searches in tops spots so far. Toys-r-us has it on.

    I’m told they’re looking for a QS above 8 and it’s ideal to be using position preferences.

  • http://www.gordonchoi.com Gordon Choi

    Amber, it’s certainly great that Google keeps inventing new features for Adwords!

    Earlier in China, a new feature very similar to Adwords ad sitelinks was launched in beta and was only available for a few selected “trademark / brand” keywords

    http://www.gordonchoi.com/google-adwords-ppc-sitelinks-20091101

  • http://mobile.broadbandgenie.co.uk Sam

    Hmm well it seems we aren’t eligible for this which is quite frustrating.

    On some campaigns I might run different adgroups with different priorities- i.e. a few adgroups where I’m aiming to be number 1 with a great CTR and a few where im happy sitting at p10 so long as my CPC is lower than my EPV. It seems by having this on a campaign level google is penalising my good CTR terms. It’s a little bit annoying as I dont really want to have to have 100s of campaigns running- thats what adgroups are for. Any tips?

  • http://www.sem-stammtisch-frankfurt.de/ Bfri

    Great blog post. I wrote an article about Ad Sitelinks on our German blog and used your screenshot (you got a link ;) ). Does anybody know if the ad sitelinks URLs can be feeded via the API to automatically append tracking parameters?

  • http://www.abebooks.com Anton

    Hi everyone,

    Now that it’s been out for some time, I was wondering if anyone could share their experience with this feature? How does it look on the ROI side?

    Thank you in advance!

  • http://www.clicksandclients.com Paul

    I’m having pretty lousy success with it on two campaigns. CTR is off the charts but end conversion on one campaign is down from 1.25% to .25%

    Back to the drawing board…

  • http://www.searchenginesmarketer.com Mark Kennedy

    Hi Anton,

    On a campaign that gets around 120 clicks per day, the site links got 12 clicks for the entire month, so they don’t get a lot of volume (at least on this campaign).

    However, I did get a conversion from one of those twelve clicks, but the sample size is too small to determine if the ROI works just yet.

  • http://www.abebooks.com Anton

    Thanks everyone. I’ll run a little test and see how it works for me

  • http://www.catalog-ceasuri.blogspot.com/ dany

    Hi Amber.
    I want to ask you if you find how you can track this site links.I do ppc for some e-commerce sites and i don’t have yet a tool to measure the results,the convert?how can we know this?. Google Analytic can’t do this Yet. I made a post about this site links too but in another language http://sem-point.com/ad-sitelink/ ,take a look if you want.

    Nice post by the way.

    • http://www.ppchero.com Amber

      Hi Dany, I added tracking urls to the sitelink urls just like I would at the ad text level. That has seemed to work for me. thanks,

  • http://www.dc-storm.de Birger

    Hi Dany,

    we provide our clients with an Excel sheet that serves as an URL builder tool to track Ad Sitelinks. This helps to track visits and conversion data. At the moment you cannot associate cost data with.

    You can even track your Sitelinks in Google Analytics. Just append a tracking string to your Sitelink URLs:
    http://www.example.com/gifts?sitelink=link1
    http://www.example.com/gifts?sitelink=link2

    These URLs will be recorded by Google Analytics and you can access them via the Top Content report.

    I hope that helps a bit.

  • http://www.crealytics.de/blog Johannes

    We explored the effects of the Ad Sitelinks and saw the click-through-rate increase by 25% in comparison to our common ad.

    See also:
    http://www.crealytics.de/blog/2010/01/29/erweitere-anzeigen-links-bei-adwords-steigerung-der-klickrate-jtarnow/

  • http://www.catalog-ceasuri.blogspot.com/ dany

    hey @Birger ,i forgot to thank you . I have done how did you show me in that example and it worked fine ( on a site it worked on the other one didn’t ,i think the GA isn’t well installed on that site or something).
    I have to tell you that the users from .ro isn’t ready for this kind of thing, there are clicks but not satisfied , and the CTR its a little bit bigger but not significant.

    Thanks very much for the tip.

Close
Hero Conf 2012