{"id":117089,"date":"2013-09-19T23:58:00","date_gmt":"2013-09-20T04:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/never-underestimate-the-power-of-sitelinks\/"},"modified":"2024-12-19T16:39:58","modified_gmt":"2024-12-19T21:39:58","slug":"never-underestimate-the-power-of-sitelinks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dacgroup.com\/en-ca\/insights\/blog\/search-optimization\/never-underestimate-the-power-of-sitelinks\/","title":{"rendered":"Never Underestimate the Power of Sitelinks"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few years ago, I was interviewing for a search engine marketing<\/a> position and the interviewer (who happens to be an SEM guru of sorts) asked me what my favourite Google innovation was. \u201cSitelinks,\u201d I answered very quickly (they were new at the time). He nodded and asked the highest increase in CTR I had seen with the addition of sitelinks. I responded by saying I had seen as high as 60% in some cases. At the end of the interview, given the opportunity to ask questions, I asked him what his favourite new AdWords feature was and he said Sitelinks also. I remember thinking pretty highly of myself in that moment, because I had I just discovered that I had the same favourite nerdy PPC game changer as someone I really looked up to.<\/p>\n

Now what\u2019s interesting here is that we\u2019ve all been well aware of how effective sitelinks are in expanding ad units, causing them to take up more real estate on the SERP and increasing CTR, but the sheer magnitude of their potential impact on results never really dawned on me until recently. I\u2019d like to share a few things I\u2019ve learned about sitelinks over the past few months.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not clicks on the sitelinks that matter. It just matters that they\u2019re there.<\/b><\/h2>\n

After reading this far, you may be surprised to learn that my experience tells me searchers don\u2019t actually click on sitelinks that much. In the 21 day test shown in the graph below, you can see that the percentage of ads shown with sitelinks starts to spike around day 16, but the actual clicks on the sitelinks doesn\u2019t increase significantly. For paid search marketers, this means two things. First, the actual clicks on the sitelinks is not what helps drive results. It\u2019s the larger ad unit taking up more real estate on the SERP, capturing the attention of more searchers and pushing competitors down. Second, don\u2019t get too concerned about driving people to parts of your site that maybe aren\u2019t as related to the search and thus perhaps not as likely to convert. The overwhelming majority won\u2019t go there anyway.<\/p>\n

\"Sitelinks<\/a><\/p>\n

How to determine what percentage of your ads are shown with sitelinks. <\/b><\/h2>\n

This is a quick and easy, not too well known, trick in the AdWords interface.<\/p>\n

In any of the major tabs (campaigns, ad groups, ads, keywords), click on the segment<\/b> button and select click type<\/b>. Once you download the segmented report (or view it in the UI), all your metrics will be shown for any extensions that apply to that keyword\/ad group\/ad, etc.<\/p>\n

\"UI1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So to calculate how many ads showed with sitelinks, take the total impressions for headline<\/b> which is all ads and divide by the total for sitelinks<\/b>. For clicks, add all the clicks together i.e. headline + all extensions and divide by the number of clicks for sitelinks.<\/p>\n

\"UI2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

You cannot cheat the system with duplicate sitelink URLs anymore.<\/b><\/h2>\n

The Google sitelink policy has been around for some time and it states:<\/p>\n

\u201cEach sitelink must point to different content:<\/i><\/strong> We don’t allow two or more sitelinks in the same campaign or ad group to point to the same landing page or the same content. We also don’t allow sitelinks that direct to the same landing page as the ad’s destination URL\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

For a while, it was pretty easy to get away with using duplicate URLs for sitelinks, especially when driving to a form or promo page with no other destinations available. Unfortunately, this doesn\u2019t work anymore. Accounts that have duplicate URLs for sitelinks now pretty consistently result in those sitelinks not serving at all. The bad part about this is that there\u2019s no mechanism within the AdWords UI to inform you of this. That\u2019s something important to keep in mind when building promo pages that you plan to advertise using paid search. There have to be unique URLs created in order to take advantage of sitelinks.<\/p>\n

Also, spot-check your sitelinks often. At this time. There are no disapproval notifications being emailed to you like you\u2019re used to for ads. So if your sitelinks are disapproved for policy violations such as excessive punctuation, you will only see the disapproval if you go to the sitelinks view in Adwords.<\/p>\n

\n \n
\n
\n

\n Stay Forward <\/h2>\n

\n Get exclusive insights into digital
media's top-trending topics delivered
directly to your inbox. <\/p>\n <\/div>\n\n

\n
\n
\n
\n \n