Keep track of new sitelink rules and keep your enhanced campaigns knotted tight!
First there were enhanced campaigns; now there are enhanced sitelinks. As you may have noticed, enhanced sitelinks started to become part of many PPC conversations beginning in February this year. Starting on September 23, AdWords upgraded all legacy sitelink, app, and call extensions to enhanced. If you were using these legacy extensions and hadn’t upgraded them before September 23, take note of these important changes:
- If your campaign had only legacy sitelink extensions, Google upgraded that extension and marked it as deleted. The newly upgraded extensions then went through Google’s standard approval process.
- Performance statistics for upgraded extensions were reset; however, historical reports for deleted legacy extensions will continue to be available until October 23.
- Legacy sitelinks that exceeded the 25-character sitelink limit were upgraded. However, Google will soon begin enforcing this limit, which means that sitelinks longer than 25 characters will be disapproved. Make sure you adjust your sitelink text to 25 characters or fewer so that they continue to show when this enforcement goes into effect.
- During the upgrade, Google created an upgraded extension for each existing extension. In most cases, this was one upgraded extension per non-upgraded extension. However, if a legacy sitelink extension had multiple links, Google created one upgraded sitelink for each individual link.
- Upgraded sitelinks must follow the duplicate sitelink policy. This means that each sitelink URL within a campaign or ad group must direct to a different landing page with unique content. Sitelinks within a campaign or ad group that point to the same content won’t show.
When Google introduced enhanced sitelink details in February as a new feature in enhanced campaigns, the sitelink details were pulled from other ads in the campaign that shared the same landing page URL. Now, Google has announced that advertisers will be able to control the copy in sitelink details.
New description fields have been added to the pop-up window to set up new and edit existing sitelinks in the AdWords user interface. To add or edit the sitelink description within the AdWords user interface, you can locate the form under sitelink extension settings.
This new feature gives the advertiser much more control, flexibility, freedom, and enhances the overall strategy of what your mainline ad copy says over the sitelinks. It essentially allows you to create 5 ads in 1.
Summary of features in Enhanced Sitelinks:
- Sitelinks can show in groupings of 2 or 4
- Description Lines 1 and 2 can be 35 characters each
- Sitelinks cannot violate the duplicate sitelink URL policy
- Sitelink text cannot be the same as other sitelinks in the same ad group/campaign or the main ad that’s showing
- Sitelinks cannot use dynamic keyword insertion
Key Takeaways:
- According to Google, on average ads with sitelinks have a 30% higher click-through rate compared to standalone ads. So be sure to use enhanced sitelinks wisely.
- Individual enhanced sitelinks are a now an opportunity to test out different language and calls to action in your ad copy.
- If you know you’re going to be in one of the top positions or are paying to achieve a top position, use the descriptions of your enhanced sitelinks to take advantage of more real estate within the SERP.
Happy searching!
