Google sitelinks now available to advertisers
Another new release from Google AdWords this week allows advertisers “whose ads meet a certain high quality threshold” to add sitelinks to their text ads when they appear on Google properties. These let searchers get straight to the content on your site that is most relevant to their query.Up to four sitelinks will display where an advert is the “best match” for a user’s query. This will often be for a unique, brand-related search, such as your company or product name:
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.
Tags: adwords, quality score, sitelinks