Google Sitelinks: The Adwords Version
2010 will be a very interesting year in the search space, both in the natural and pay per click markets. As Bing attempts to gain more traction and Yahoo concentrates on maximizing its product offerings, Google continues to release updates to its search engine asserting their progressive approach.
One of these recent releases in the beginning of 2010 is a feature called “Ad Sitelinks.” Sitelinks have long been a recognizable feature of natural search, and advertisers now have the ability to implement this attribute in the pay per click space.
The above example depicts a top positioned sponsored search result with 4 additional sitelinks. What are the benefits of these additional placements? At first glance they are numerous, the most obvious being additional search real estate. As in most business ventures, bigger is usually better. In this case, a single search result is taking up additional space for the same price, inevitably making each “square-inch-of-search” less expensive.
Secondly – and most likely Google’s main objective – more relevant search results! As the atmosphere becomes incrementally cluttered, relevance remains king. Additional sitelinks give advertisers the opportunity to include multiple product pages, service offerings, promotional calls-to-action, and a large number of other possibilities to increase the likelihood of a click-through.
All that being said, these sitelinks are not entirely the golden egg they may appear to be. First and foremost, additional links will only be displayed for the top positioned ad on a page, and further only if the specific ad has an ample enough bid and quality score to out position the competing ads. Taking those criteria into account, ad sitelinks at this point seem to be beneficial primarily for branded campaigns, as branded keywords and searches will have a better chance of being in the first position without breaking the bank and given the searcher’s knowledge of the brand they will be more apt to click one of the links that may not have been completely relevant to their query.
Another questionable aspect of this feature is direct tracking. As sitelinks are set at the campaign level of your Adwords account, if you wish to track each element individually they must also have specific URL tags. While this may not seem so extreme, these URL’s were most likely already being automatically tagged with standard Adwords protocols, so be sure that if you employ this technique to be wary of potential tracking conflicts.
New functionality within the major search engines is always exciting. Over the last two weeks we have implemented this feature and have seen an increase in both click-through-rate and conversion rate for specific campaigns. How much of this is directly attributable to the added links as opposed to general seasonality and other campaign modifications is not entirely certain, however, I can state with confidence that they have positively influenced performance.
