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.

First, they introduced the subtly highlighted box above the organic results, reserved for up to three advertisers who achieve a sufficiently high Quality Score:

Next they added locations:

Then it was the Google Checkout logo to advertisers who accept payment that way:

And now we’re starting to see two new additions: site links and product results.

Site links have been an element of organic results for a while now, but I’ve not seen them in paid links before today (thanks @savamaloy and @judithlewis for the tweets).

Google have reportedly been testing product links for a while now, but it’s only very recently that I’ve seen them in the UK results:

None of my clients have this feature enabled in their accounts yet, so I can’t gauge what effect product links have on CTR or conversions, but discussions around the web seem to indicate that not many searchers actually click on the [+] button to expand the listing.

This feature prompts some interesting questions:

• How will Google charge for a click on the [+]?
• Will they devise some measurement that’s more than an impression but less than a click?
• Will a click on the [+] but no subsequent click-through harm the advertiser’s Quality Score more or less than simply incurring an impression without a click?

I wonder whether this move away from the simple design principles that have served them so well (see Simplicity is Powerful) so far are being compromised in the quest for extra revenue. If they are, how will searchers respond – will they flee to the competition?

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.

A Microsoft employee (working in his own time) has developed a ‘blind taste’ challenge where you compare the results from three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and the recently launched Bing. You choose your favourite set of results to reveal which search engine they came from. The results can be surprising. In my tests I found that I preferred Bing’s results almost as often as Google’s, with Yahoo! coming in a poor third.

Microsoft’s strategy with Bing seems to be working. Three weeks on from its launch, they have maintained their market share of 12% in the US (it’s lower in the UK). Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer spoke this week of the company’s plans to invest a massive 5 -  10% of its operating income over the next five years, citing their investment and subsequent success of Xbox as the model.

But here’s my advice to Microsoft: sort out the basics. A search on Google for Microsoft’s adCenter (their competitor to Google’s AdWords) brings up the following result.

Have they learned nothing? They really need to improve:

• cross-browser compatibility (you can’t access adCenter using Safari);
• the user interface (adCenter is clunky, badly structured and has no offline tools like AdWords Editor); and
• the description that other search engines display in their snippet (tell me why I need to use adCenter).

What’s your take?

• Have you used Bing? Did you like the results?
• What about Microsoft adCenter? Have you found it worth the time and effort for the volume of business it generates?

Leave your thoughts in the comments.

Like many people, I wasted a couple of hours looking around places I know spent some time researching the product. The detail and quality of the images is quite incredible (even if the face recognition software sometimes blurs out the wrong thing). Whilst oo-ing and ah-ing over it with some of my coworkers, we discussed what motivates Google to invest in products like this and how they plan to make any money out of the service (or any of its other free offerings).

Big Hairy Audacious Goal

Google’s Big Hairy Audacious Goal is to “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. A pretty ambitious task, but when you see results such as Street View it really hits home just how serious they are about this mission. (And look what happens to companies if their goal isn’t ambitious enough: Microsoft have pretty much succeeded in their goal of “A computer on every desk and in every home” and look how they’re floundering these days, with competitors beating them at every turn.)

But Google’s real goal, of course, is to make money. So how might they ‘monetize’ Street View?

They are positioning themselves as the place to go when searching for anything and the more often they get people visiting Google as their first choice search engine, the more revenue they will earn from advertising that is displayed alongside the regular results. Street View is incredibly useful – imagine being able to find out what your destination looks like before you visit somewhere for the first time – and I think Google are going to attract a lot of people to Street View.

I wouldn’t be surprised if we soon start to see advertisers being offered the opportunity to buy listings within Street View. Google already offer pay-per-click within Google Maps (they’re called local listings) and show up amongst the organic map results. I think we’ll see new opportunities for advertisers within Street View itself, which will be a more immersible experience than the standard page of search results (the so-called Ten Blue Links).

How about if you could ‘walk’ down a street and:

• check the menu of a restaurant, view the interior and reserve a table, all from within Street View
• view the special offers that a shop is running before you set off into town
• visit the cinema to see what films are showing today
• plan where you will pick up your coffee on the route from the station to your meeting

All of these businesses could embed content into the Street View such as photos, videos and discount coupons (user-created content is already appearing in Google Maps; select to view it in the ‘more’ menu).

Add user-generated content to Google Maps

How do you see Google making money out of Street View?

“Profit is sanity; Turnover is Vanity.”

It’s exactly the same in the world of search marketing:

“Conversions are sanity; Traffic is vanity.”

It’s easy to be seduced by the ever-increasing traffic that comes to a site as a result of improving on your search engine optimisation or buying clicks on the pay-per-click platforms. But if that traffic isn’t converting to something tangible – sales, enquiries, sign-ups, downloads, etc than you have acquired nothing more than boasting rights.

The moral? Make sure that you always idenity at least one action that you can track as a ‘conversion goal’ within your stats and measure your site’s performance against that. Don’t look just as the volume of traffic.