Better Ads via Better Sitelinks

Sitelinks are an important part of successful ads.  They show value to potential customers before a click occurs, while also being (along with other extensions) a factor of ad rank.  User interaction with sitelinks is so strong that you should consider them a basic part of your ad text - title, description, display URL and sitelinks.  Optimize the messaging in this space routinely, just as you do with ad text.

Many advertisers aren’t taking advantage of this excellent feature just yet, so before we start optimizing you may need to implement them.  Adding sitelinks boosts the average CTR on an ad by 10-20% (+20-50% when the search is one of your branded terms), so that implementation should be time well spent.

Make sure to have at least six active sitelinks for desktop and four active sitelinks for mobile, but remember that you can go all the way up to twenty total per ad group or campaign.  Sitelinks allow 25 characters for the link itself, and that space allows for testing.  We’ve found that somewhat shorter sitelinks are the most effective, though, so try to keep them closer to 18-20 characters for desktop and 12-15 characters for mobile.

We think sitelinks are a great proven feature, and we also think that they can be made better.

Reporting on Sitelinks

Start by knowing how you’re doing.

When reviewing these statistics, remember to compare sitelinks to one another and not to overall ad performance (as CTR on sitelinks is almost universally lower than a click on an ad, even though an ad with sitelinks will perform better than an ad without sitelinks).  You can also look at a sitelink’s contribution to the entire creative.  If you segment by “This Extension vs. Other” you can see if that extension is encouraging clicks on the headline or other links.

Identify your strong performers in terms of CTR (on the link itself or the surrounding ad), conversion rate, and conversion volume to establish a baseline of what target you can shoot for with low performers.  If certain sitelinks aren’t receiving a lot of impressions they’ve been passed over by the system, which means that you could probably work on improving those first.

(Quick aside - Beyond normal reporting, it’s also a good idea to do a simple sense check.  Are those the six {or twenty} pages that would be the most useful for your customers?  Even if CTR or impressions are low, is there a minority of your users that will find that sitelink very useful?  You may want to keep that link in place for them.)

Once you’ve found what’s not working, try out new text to improve performance.  If CTR is fine but your conversion rate is lagging, you could be sending traffic to the wrong page or setting user expectations incorrectly with a misleading link.  As with your ads, even top performers could potentially be improved upon.  Think about something new you may want to try.

When viewing your sitelink data, the info is available at the ad, ad group, campaign, and account level.  Add or remove these columns on the Ad Extensions tab to determine just how specific you want your info to be.

Testing Your Sitelinks

Pure A/B testing isn’t possible because each sitelink must point to different content.  When you’re identifying what’s lagging behind, recognize that other variables can muddle your results (things like ad tests, bid changes or seasonality).  You can try out variations of sitelinks in different campaigns or sets of ad groups to see what works better, but it’s still not going to be a perfect solution.  Recognize the imperfection of this whenever reviewing your results.

Sitelink testing shouldn’t be as frequent as your ad testing (due to the lack of A/B testing).  Monthly or quarterly reviews might make sense for you, depending on your volume.

Apply ad copy testing principles to your new sitelinks.  Think of distinct calls to action and benefits that relate to a user’s search and the page you’re directing them to.  You can also take lessons from previous ad tests and apply them.  For example, you can use losing (but still strong) ad copy as your sitelinks or their descriptions.

Sitelinks with Additional Detail

You also have the option to add additional detail to your sitelinks, which is great opportunity to prove value to customers before they click.  At present, sitelinks automatically serve descriptions where appropriate.  That feature is going away in the near future, though, so add in descriptions yourself sooner rather than later.

Mobile Sitelinks

Try to speak to mobile users.  Think about mobile intent and how it differs from desktop, and then reflect that way of thinking in your sitelinks.  You’ll also want to keep mobile sitelinks shorter (to around 12-15 characters) to ensure they aren’t cut off.

Closing

You can show users valuable information about your site right in your ads via sitelinks.  It’s imperative that they’re present, and once they’re there you should focus on making them as good as they can be (just as you do with the ads themselves).  Sitelinks not only increase the relevance of your ads, they increase the relevance of the user experience you deliver after the click.

Start The New Year With A PPC Health Check: Part 2

Welcome to Part 2 of my PPC Health Check series! I covered account structure, settings, conversion tracking and budgets. Today’s piece will help you understand the areas you need to be checking with regard to keywords, ads and performance.

Reviewing a campaign properly isn’t something that is done in 20 minutes — you’ll need to spend hours checking these things over in detail, depending on how large your account is. Please keep this in mind when checking over your own accounts.

As a further point on ad extensions, below is a great example of an ad that almost has it all (for the adventure holiday company Alpine Elements). Social extensions and seller reviews are missing, but it’s making use of some great image extensions that show the core areas of their business: call extensions, communication extensions, site links and site link descriptions.

If only all ads could take up this much space! You’ll mostly only be able to achieve this on your brand terms as they’ll always be in high positions, but it’s worth trying to add all these extensions to all your campaigns.


Here’s an example of an ad with seller reviews and social extensions. Looks pretty good, doesn’t it? These kind of extensions really make a brand stand out as trustworthy and reliable, and will almost certainly be leading more people to click on one advert over another.



This PPC Health Check series has just covered the main areas you should be looking into — but there are also many other charts you could run for your account to determine whether it’s still in a healthy state or not with regard to performance. This post is primarily focused on paid search campaigns; you will need to look at some additional factors when analyzing campaigns on the Google Display Network.

While this series has focused on settings and the fundamentals of any campaign, it’s important to note that to improve performance in your campaign’s year-on-year, you need to be taking advantage of the many new campaign types that are available such as dynamic search ads, product listing ads, remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) and dynamic remarketing. These will all help you gain additional market share in the year ahead.

Features within AdWords change frequently so it’s important to sign up to regular AdWords newsletters (and watch this column) to be kept updated on anything new that might be useful for your account. If you stay stagnant for too long you’ll be left behind in this industry and end up miles behind your competitors; regular knowledge updating and health checks are a necessity!