Google has announced that sitelinks on desktop search ads, first introduced in February this year, are now rolling out to users in all countries where AdWords is available.
The sitelinks extension allows advertisers to show links to various pages within the website below their ad text. In early testing, Google claimed ads with sitelinks saw an average of 30 percent higher CTRs.
Advertisers can create up to ten sitelinks when selecting campaign settings, from the Ad extensions tab. There is a checkbox in the settings to activate the feature, which says, “Sitelinks: Extend my ads with links to sections of my site.”
Ads may show two, four, or six sitelinks in addition to the site URL. Ads displayed on mobile phones can show up to two sitelinks, maximum.
Each link should have a unique landing page and there should be one ad to match each sitelink, at a “bare minimum,” according to Google.
Advertisers must delete the “http” when entering page URLs in order for the sitelinks to work. The order in which links are entered does factor into how often a sitelink will appear in an ad.
Google recommends keeping sitelink text “short and sweet,” to increase the amount of links they can show in each ad.
Enhanced sitelinks will only show in ads above the top organic search results, not in the sidebar. Advertisers struggling to reach the top ad position can try to improve their Quality Score or increase their max bid to increase the likelihood their enhanced sitelinks will appear.
In the announcement, Senior AdWords Engineer Pramod Adiddam warns, “Like other forms of sitelinks, enhanced sitelinks are generated automatically so they might vary in appearance. And you might not see them show 100% of the time even when you’re eligible.”
Are you using enhanced sitelinks in your campaigns? Let us know what experience you’ve had with them!