How to Maximize Your Click-Through Rate and Add More Control to Your Landing Pages Using Ad Sitelinks
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July 20th, 2011 
Posted in: PPC Marketing 
198 CommentsIn the organic search listings you’re probably familiar with Sitelinks. They are the collection of links that appear below the search result for your website, and they link to the main pages of your site. Sitelinks are there to help users navigate your site. They are created by analyzing the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time. Though they are generated automatically, if you are unhappy with these automatic links you can delete some or all of them using Google Webmaster Tools.Depending on how specific the search term is these Sitelinks are sometimes displayed on one line or across four lines. For example when searching for the broad term “broadband” one line of four Sitelinks appears below the first search result, and searching for the brand name “Vodafone” displays eight Sitelinks across four lines.
Sitelinks give your organic search listing more prominence in the results, and can also expose more of what your website has to offer. It’s not surprising therefore that Google have decided to introduce this feature to its paid results.
Ad Sitelinks
Ad Sitelinks allows ads that appear in the top positions (ads with a very high quality score) to have as many as five links in their ad. This includes the main landing page as well as four additional links which appear beneath the ad text. Initially Ad Sitelinks was a feature introduced for brand specific searches only, but now you can enable this on more generic, unbranded campaigns.
Depending on how specific the search term is the Sitelinks will appear either as one line or two lines. For example when searching for “broadband” the 3 Broadband ad that is triggered has one line of links below the ad text, and searching for the brand name “3 broadband” will display this ad as having two lines of links below the ad text.
Ad Sitelinks will only appear when ads qualify for the top positions, however you can still enable this feature in preparation for a time when your ad will appear in a top spot. With Ad Sitelinks enabled, if your ad appears in the right hand side of the search results, it will appear in the same format as you are used to. For example, the ad below is the same ad triggered above in the search for “3 broadband” but now that it is no longer in the top spot the Ad Sitelinks do not appear.
Sitelinks don’t cost any extra in comparison to ads without them. Also, the costs per click do not differ depending on whether someone clicks on the main ad link or any of the Sitelinks. Additionally, if a users clicks on more than one link while viewing your ad you will only be charged for one click.
How To Set Up Ad Sitelinks
You will find the option to set up Ad Sitelinks in your Campaign Settings tab, under the “Ad extensions” section. To change which ad extension you are viewing, there is a drop down menu labelled “view” (directly underneath the campaigns tab) where you will see three options – “Local extensions”, “Phone extensions” and now “Sitelinks extensions”.
If you choose “Sitelinks extensions” you will now be able to click “+ New extension” which will open the next step in the process.
Ad Sitelinks is a campaign level setting, so the first step in setting them up is to choose an existing campaign to assign them to. As this is a campaign level extension you should take note that all of your ads in that specific campaign will have the Sitelinks assigned to them, so choose your campaign wisely. Make sure that the Sitelinks you setup are specific to the entire campaign.
The next step is to choose the link text (35 characters max), and the destination URL (1024 characters max). The text and URL follows the same rules as the rest of your Google Ads account, so for example the URL must direct users to a page from the display URL website being used in that campaign.
You can add between one and ten Sitelinks for each campaign, though only four Sitelinks will be shown, which ones are shown will depend on the keyword that triggered the ad.
If the campaign you are writing the Sitelinks for is a generic one it is more likely that the Sitelinks will appear as one line of text, so it is best to submit short and relevant link text. However, if the campaign is very specific e.g. brand focused, the link text would be displayed across two lines and can therefore take up most of the 35 characters without seeming cluttered.
Once you have saved these Sitelinks they will then appear listed in the “Ad extensions” section, with associated performance data such as clicks, impressions and CTR.
When choosing what campaigns to assign Sitelinks to, remember that this feature is being assigned to already highly successful ads and as with any new Google Ads feature, you should make sure to regularly check their impact.
The best method of monitoring the performance of the Sitelinks is to create two identical campaigns, and enable Sitelinks for one, but not the other. You will then be able to compare the performance with Sitelinks and without.
It is currently not possible to see individual link level performance data from within Google Ads, but using the tagging feature of Google Analytics you should be able to see what links were clicked on.
Add More Control to Your Landing Pages Using Ad Sitelinks
Unlike the Sitelinks in organic search, Ad Sitelinks gives you complete control over what links appear, giving you the opportunity to offer multiple landing pages to the user. Thus you can choose to provide text and links to other persuasive pages on your website.
It is still the ad’s main Destination URL link that is taken into account when determining the landing page quality for individual ads. This enables you to utilize already successful Google Ads campaigns to promote additional lower performing products or brand new products. However, Google suggests that you choose Sitelinks that are relevant for all your ads and search terms within your campaign, and to avoid attaching irrelevant links to your ads. As in the example below, the keyword “broadband” triggers the ad and the Sitelinks used all relate to broadband products that the company provide.
However, with regards to a branding campaign you may have a keyword list related to all areas of your business, therefore you could certainly use Sitelinks to promote lower performing or new products. For example, the keyword “3 broadband” triggered the ad below, however the Sitelinks relate to three other products (and product pages) that this company offers.
Maximize Your Click-Through Rate Using Ad Sitelinks
Ad Sitelinks make your ads stand out even more by giving your ads more real estate on the all-important first page of search results, with Google indicating that early users of the feature had reported on average a 30% increase in clickthrough rates. Some brands are even experiencing a 15-40+% lift in brand PPC sales YOY!
If you’ve already been bidding on branded keywords you’re likely to have been sending traffic to your homepage, and in this case it’s difficult to determine what the user was actually searching for. With Sitelinks you have the ability to offer multiple landing pages to the user, so searchers can choose the landing page that’s most relevant to them, which increases the chances of a conversion.
Sitelinks also give you the ability to include extra text in your ad. The extra text could either be used as an additional description line, linking to special offers or product benefits, or for promoting other products/services. If you use text that accurately describes the link, you increase the likelihood of a conversion. You can read the transcript of an interesting talk at SMX on supercharging your sitelinks here.
When creating your Sitelinks take into account the most popular ads already running in your campaign. Focus on the text from these ads and their associated landing pages that have the highest conversion rates. Linking to already successful landing pages will further increase the conversion rate of the clicks on your Sitelinks. You can check out some interesting examples of sitelinks in use here.
TIP: Brad Geddes has another creative use for ad sitelinks. Add your phone number to one of your sitelinks to increase your “call through rate”. If you’re advertising a local business, create a sitelink with your phone number as the anchor text and the destination URL being your site’s contact page.
Conclusion
Though Ad Sitelinks may improve your clickthrough rate it’s important to utilize them in a way that continues to bring highly targeted traffic to your site. Monitoring the conversion rates of campaigns that use Sitelinks is essential to determine if they succeed for you.
July 20th, 2010 at 10:35 am
This is a great post! Kudos to Sinead. Dave, you have made a great hiring decision. All the best!
July 20th, 2010 at 10:56 am
What’s a “very high quality score”? 8 and above? 9 and above? Or just 10/10?
July 20th, 2010 at 11:46 am
Hi Sakis, I know I did :) Watch out on the AW forum, she’s a hot contender for TC ;)
July 20th, 2010 at 11:49 am
All the best in the new job Sinead. Great post. Very helpful read.
July 20th, 2010 at 11:57 am
Hi Cormac. Thanks for your comment.
As long as your ads already appear above the search results, you will qualify for ad sitelinks. Getting your ads into these top positions is done through a mixture of high quality score and your CPC bid, it all comes down to who ranks higher versus your competitors bids/QS. Google doesn’t tell us exactly what QS you need to achieve to get into the top ad positions, all we can do is assume that the QS must be 10, or at least higher than that of the competitors bidding for the same keywords. I hope this answers your question.
July 20th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Hi Sakis, thanks very much for the feedback.
July 20th, 2010 at 11:58 am
Cheers Louise, it’s going brilliant so far.
July 20th, 2010 at 11:59 am
Brilliant article and I will soon be putting the info to good use. Thank you :)
July 20th, 2010 at 12:05 pm
Hi Sian, thanks for the feedback. Let us know how you get on with the new extension, would be interested to see if it improves conversions/ctr for you.
July 20th, 2010 at 12:56 pm
it is really great article , i got a lot from here. the way and the new information you have shared over here. PPCcan get us instant result, and they are appearing on the top, or on the right side to a relevant keyword, but i will say that this is for the up to you are paying you will get results, and it will end when u stop paying to them. nice information
July 20th, 2010 at 1:16 pm
Great blogpost Sinead, I haven’t been testing out this feature yet but will be sure to do so now :) Well done.
July 20th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Hi Lisa, thanks for the feedback. Good luck trying it out.
July 20th, 2010 at 1:43 pm
Hi Sinead,
Glad to hear you are now on the road to Corporate Stardom! Great Adwords post by the way. It’s been 2 years since my own Adwords campaign (which was successful) but I hear that the effectiveness of Adwords campaigns are losing ground of late.I’ll be keeping an eye open for more under the radar stuff from you in the coming months.Incidentally recognised your Photo in your Facebook Ad as a Twitter Patriot.Keep it coming!
July 20th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
Hi Robin, thanks for your feedback. I’m very much settled in here at RedFly and having been using AdWords on a daily basis for a long time I can’t say I’ve noticed a decrease in the effectiveness of PPC/AdWords. Though there are of course far more options out there these days for advertisers (such as Facebook, like you mentioned), but imho none offer the highly targeted relationship between the search user and the keyword marketer like PPC/AdWords does.
Do subscribe to the site for more great guides such as this and thanks again for your comment.
July 20th, 2010 at 3:16 pm
It certainly merits some mucking around with. I just wish they had not made it a campaign level option. I don’t have many campaigns where one set of sitelinks will suit all my ads!
July 20th, 2010 at 3:51 pm
Hi Jordan, yes it really is a pity that all of the Ad Extensions are only available at campaign level for now. Hopefully AdWords will expand up this in the future.
July 20th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Thank you Sinead, for that insight into Ad sitelinks – unfortunately, it is out of reach for me at the moment, due to the cost of adwords advertising, so I still have to hope for my site to do well so i can have organic sitelinks!
July 20th, 2010 at 7:33 pm
Hi Cisco, thanks for your comment. You know, even with a small budget AdWords can definitely work for you, all you need is a very highly targeted campaign. That way, all the traffic that does end up at your site will be highly targeted and will be more likely to turn into a conversion. Also, with AdWords you have great control over your budget, especially the prepay option – so at least you know you won’t run up high costs.
July 20th, 2010 at 7:44 pm
Thanks for the comment!
July 20th, 2010 at 9:14 pm
Great article Sinead. I’m currently using ad sitelinks on my branded campaigns, but I’m going to give them a try on all my other campaigns now as well. Hoping to see a nice CTR blip!
July 21st, 2010 at 12:31 am
Great post Sinead!
I was wary of the Ad Extensions features but have set up some Sitelinks to run in my next campaign.
How about a post on the Locations and Phone extensions next?
July 21st, 2010 at 8:58 am
Hi Brendan, thanks for your comment.
Actually Dave has written a previous post on location extensions: http://www.redflymarketing.com/blog/using-geo-targeting-to-improve-adwords-quality-score/
and we’ll look into the phone extensions one.
July 21st, 2010 at 9:00 am
Hi Dillon, thanks for the feedback and good luck applying ad sitelinks to your other campaigns.
July 21st, 2010 at 2:04 pm
Thanks for that. I’d never come across Ads Sitelinks before (although I leave PPC to the professionals!), so it’s good to know.
July 21st, 2010 at 3:10 pm
Hi Andy, thanks for your comment :)
July 21st, 2010 at 6:01 pm
Nice post Sinead. As always RedFly have come up with a comprehensive and informative post.
July 22nd, 2010 at 3:47 am
Thanks Sinead. I haven’t had huge success with site links in the past but will have to try them again as traffic increases to see if there is a benefit against the space being used for other valuable text.
July 22nd, 2010 at 12:03 pm
Hey Sinead,
Very informative.. Had come across Ad Sitelink option on Google interface but did not try to explore the same. After reading your blog things are clear and can use for couple of campaigns.
Hope to read many such informative blogs ahead…
Cheers!!!
July 22nd, 2010 at 6:41 pm
Well done Sinead! One other ad extension worth mention is the newly-released ‘seller ratings’ — it’s got its kinks but ultimately makes Google start to look more and more like Bizrate and the rest…
http://searchenginewatch.com/3640925
July 23rd, 2010 at 11:00 am
Hi Mat, thanks for your feedback. I’m glad I’ve been able to live up to the high standard Dave has set here on the RedFly blog.
July 23rd, 2010 at 11:01 am
Hi Aaron, thanks for the comment and good luck with trying Ad Sitelinks out again.
July 23rd, 2010 at 11:01 am
Hi Sayed, it’s great to hear that you’ve read this guide and will be now trying out this new feature. Good luck!
July 23rd, 2010 at 11:07 am
Hi Paul, yeah it’s great to see Google releasing lots of new Ad Extensions. Hopefully some of the newer ones will be available to us here in Europe soon.
July 26th, 2010 at 2:33 pm
Nice post, it’s good to see Google continue to hide the organic listings :) – the integration with Google product reviews (tested in the US at the moment, don’t think it’s available in the UK) is really interested.
I have segmented data for sitelinks and it’s pretty strong at being able to advertises discounts etc. As you say, great for branded search, when you don’t know exactly what the user is looking for, you can just show your top performing pages.
With Google local extensions, sitelinks, product reviews, Google may actually get organic right to the bottom of the screen. Hopefully the will give organic something and role out a better version of rich snippets soon.
July 26th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Great post Sinead! Something that people forget is that you can also track Sitelinks on Google Analytics and analyse the performance, very simple and very helpful. We wrote something sometime ago http://www.stellarsearch.co.uk/blog/ad-sitelinks
July 26th, 2010 at 3:54 pm
Hi Sinead, I saw an example today of somebody taking Brad’s tip one step further by adding a tick to their Ad site links to make it stand out even more. Can’t work out if its allowed or somebody is just being cheeky or clever. Here is a picture of the offending ad. http://www.ocatio.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/tick-adwords-site-link.jpg
Mat
July 26th, 2010 at 8:12 pm
Hi searchbrat, while I don’t necessarily agree with you that Google are hiding the organic listings I do see your point about how Ad Extensions can add some extra clutter to the SERPS.
July 26th, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Hi Stelios, yes we only just touched on the idea of using Google Analytics with Ad Sitelinks, so thanks for adding a useful link here in the comments.
July 26th, 2010 at 8:22 pm
Hi Mat, this is indeed pretty clever but I think this might be a feature Google is testing at the moment as I have seen these checkmarks before, as well as small arrows too. Only time will tell if this is a new formatting option to be rolled out soon.
July 27th, 2010 at 11:53 am
Hi Sinead,
Could you clarify for me how Adwords charges for these sitelinks? The scenario that I have in mind is, I right click on one sitelink and open it in a new tab, and click on another sitelink. Would the advertiser be charged for two clicks?
Heta
July 27th, 2010 at 2:40 pm
Hi Heta, thanks for the question. You are only charged for one click. Which is great if a search user does indeed click more than one link.
July 29th, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Hi Sinead good article, im inclined to agree with search brat, it seems at times google wants us all on adwords. There is a lot of clutter on a given serp, if your coming from a non tech user point, the line between organic and other is blurry. I would love to know how much of an adwords user spike Google gets every time there is an algorithm update.
Rgds Derek
July 30th, 2010 at 7:50 pm
Hi Sinead,
Great to see that RedFly has a psychologist on board. I’m already liking your insights.
I’d like RedFly’s professional opinion on a question related to click through rate.
Would you agree that when we focus specifically on our AdWords ads, the key metric we should optimize for is click through rate?
I think many people like to also optimize their AdWords ads against metrics related to conversions, e.g., conversion rate, cost per conversion, and other metrics that are relevant to conversions.
This, apparently, is why people like to set their AdWords campaigns to “Rotate,” as opposed to “Optimzie,” because the “Optimize” setting focuses on click through rate, and will automatically show the ad with the best click through rate more often.
Wait, these people say. Instead, you should set your campaigns to “Rotate” so your ads are shown an equal number of times. This, they say, will allow you to consider other metrics. You’ll build up significant data for both of the ads in your AdGroup, allowing you to compare how the ads do regarding conversion related metrics, such as conversion rate, cost per conversion, etc.
But is this the best approach? If you instead choose the “Optimize” setting, Google AdWords will automatically favor the ad with the best click through rate, and if you think this is the ultimate metric to optimize against, it’s an easy way to implement your optimization strategy.
The may be the best approach, since it’s the users’ search queries that are triggering the appearance of your ads, and each search query has associated with it a conversion profile. Some user queries have commercial intent (e.g, “free range chicken buy online”), whereas other queries are research oriented and not likely to convert as well into customers (e.g., “what is free range chicken”).
It might be argued that search queries should be optimized by conversion related metrics, but ads should not, because they are seen only briefly and have little influence one way or the other on conversions. If we take this approach, we would optimize our search queries against metrics that are relevant to conversion, and we’d optimize our ads against a single metric – click through rate.
Lucky for us, we have data to show us which of the options are best. Since RedFly has extensive experience optimizing AdWords campaigns, I wonder what RedFly has to say on this question: As we evaluate AdWords ads and optimize, should we, (1) Concentrate our efforts on exclusively on click through rates?, or (2) Concentrate on click through rates, and only go through the effort of also looking at conversion related metrics for search phrases that take up a big percentage of our budget, because these efforts are not likely to yield results, or (3) Set all of our campaigns to “Rotate” so we can look at both click through rate and conversion metrics for our ads, or (4) Set our campaigns to “Rotate” and focus exclusively on metrics relevant to conversions?
Based on the data RedFly has seen, I’d be quite interested in hearing your comments and advice on these options. Thanks for any advice you have!
August 2nd, 2010 at 8:39 am
Hey there Sinead,
I never knew that we could Ad Sitelinks in our Adwords listing too. PPC is totally new too me , this post has really helped me a lot. Thanks a lot for sharing this
August 3rd, 2010 at 10:19 am
Very well written and explained. Good and helpful post. Thanks and keep posting.
August 3rd, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Hi Derek, thanks for your comment.
August 3rd, 2010 at 12:46 pm
Hi Alex, thanks for the feedback, glad it’s helped.
August 3rd, 2010 at 12:47 pm
Hi David, thanks for commenting, we certainly will keep posting :)
August 3rd, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Hi Greg.
Thanks for your questions, but because all industries are different, there is never a comprehensive answer to questions such as the ones you have posted here, but I will give some advice with regard to CTR etc.
You should never concentrate your effort exclusively on one metric. A combination of metric works best, for example looking at high CTR low conversion ads can mean a good ad but a bad landing page.
With regard to setting your campaigns to “rotate” etc, you should experiment with this yourself, run a campaign for a 30 day period on “rotate” and then set the same campaign to 30 days on “optimize” and see what (if any) difference there was. This is the only way to tell, to see what works best for your particular account.
Hope this helps a bit, if you’re looking for further help with AdWords, we do some work over on the Google AdWords Help Forum and highly recommend it as a place to post questions such as these.
Thanks again for your comment,
Sinéad.
August 5th, 2010 at 6:09 am
Would you have an idea how I remove unwanted and irrelevant google ads? thanks.
August 5th, 2010 at 3:57 pm
Great article. Using the natural search sitelinks to explain the PPC side makes perfect sense to me. One question: can changing these ad sitelinks frequently have a negative impact on quality score?
August 6th, 2010 at 1:42 am
Hi Sinead,
Thank you for sharing your knowlodge with us.
Very good article with step by step guide.
Sorry for my bad english :-)
Best regards from Brazil.
Tiago C. Simões
August 6th, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Sorry John, I’m not 100% sure what you’re asking. This is probably a question best put in the AdWords help forum, but you’ll need to expand upon this quite a bit.
August 6th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Hi Tony, thanks for your feedback. Ad sitelinks don’t have an impact on your quality score, so you could change these quite often for testing purposes, see which ones convert best.
August 6th, 2010 at 12:57 pm
Hi Tiago thanks for your positive feedback.
August 9th, 2010 at 11:11 pm
Excellent tip Sinead! I wonder if using this type of deep-linking ad campaign actually will help to get Google to create organic Site Links for your site? That would be worth the money!
August 10th, 2010 at 1:21 pm
Hi Jon, as of the moment organic sitelinks are completely automated. Although, using Webmaster Tools, if you think that the sitelinks displayed for your site are inappropriate or incorrect, you can block them so that they no longer appear.
August 12th, 2010 at 1:02 pm
So if Google reports getting on average 30% more clicks with Ad Sitelinks does it make sense to bid up to 30% more to reach these top positions. I am thinking if your ads show up in the 3rd of 4th position but you want to improve your CTR and QS it might make sense bidding a little more per click in order to be able to use this feature (even if your conversion rates aren’t immediately effected it seems like your QS will rise and you’ll end up having to pay less per click in the long run). Any agree/dis-agree?
August 16th, 2010 at 2:13 pm
This post is what I think I have been missing. I will start putting it to good use today and see how it goes. You’ve made it again. I appreciate it.
August 17th, 2010 at 2:42 pm
Hi Michael, thanks for your comment. Hope Ad Sitelinks work well for you.
August 17th, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Hi there, to be honest, I would never recommend to increase your bid in an attempt to improve CTR or QS. If what you are doing now isn’t improving your CTR/QS, then spending more money isn’t a solution. Focusing on ad/landing-page quality would be a better place to put your time.
August 24th, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Thanks for the great information. I am always looking for better ways to improve my traffic and I never thought of adding additional links to the page to improve ratings. I will have to keep an eye on your future posts for more great information
August 24th, 2010 at 5:10 pm
Hi Trish, thanks for your feedback, appreciate it.
September 11th, 2010 at 6:36 pm
Thanks Sinead – i’ve used this before and I agree it’s excellent for conversion. We’re still on the fence as to whether it’s improving clients sales’ but it’s definitely impacting on click through rates.
September 16th, 2010 at 4:02 pm
Advertisers can use Sitelinks to point visitors to the most valuable site pages. Here are some ways in which MVP can be used with Sitelinks. They can be used to:
•push people further along the purchase funnel
•push people to the deeper, more focused and better converting pages of your site
•push people towards your more profitable products
I have set my site up with these links but goggle has not added them to searches for my website as of yet.
September 19th, 2010 at 11:55 am
great atrticle…will be putting this into use on my site…
September 20th, 2010 at 7:22 am
Hi..!!!
Nice Post.Thanks for sharing it. Very useful post. Thank You.
September 20th, 2010 at 4:13 pm
Hi North Star, thanks for the feedback.
September 20th, 2010 at 4:14 pm
Thanks for the comment, hope your sitelinks come into effect soon.
September 20th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Thanks for your positive feedback :)
September 20th, 2010 at 4:15 pm
Thanks Yash, glad you found it useful.
September 22nd, 2010 at 2:18 am
Thanks Sinead and Dave, this one helps my Landing Page. The problem is google banned my site due to their policy but when I went through their policy I don’t think my site doesn’t violates any of their policies. They said my site is into gambling that I have to make some chu chu thing there, and I told it is not about gambling, it is just about tips about an event…sigh, don’t even know what my next step….
September 23rd, 2010 at 1:26 pm
The ability to allow the user to select the most relevant link and the advertiser to deep-link to the most relevant page is excellent. It’s good for UX and it’s good for the conversion rate.
Location extensions are excellent too – if you have an extension for the user’s local area you immediately look more relevant.
September 25th, 2010 at 8:02 am
Sinead, I’ve been looking for this the whole time! I’m glad I found your article. I really find it very informative.
Thanks for clearing these out for us.
September 27th, 2010 at 8:50 am
Thank you kindly Sinead – i’m a regular reader of your blogs – looking forward to the next one.
September 27th, 2010 at 10:04 am
Hi Sky High,
Obviously you’ve already unsuccessfully contacted the support team about this issue, the next thing you can do is to go to the Google AdWords help forums: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdWords?hl=en
Dave and I do some work over there and either ourselves or some of the other forum contributors would be able to give some more detailed advice with regard to this and other questions.
September 27th, 2010 at 10:04 am
Hi Ben, I couldn’t agree more. Thanks for your comment.
September 27th, 2010 at 10:05 am
Hi Keith, thanks for the positive feedback :)
September 27th, 2010 at 10:06 am
Hi Cisco, thanks, make sure to subscribe to the blog for future blog post updates or you can also follow us over on twitter – http://twitter.com/redfly
September 27th, 2010 at 8:14 pm
Wow, great article Sinead. Very informative and nice use of graphics. How do you get site links added to the organic results? because they are not auto-generated for all sites
September 29th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Thank you so much for this information and for taking the time to share it with us.
This is excellent information that will take us to the next step with our marketing!
September 30th, 2010 at 3:23 pm
very good article indeed on how to crease CTR . i’ve bookmarked your site to check for future tips
September 30th, 2010 at 9:35 pm
a real cool blog, and a nice ticket, tks sinead
October 1st, 2010 at 3:03 am
Thanks for the link Sinead, I appreciate your help. I’m waiting for the reply now…cross fingers…:)
October 2nd, 2010 at 4:18 am
Nice post, it’s good to see Google continue to hide the organic listings :) – the integration with Google product reviews (tested in the US at the moment, don’t think it’s available in the UK) is really interested.
I have segmented data for sitelinks and it’s pretty strong at being able to advertises discounts etc. As you say, great for branded search, when you don’t know exactly what the user is looking for, you can just show your top performing pages.
With Google local extensions, sitelinks, product reviews, Google may actually get organic right to the bottom of the screen. Hopefully the will give organic something and role out a better version of rich snippets soon.
October 6th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Hi there,
I would recommended signing up to Google Webmaster Tools and submitting a sitemap of your site, this could help, but unfortunately Sitelinks are automated for now though you can remove them (if you have any) through Webmaster tools.
October 6th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
No problem, glad we could help.
October 6th, 2010 at 4:46 pm
Hi, thanks for reading and bookmarking. You should subscribe to the rss feed.
October 6th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Thanks for the feedback.
October 6th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Good luck!
October 6th, 2010 at 4:47 pm
Glad you are seeing some success using Sitelinks.
October 11th, 2010 at 3:48 am
I didn’t know about sitelinks before. A lot of my clients would surely love to have such a feature added to their campaigns. I’m fairly new to PPC so could use the advices given on your blog. Thanks
October 11th, 2010 at 7:35 pm
Wow. Thank you very much. I was unaware of Sitelink. Will be going over there now to set it up and make sure its relevant to my website.
October 13th, 2010 at 10:40 am
Hi thanks for your feedback, good luck with your AdWords campaigns.
October 13th, 2010 at 10:40 am
Hi Paul, thanks for your comment. Glad we could be of help to you.
October 14th, 2010 at 11:12 pm
Hey very good tips there, I’m kind of a newbie to this and your posts really do help. Guess I’ve got a lot to learn and the indepth coverage of ad sidelinks does help. Keep up the good work!
October 15th, 2010 at 9:25 am
Hi Stephen, thanks for your kind words and good luck with your future campaigns.
November 15th, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Great post, and great piece of research that ad sitelinks can be useful for increasing clicks on site page.
November 18th, 2010 at 6:03 am
This can provide additional visits/conversion without additional cost. And encourage websites to create highly relevant webpages that fits to their ad.
November 18th, 2010 at 11:15 am
Great! Your information is very useful for my new being developed business. Did you find what I am talking about? Yes right, I am about to start my new online business then I will thank you again for this information after using your information.
November 19th, 2010 at 7:31 am
Thanks for sharing this wonderful Information.Great job.
November 20th, 2010 at 9:14 am
Hey Sinead! You’ve done a great job! I’m a little bit newbie here, but your article was easy to read and UNDERSTAND, what means so much for me! Now I’ll use AdWords also, as I do with Videolsalesletters.
November 23rd, 2010 at 1:36 am
Thanks for the post…really great!
November 23rd, 2010 at 7:25 am
We always care about search engine features. Now we must say thanks for you for this good potential to perform our site.
November 23rd, 2010 at 5:38 pm
Hi Rahul glad you found it helpful.
November 23rd, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Hi Jack, thanks for your comment, sitelinks certainly do provide extra visits to our landing pages.
November 23rd, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Hi there, glad you found it of interest.
November 23rd, 2010 at 5:40 pm
Thanks!
November 23rd, 2010 at 5:40 pm
Hi Hanna, glad to hear it.
November 23rd, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Hi Greg, we’re glad to help.
November 23rd, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Glad you found the post helpful.
November 25th, 2010 at 7:51 am
that is simply great Sinead.
you have suggested a complete remedy,on can completely understand it due to the way you expressed …
November 25th, 2010 at 5:18 pm
Glad to have been able to help.
November 29th, 2010 at 3:18 am
This is an awesome article and I’ll be checking
out more of your site! Bookmarked!”
November 29th, 2010 at 12:22 pm
Glad to hear it.
December 3rd, 2010 at 3:37 pm
from my experience, almost every ad click goes to head, so it’s quite hard to get good ctr with those site links.
December 14th, 2010 at 5:44 pm
Hi Sinead,
I’m very big on Conversion Tracking, I feel lost without it. To my mind it’s certainly one of the most important indicators of your campaign’s overall performance. Blah, blah, blah…
So my issue is this: I don’t see any way to tie the site links to their respective conversion data. This seems silly to me and I suspect I may be missing something, but I can’t find it and it’s driving me mad.
Do you know how to drill down and reveal conversion data from site link traffic?
-Shrugging in San Diego :P
December 14th, 2010 at 5:47 pm
Best I’ve been able to do so far is:
In Google Analytics > Traffic Sources > Ad Versions > Goal Set 1 tab > segment by landing page, then campaign
This doesn’t seem like a very ‘clean’ way of acquiring these metrics, but it’s the best I’ve found so far. :(
December 21st, 2010 at 6:19 am
Hi Sinead,
your article contains some worthy information which i guess will help lot of people.
December 21st, 2010 at 9:14 am
Very useful and practical advice. I will try it immediately :)
December 21st, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Glad to hear you found it useful.
December 21st, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Thanks, hopefully it has helped a few people.
December 21st, 2010 at 5:44 pm
Seems like the kind of thing Google are probably working on because it really would be helpful to discern the conversion data on sitelinks.
December 21st, 2010 at 5:45 pm
Works differently for everyone across different industries, my advice would be if that it doesn’t work for you simply don’t implement them anymore.
December 28th, 2010 at 11:36 am
Hi Sinead,
Good posting. I read in my Google Webmaster Tools, in Site configuration –> Sitelinks, explanation like this,
“Sitelinks are links to a site’s interior pages. Not all sites have sitelinks. Google generates these links automatically, but you can remove sitelinks you don’t want.”
Is it mean that sitelinks can appear automatically in Google search engine result if Google ‘sees’ that a site has sitelinks?
Thanks
January 4th, 2011 at 11:17 am
Hi Trimulyawan, this is exactly what happens – Google basically decides if showing Sitelinks is helpful or not to a search user, and will choose to display them or not. You cannot request to have Sitelinks added to your organic search result, however, if Google does indeed show them for your site you can opt to edit them within Google Webmaster Tools.
January 12th, 2011 at 1:52 pm
Thanks for the article Sinead, very informative.
I have started to go through my Google tools and use many of the tools now.
Thanks for the great explanations as always!
January 18th, 2011 at 2:51 am
Great post, thanks for this I never knew that you could edit your sitelinks believe it or not. Some other awesome tips, bookmarked and tweeted this. Thanks.
January 18th, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Thanks, Sinead. I’d noticed that these sitelinks are starting to appear more and more regularly in search results. Do you have to pay a premium for this or is it just down to the whim of google whether you get the benefits or not?
January 18th, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Sinead, thanks for this information. This will help a lot – giving some pointers to everyone on ads and click throughs.
January 21st, 2011 at 3:39 pm
That is a really great post. I’m so glad I found it.
January 27th, 2011 at 12:58 pm
Glad you found it helpful :)
January 27th, 2011 at 12:58 pm
You’re most welcome.
January 27th, 2011 at 1:00 pm
Clicks on ads that contain Ad Sitelinks will cost you the same as if there were none, so no, you don’t pay a premium. If you read the article above, there is a detailed explanation of how to get Ad Sitelinks.
January 27th, 2011 at 1:00 pm
Glad you found it helpful.
January 27th, 2011 at 1:00 pm
Hi Stephanie, you should subscribe to the blog for more hints and tips on AdWords.
February 9th, 2011 at 8:19 pm
WOW,
Thanks so much I have been trying to figure out how to ad sitelinks to my adwords campaign all day long. I appreciate the tips and the help.
February 15th, 2011 at 6:36 pm
Great to see it is helping :)
March 2nd, 2011 at 5:39 pm
sinead, I think you hit on something so very important – split testing. It’s amazing how many marketers don’t actually test their campaigns and then they wonder why their ads are not performing. You just pointed out the golden rule – always be testing.
March 10th, 2011 at 3:08 am
I wonder if things like this will become more important with the new algorithm changes.
March 16th, 2011 at 9:34 am
With Adwords, we can easily add sitelinks to our ads. But naturally sitelinks are created automatically according to the importance of the sitelinks for the website. :)
March 18th, 2011 at 8:47 am
Great article Sinead. Thanks
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:12 pm
As mentioned above, natural sitelinks are indeed created automatically but only in the search results and not in your ads.
March 23rd, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Glad to see so many getting something out of it :)
March 24th, 2011 at 4:31 pm
Thanks for this tip. I am very optimistic it will boost my click-through rate. Thanks for sharing it.
March 27th, 2011 at 12:02 am
Sinead, nice work. I recently started posting replies in the AdWords help forums and saw that you’re a major player there. Now I see why. This post is like a super tutorial on steroids. Whole different class. Thanks much. I learned a lot. SJK
March 29th, 2011 at 11:54 am
Hi Joe, thanks for your kind words. Glad to see everyone is learning from these types of blog posts, I hope to do more in the near future.
March 29th, 2011 at 11:55 am
Hi Kingsley, glad you found the post helpful.
April 16th, 2011 at 2:24 am
Nice piece. This is some of the more definitive information I have read on AdWords. What a way to punch up my ads. Am following on twitter – C
April 23rd, 2011 at 2:56 pm
Thanks for this excellent information. I seriously have not seen this discussed in a better manner. Sitelinks would definitely improve your CTR, wasn’t sure how to do this until now.
May 5th, 2011 at 8:10 pm
I’ve seen a noticeable improvement in traffic on my own site from the organic site links in Google. After reading your post I’m seriously considering a targeted Adwords campaign utilizing ad site-links.
May 12th, 2011 at 1:00 am
This things would be helpful for us. We need to bring traffic to our sites. It’s been a great pleasure for reading this technique in improving our marketing.
May 12th, 2011 at 12:45 pm
Awesome post. Very informative. Thanks for posting this.
May 15th, 2011 at 9:33 pm
Very well written post. I had always been curious as to how exactly sitelinks worked, and this cleared everything up. Thank you Sinead!
May 18th, 2011 at 11:33 am
No problem, glad you found it helpful.
May 18th, 2011 at 11:33 am
Hi Shane, glad you found it informative.
May 18th, 2011 at 11:34 am
Good luck with that :)
May 18th, 2011 at 11:34 am
Let us know how you get on Alex.
May 18th, 2011 at 11:34 am
Delighted to hear that this post has been of help to you Louise.
May 18th, 2011 at 11:35 am
Glad to see you liked the post enough to follow us on Twitter Cory :)
May 20th, 2011 at 2:56 pm
Hello Sinead
Thanks for the article, I had not really given too much thought to sitelinks before. After reading your article I think I’ll start using webmaster tools a bit more to target my sitelinks to get the most out of my site.
regards
Stephen
May 25th, 2011 at 4:48 pm
Hi Stephen – yeah Sitelinks in the SERPS are just as important as your titles and descriptions, but as I mentioned, you can’t add sitelinks for the google search results for your sites but can remove any you don’t want to appear.
June 20th, 2011 at 1:22 pm
Hey Sinead,
Thanks for sharing your information, I’ve never considered ad site links for increasing click through rates before! I’ll need to look into this more now on how to structure my site for them, as you mentioned it does give your search results more authority!
Thanks
William
June 22nd, 2011 at 1:30 pm
Hi William, let us know how you get on :)
July 6th, 2011 at 1:40 pm
I have to say, we got sitelinks on certain terms organically recently and theres been a definite increase in site traffic. We have put quite a bit of effort into our organic listings but I’m sure the sitelinks are a major contributing factor.
July 12th, 2011 at 10:08 am
I think you hit on something so very important – split testing. It’s amazing how many marketers don’t actually test their campaigns and then they wonder why their ads are not performing.- Thanks for great Article
July 14th, 2011 at 1:48 pm
Thanks for your comment, glad you found it helpful.
July 15th, 2011 at 3:22 pm
If we includ sitelinks, it help users navigate to the right content on the page quickly, but it increased the likelihood that he left even faster. Sitelinks significantly reduced pageviews, had a negative impact. At the same time increase the bounce rate. What do you recommend?
July 19th, 2011 at 1:37 pm
Ah wow, great post Sinead!
Our website has just had sitelinks added into our Google SERP listing, and I was looking for ways to make the most of them.
Now I’ll be adding them into our AdWords campaigns, and will let you know the results :-)
Talk soon!
– James.
July 24th, 2011 at 3:39 pm
I hope my blog can be on first page serp so I can see whether there is a sitelink or not. With sitelink I can go directly to the page that I google for without have go to index and search for sitemap or categories. That is why I aggree with you Sinead, if you find what you are looking for there is a big chance that you will take action right away. And if you leave right away then, probably you don’t like the over or product and the page bounce rate going to be high.
August 12th, 2011 at 9:04 am
Very interesting, our site now has organic sitelinks but didnt know paid for versions were possible. Need to try this out. Thanks for the insight, great info.
August 19th, 2011 at 8:54 pm
It is brilliant to track the sitelinks with AdWords. I am not too clear though as to whether this was your idea, Sinead, or Google’s suggestion. It would make sense for Google to mention this to their clients to not only cross-sell paid results and AdWords, but also because their paying clients deserve to get the most out of their investment.
September 22nd, 2011 at 3:16 pm
I think this will help me a great deal to increase traffic and page rank. Site Link makes it easier to find some relevant information.
September 26th, 2011 at 4:46 pm
Sinead
Thank you so much for this post, I had no idea what Ad Site links were until you explained this so simply.
Thanks
Keith
September 30th, 2011 at 10:36 am
Interesting, I didn’t realize that it was so easy to ed/delete the sitelinks using google.
September 30th, 2011 at 2:22 pm
Hi Sinead, I actually implemented the Three campaign that you are referencing here, so I just wanted to say thanks for using that :-)
Gavin
October 1st, 2011 at 9:08 pm
Thank you so much Sinead. I have always wondered how those links appeared below some search results. A very enjoyable read!
October 3rd, 2011 at 11:29 am
Hi Gavin – well, keep up the good work in that case :)
October 3rd, 2011 at 11:29 am
Glad you found the blog post informative Jared.
October 3rd, 2011 at 11:30 am
You’re most welcome, glad it helped.
October 6th, 2011 at 1:38 am
Thank You Sinead,
I have been gathering as much info as possable about PPC for the bankruptcy attorney I work with and this is some very good key info!
October 13th, 2011 at 11:15 am
Thanks for the guide Sinead, we’ve just got the sitelinks up and running on our PPC- really happy with it!
Thanks :-)
October 13th, 2011 at 5:40 pm
What a great post Sinead! I was always wondering how to setup these ad sitelinks, I think it’s a great way to also gain coming traffic trust, which turns incoming Google traffic to much more quality traffic!
Thanks again :)
October 28th, 2011 at 11:29 am
I have heard about organic sitelinks that you mention in the post but I’ve never ever heard or seen ad sitelinks. This was something completely new for me and thanks for sharing :)
October 31st, 2011 at 1:13 pm
I’ve noticed these before but never understood how they were posted on google. This definitely seems like a good way to possibly gain more attentive eyeballs to your site.
November 10th, 2011 at 9:05 pm
I implemented sitelinks and my click through rate popped. It works well.
November 17th, 2011 at 10:40 pm
It certainly merits some mucking around with. I just wish they had not made it a campaign level option. I don’t have many campaigns where one set of sitelinks will suit all my ads!
November 18th, 2011 at 2:14 pm
Great site Sinead. Amazing how many people are commenting. Titles and headlines are very important and often overlooked. I am only just getting my head around seo.
November 18th, 2011 at 4:29 pm
These are some fantastic tips, Sinead! I’m so excited to implement these over here in the States. Thank you!
Grace
November 18th, 2011 at 8:11 pm
Hi Sinead:
Getting a high quality score and increased click through rate in PPC is crucially important to the success of your marketing campaign and the financial success of your enterprise –especially for those sites that don’t receive that much organic (free) search engine traffic, and have to rely more or exclusively on PPC.
Your helpful and easy-to-follow post on ‘how to maximize your click-through rate and add more control to your landing pages using ad sitelinks’ addresses the subject matter quite adequately.
November 23rd, 2011 at 9:02 pm
Hi Sinead,
Glad to hear you are now on the road to Corporate Stardom! Great Adwords post by the way. It’s been 2 years since my own Adwords campaign (which was successful) but I hear that the effectiveness of Adwords campaigns are losing ground of late.I’ll be keeping an eye open for more under the radar stuff from you in the coming months.Incidentally recognised your Photo in your Facebook Ad as a Twitter Patriot.Keep it coming!
December 4th, 2011 at 11:13 am
Hi Sinead,
Glad to hear you are now on the road to Corporate Stardom! Great Adwords post by the way. It’s been 2 years since my own Adwords campaign (which was successful) but I hear that the effectiveness of Adwords campaigns are losing ground of late.I’ll be keeping an eye open for more under the radar stuff from you in the coming months.Incidentally recognised your Photo in your Facebook Ad as a Twitter Patriot.Keep it coming!
December 7th, 2011 at 5:21 pm
Awesome guide! lucky enough to have come across this valuable information! Can’t wait to have my team implement many of these strategies.
December 21st, 2011 at 9:31 am
I should admit that this is pretty tricky idea but the worst part is that t only works for the paid results and the statistics is showing that the number of people who are actually clicking there is less than 10 %. Of course this will work great added to your adwords campaign.
December 26th, 2011 at 11:30 am
Getting a high quality score and increased click through rate in PPC is crucially important to the success of your marketing campaign and the financial success of your enterprise –especially for those sites that don’t receive that much organic (free) search engine traffic, and have to rely more or exclusively on PPC.
January 5th, 2012 at 11:12 am
Fantastic Guide. Hopefully I can get my soon to no. 1 soon to implement them!
March 6th, 2012 at 12:01 am
I had no idea that you could do this with sitelinks. I can see immediate benefit. I’ll certainly be playing with this option and test the effects
March 7th, 2012 at 2:57 pm
Glad you found it useful.