Last week I went through location extensions, a great way to get more exposure for your PPC text ads. In order to take full advantage of AdWords, it is highly recommended you utilise all Text Ad Extensions you can. Today I will be introducing the most valuable extension in my opinion – Ad Sitelinks Extension.
Ad Sitelinks lets you include additional links to other section of your website. As they can be updated as often as you like, they are best used for time limited and seasonal offers.
Just like location extensions, Ad Sitelinks will give your ads anywhere between one to three lines of extra Google SERP real estate. Which any good PPCer will tell you – is too good to pass up!
One-line / Multi-line and how to qualify for Ad Sitelinks
Multi-line Ad Sitelinks comes in forms of two or three lines – Google will display up to four links over two lines, or six links over three lines. These will generally only appear when your ad provides the ideal answer to a search query, which may be determined through Quality Score, CTR and Ad position (above image, only number one of the top three has luxury of multi-line Sitelinks). Brand term searches will trigger Sitelinks more often, make sure you have it enabled for your brand name campaign.
One-line Sitelinks will display up to four links in one line – This may trigger more often than multi-line Sitelinks, make sure your ad has a good Quality Score, CTR, and your links should trigger when you are in the top three.
Google recommends the following best practice to increase your chance of showing Sitelinks:
- Your ad should have one of the top positions above the search results.
- Your ad should have a very high Quality Score.
- Your Sitelinks URLs must direct users to pages that are part of your main website.
Which links will be shown?
You can add up to ten links for Ad Sitelinks Extension. Google will try to rotate the links as only maximum of six can be shown at once. They will be prioritised based on the order you enter them and how well they perform, so make sure you enter the most important links first.
Google will generally put shorter texts into a one-line Sitelink, and longer texts into multi-line Sitelinks. You should optimise your text length for the type of Sitelinks you are going after – bear in mind multi-line Sitelinks will trigger less often.
How to implement Ad Sitelinks
- Once logged into AdWords, click on the campaign you wish to add Ad Sitelinks to, click on the “Ad extensions” tab – If you cannot see the ad extensions tab, click on the arrow to the far right and enable the tab in the drop down.
- Once you are in the Ad extensions tab, select “View: Sitelinks Extensions” from the dropdown menu just below Campaigns tab.
- To add Sitelinks, simply click on “New Extensions” to add anything up to 10 links to this campaign.
- To edit a set of Sitelinks, place your cursor over the extension and click when the pencil icon appears. This is also where you can see your stats of how your Sitelinks are performing.
Click below to see other parts of AdWords Ad Extensions series, check back next week for part 3!
- Google AdWords Ad Extensions – Part 1 of 3 – Location Extensions
- Google AdWords Ad Extensions – Part 2 of 3 – Ad Sitelinks
- Google AdWords Ad Extensions – Part 3 of 3 – Product Extensions
- Google AdWords Ad Extensions – Part 4 of 3 – Call Extensions
What do you think?