It looks likely that only the ad in the top position will be eligible for sitelinks and the ad needs to have a very high Quality Score.

Is it worth it?

To decide if it’s worth increasing your bids to get this top spot, you need to consider:

• Is your Quality Score as high as possible? (Preferably 10/10)
• How much do you need to bid to get the top spot and what is your cost-per-conversion at this price?
• Does that cost-per-conversion make sense, given your margins on this product / service?

(If you’re not sure what those stats are, you need to dig into your AdWords and Analytics data to find out.)

If those numbers add up, you should definitely experiment with sitelinks to see what effect they have on your results. Adding sitelinks costs you nothing – you still only pay for the clicks you receive whether it’s the main link or one of the sitelinks. If a user clicks on more than one of your links in the ad, Google will class the second and subsequent clicks as fraudulent and not charge you for them.

How to set up sitelinks

Take a look through your account and see which ads are likely to qualify for sitelinks. In each campaign you need to:

• look for for Ad extensions under Settings  > Networks, devices and extensions (if you don’t see the option it means this campaign isn’t eligible yet)
• check to see which keywords have a high Quality Score and are already appearing in the top position most of the time (average position less than 1.5)
• consider if those keywords could have multiple relevant landing pages on your site. In the example above, a user searching for Staying Cool might want to book an apartment in any one of the four cities they operate

You have (a generous) 35 charcter limit on the link text, but keep the link simple and easy to understand.

What to choose as sitelinks

Some ideas for what to choose as sitelinks:

• cities in which you operate, if you are location-based business
• key product lines that carry the same brand name as each other
• different services that you offer
• seasonal lines
• special offers
• pages that are relevant at different stages of the buying cycle (research, price comparison, purchase…)

What’s missing

There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to measure the number of clicks from each of the sitelinks or track the performance thereafter. You’ll be able to set up custom segments within Google Analytics, but it would be better if Google added some basic data to their AdWords reports.

Have you tried using sitelinks in your adverts yet? What results have you acheived? Any more ideas for creative ways to use them? Let me know in the comments.

I guess it was only a matter of time before they started enriching the content of ads within the ’search network’ (they’ve offered various ad formats, including image and video, within the content network for a while).

I’m sure that ads with images are likely to attract a higher click-through-rate than pure text ads, and a higher CTR leads to a lower cost-per-click.

It will be really interesting to see how searchers respond to the new look, as the unobtrusive nature of Google’s pay-per-click ads (along with their clear labeling as ’sponsored links’) was one of the reasons for their early success.Google enhance

Yesterday one of my clients was paying an average of 40¢ per click on a maximum bid of 45¢. After I switched the account to GBP the bid was automatically converted  to 27p (about right at today’s exchange rate). But when I checked the account just now I discovered that impressions and clicks had plumeted to a fraction of their previous level and the recommended bid was now in the range 46p to 56p – that’s a whopping 75¢ to 90¢.

Hopefully this is just a short-term blip and they’re working on the solution. Facebook Ads are great for raising brand awareness amongst a really tightly defined audience but the company is not noted for being very responsive to customer support tickets. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see how this works out.

Well, Royal Mail have launched a new direct mail service aimed at the internet generation; those of us who expect the right to opt-out of marketing messages and hit the spam button at the first sign of unsolicited email. Called Matter, it’s a letterbox-sized box of freebies and samples from companies like Original Source, Cadbury and Harper Collins. Entirely permission-based, it’s only sent to people who have opted-in to receive it.

The thinking behind the idea is that the postal service can deliver a marketing experience that no other media can: you can touch, smell and taste these products and the excitement and delight of receiving the box makes it feel like opening a present. Apparently, big brands in particular are recognsing the value of having such an intimate contact with customers.

What I think is really interesting is the way that Royal Mail are working with the prevailing trends, rather than fighting against them. Consumers have become used to having more power in the customer / supplier relationship. They:

• expect to receive marketing emails only from companies they gave permission to (and mark as spam anything else)
• follow people and brands they find interesting on services such as Twitter and Facebook, and unfollow just as easily
• use the Mail Preference Service to prevent companies sending marketing mail
• demand to be compensated for their attention, whether that be material reward, entertainment value or interesting content

According to Stop Junk Mail, the volume of addressed junk mail is decreasing by 4.3% a year in the UK, after reaching a peak of 5.5 billion items in 2003. Presumably, companies are finding that they can acheive better conversion rates at lower prices by using other methods. But junk mail and spam is only junk mail and spam if it is unwanted.  Matter has recognised this and created a product that consumers actually want to receive, which makes all the difference.