It all started in 2010 when Google in an effort to help businesses launched Ad Sitelinks. Over the last couple years there have been some improvements and recently Google announced Enhanced Sitelinks for Adwords.
The announcement was made in February this year but it is now being rolled out to all other countries that use Adwords. Advertisers can now show links to a number of pages on a website and will be listed below the ad text. So far Google is saying that CTR has been boosted at least 30 percent with the new sitelinks.
To get started you will need to go to the Ad extension tab and select the textbox to activate this feature. Once you do you will be able to create up to ten sitelinks when creating your campaigns. Other text ads in your account will be taken into consideration and will be combined into an Adwords listing when appropriate.
The improved CTRs will definitely make it worthwhile for businesses. Not everyone will qualify for Enhanced Sitelinks though. If you want to use this your ads must show above the SERPs and there must be active ads that are relevant to the sitelinks in your account.
The costs for clicks as well as the reporting will be the same is it always was. If you’re adding sitelinks you should ideally add about 6-10 and make sure to set up a different landing page for each link. Added to that you should test, test and test some more by having multiple ads going to the same landing page. Once you identify the best performing ad stick with it and tweak if you need to.
In the actual ads there might be two, four or six sitelinks displayed in addition to the site URL at the top. There will be a maximum of two ads displayed on mobile phones. Additionally you must strip the URL of the http or else the sitelinks won’t work.
To get the best results and for Google to add more links to each ad it is best to keep the text short as possible. The last tip for best practices with Enhanced Sitelinks is that you might need to bid aggressively and do all you can to improve your Quality Score if you want the spot at the top.
Keep in mind that Google explained that your order of links may not necessarily be Google’s and because the ads are generated automatically the appearance might be different from your expectations.
The Google Adwords Center provides a lot of details to help you get started and make the most of Enhanced Sitelinks.
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