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!

A Former Googler’s Routine For AdWords Management

It’s been seven months since we launched Optmyzr’s first tool  at SMX Advanced in Seattle – the Quality Score Tracker – and we’ve been busy adding tools, reports and optimizations since then. Now, one of the most common questions we get is when to use various optimizations — and, of course, these apply no matter what tools you’re using.

There are plenty of daily tweaks to make in any AdWords account, but what are some of the optimizations we do on a regular schedule? While there’s no one right answer for every account, I’ll share some of my thoughts about what to do and when to do it to keep an account in great shape.

Do These At Least Quarterly

AdWords changes all the time — in the past year, we saw one of the bigger changes in recent memory with the forced migration to Enhanced Campaigns. AdWords also frequently launches new features that are less dramatic than Enhanced Campaigns but that can still have a huge impact on how your ads perform. Make sure you’re not missing out on any of these. Here are a few recent examples:

Mobile Bid Modifiers

Now that mobile and desktop ads are all served from a single campaign, are you using mobile bid modifiers for maximum performance?

Be sure you’re looking at how your ads are performing on different devices so you’re not losing money on mobile devices or tablets. With bid modifiers, you can bid lower for mobile clicks and make sure your ROI is similar to that on desktop. Try to avoid bidding your mobile clicks down 100% because that’s not a viable long-term strategy in most cases.

It reminds me of when we launched the Google Display Network and some advertisers were convinced this was a complete waste of money and turned it off entirely. Smart advertisers figured out how to set the right bids, set the right targeting and make this a very profitable part of their business.

I think there’s no such thing as a bad click, just a click that’s too expensive. So make sure your bids are set correctly to take advantage of the growing number of mobile searches. If you don’t do something with them, your competitors will.

AdWords Scripts
I talk about these ad nauseum, but I believe this is the biggest untapped opportunity for most advertisers. The ability to create custom reports, automate your secret sauce and become a more efficient marketer offers a huge advantage to advertisers that are not afraid of a little code (or copy-and-pasting code written by others).

Use AdWords Scripts to automate reports and optimizations you do frequently.

Conversion Tracking
It continues to amaze me how many accounts I come across that spend a lot of money but are not tracking conversions properly. If you’re not yet tracking conversions, figure out a way to start doing this immediately. Either that or go flush some money down the toilet… I’m serious, if you’re advertising online and not tracking conversions, you’ve got a big problem that you need to fix quickly.

If your conversions happen offline, you can now import this with Conversion Import, a tool Google launched in September.

And, thanks to Call Extensions being counted as conversions since November, it’s easier than ever to track calls as conversions without using any third-party tools.

Get A Better Ad Rank With Ad Extensions
The ad ranking formula changed in October: in addition to Quality Score and the bid, the performance of ad extensions is now also a factor. This makes a lot of sense since Quality Score is mostly a measure of CTR, and according to Google, ad extensions like sitelinks improve CTR of ads by 30% on average. So, by factoring the CTR of an extension into the ad ranking formula, advertisers that have added CTR boosting extensions get rewarded with a higher rank for their ads.

Use ad extensions to improve your CTR and get a better rank for your ad.

New ad extensions get launched periodically, so make sure you’ve taken a look at all the ones that are available to you. For example, are you using review extensions yet? They let you enhance your ad with a short snippet from a third-party review of your company. Have you updated your sitelinks with the two additional lines of text you’re now allowed to include? Have you considered setting different sitelinks for different ad groups now that sitelinks are no longer set at just the campaign level?

As you can see, there are always new features in AdWords — so be sure to do at least a quarterly review to ensure you’re not falling behind your competitors.

Do These At Least Monthly

Ad Text Cleanup
Ad text testing may be the most neglected account management task… not surprisingly so, since it’s the hardest to do correctly when using just the AdWords interface. While it’s easy to create new ads (have you tried Ready Ads yet for display ads?), it’s hard to keep track of what you’re testing and how the experiments are going. Even if you set ad rotation to let Google show the best performing ads more often, you end up with a slew of ads that don’t get served much but are still active in your account.

If you’re looking to clean up ads that are not performing well, doing the math to find those ads that are underperforming with at least a 95% confidence is not trivial. We have just launched a preview of a new report in Optmyzr that helps identify underperforming ads. Brad Geddes also has a new tool called adAlysis that helps with ad text optimization. And of course, there’s boostCTR, a company I advise, that’s been in the ad optimization space for several years.

The ad on the left has a 99% probability of beating the ad on the right. Go through your account periodically to look for the losers and delete them.

The next challenge with ad text optimization is finding winning ad text elements. You’re probably using similar lines across many ad groups; but, AdWords doesn’t provide any reporting that aggregates the performance of all headlines, description lines and display URLs.

For that, I wrote an AdWords Script that spits out a Google Sheet with aggregated performance data for every line I use in my ads. I can easily see if the line “Free Shipping” or “Next Day Delivery” has a better CTR. Armed with that data, I can quickly generate a bunch of new ad variations using the better performing text; then, next month, I can use one of the tools to clean up ads that are underperforming and do another round of tests.

Keyword Cleanup

While we are all buying keywords from Google, we should really be thinking about managing queries rather than managing keywords. The reason is that most keywords are not exact matches, so they are getting clicks and impressions from a variety of related queries.

I wrote in my last article that broad match keywords are liars. What you ideally want to do is take tight control over queries that you know convert or are critical to your business. By adding these as exact match keywords, you’ll have more certainty over their rank, cost and messaging.

One of the issues with broad match keywords is that they tend to rank worse for a query than another keyword that is an exact match to the query. That’s because in the case where the query and keyword exactly match, the advertiser has told Google they definitely want to have their ad show — when the keyword is a broad match, there is some uncertainty, and Google typically will rank that lower due to the uncertainty factor.

Add New Keywords From The Search Terms Report
At least once a month, check the search terms report and add converting queries as keywords to the account. You can add them to the ad group that generated the impression or you can add them to a new ad group, or even a special campaign for converting keywords.

When you put the new keyword by itself as an exact match into a new ad group, you’re tightly controlling the messaging in your ad for that one query. When you place the new ad group into a campaign with other converting keywords, you’re able to allocate a separate budget to converting keywords and ideally set that budget to be unconstrained.

Find Negative Keywords In The Long Tail Of Queries
At the same time, find negative themes from your search terms report. Do this by taking the keyword list and running it through a word cloud tool. That way, terms that appear more frequently will be more noticeable and you’ll have a better way to see what words from the long-tail represent a potentially significant volume of irrelevant clicks.

Deduplicate Keywords
When you’re actively adding new keywords to the account, you may find yourself accidentally creating duplicates. This is not a terrible thing, but it does complicate account management. So be sure to clean up duplicate keywords at least monthly. The AdWords Editor will help you find these, and we have a tool that takes it a step further and suggests the best one to keep based on QS, Conversions, CTR and other metrics.

Sculpt Your Account To Drive Queries To The Right Ad Group
One optimization we really like is to look through the search terms report for situations where Google shows a different ad than the one we had written for a particular query. This happens quite frequently in most accounts and reduces our control over the landing page, ad messaging and bids; so, we add negative exact match keywords to limit this behavior at least once a month.

Bid Cleanup
Make sure bids are sensible and your bid management strategy hasn’t just killed off your best keyword without telling you.

If you’re managing bids manually, look for converting keywords where you may be bidding slightly below the first page bid estimate or where your impression share is too low.
Clean up keywords that have spent too much and aren’t converting, especially if they aren’t exact matches.

Do These At Least Daily

There are plenty of tweaks to make in accounts every day. How do you know what tweaks to make? It’s best to have a clear set of reports and metrics by which you’re judging things and give yourself a big enough time window for the analysis. That way, you can steer your account in a consistent direction without making too many changes too fast. It’s like steering a car, you want to look far enough ahead and steer to the middle of the lane you want to be in rather than bouncing from one line to the other by looking just in front of the car’s hood.

For example, if you take too short a view on conversions, you may be missing the fact that some conversions take several days to happen (you can check this in Search Funnels in your AdWords account) and your bid adjustments could set bids lower than ideal.

Look For Anomalies
What I do look for are daily anomalies, or items in the account that are completely off track. For example, are there keywords that are suddenly spending way more than usual and converting poorly? Are there ad groups that show consistently declining CTR? The AdWords engineers wrote some AdWords Scripts that will notify you when some of these things happen.

Analyze Y-O-Y Data
I also like to compare last year’s top-performers to the top-performers now. If there are differences, try to understand why so that you can react appropriately.

Conclusion

So, those are some thoughts on how to manage an AdWords account for success. Stay on top of the performance every day and get into the routine of doing some of the standard optimizations on a weekly or monthly schedule, and do at least a quarterly audit to make sure you’re taking advantage of all the latest capabilities of the system.