Sitelinks. Mentioned these a few weeks ago. I repeat myself a lot in real life as well if you have identified a theme. That blog focused on needing unique landing pages for each sitelink URL.
Google are paying more and more attention to sitelinks within the PPC realm.
Why?
Well, they tested them in the naturals, I’m sure they have a brilliant organic CTR and in the ever present idea to make PPC listings look organic, this is a natural step. Google want people to click on PPC adverts to increase their revenue. Pretty simple.
So, in the future sitelinks will be available at adgroup level. Heard that from the mouth of a Google representative so it must be true. This could be great news. Really refined sitelinks helping out your really refined adgroups and also increasing the test arena. You can test multiple sitelinks within one campaign now, plus the rumour also stated we will get click data per link, instead of an overview. It’s an early Christmas present I hear you murmur.
But, is this needed?
If you have a well-structured account, you are unlikely to have multiple themed adgroups all housed within one campaign. I know my accounts don’t. The theme is identified by the campaign name with the adgroups related. Say I had a campaign for iPad, generic keywords; my sitelinks would promote the different sizes of the device and potentially some accessories – whatever the theme of the campaign was and whatever matched my KPI and of course whatever works best or whatever I wished to test.
I can see why this would work for some, maybe if you have a fashion account and the campaign is ‘Boots’ a adgroup of ‘leather ankle boots’ could use the sitelinks to cross promote the different styles or colours, but again, this could be at adgroup level, i.e. shove them into a ‘Ankle Boot’ campaign with specific copy. Break the keywords up within that. w
Sitelinks, in the future are going to pull far more data through then the standard character limit. They are going to pull at adgroup level yes, but then an advert copy from that specific adgroup. So, back to the ‘iPad’, Google will pull through 4 sitelinks from 4 relevant adgroups, using the advert copy as the sitelink. I assume based on CTR, or potentially sitelinks will start to have their own quality scores. There will need to be a common denominator to deduce which sitelink performs best. Maybe a time to get AdWords conversion tracking on site to allow you easy interface analysis on this.
The presence of using adgroup level sitelinks is a pre-cursor to this ‘adcopy’ sitelink release.
Adgroup sitelinks sound like a step in the right direction, more allowance to test multiple links within one campaign, more refinement and more insight into when links are clicked on. This will also set your account up nicely for the second sitelink release, using the previously mentioned adcopy instead of a line of text.
This is great, *BUT* your account should always be as refined as possible for the best quality scores, especially in light of how competitive the market place is.
Thanks Google, this is cool, but I’d rather be able to have campaigns specifically targeting the search partners.
