Sitelinks at ad group level are a boon for PPC advertisers
What are sitelinks?
When creating PPC ads in Google AdWords in addition to the landing page you can include different sitelinks that send visitors to various URLs within your website. Google say that sitelinks improve click through rates but apart from that obvious positive, including sitelinks in your ads create richer, more relevant ads that enhance the value of your brand terms and other targeted keywords. Sitelinks can point to specific pages on your site such as time-specific promotions, most popular pages, store locators, etc. For more information on sitelinks and how to implement them check out this help page from AdWords.
So what’s new?
There’s been a lot of talk about AdWords’ new enhanced campaigns, one of the features of the campaign upgrade is a long-awaited improvement in the PPC world. It will be possible to add sitelinks at ad group level rather than just at campaign level. This enhancement will bring much more targeted ads and gives account managers more control over the specific ads that sitelinks show alongside. With ad level sitelinks the ads can be much more specific and highly targeted for a particular search query.
Why are ad level sitelinks better?
The ability to show more specific ads to searchers should result in an increase in relevant traffic and an increase in conversions. AdWords will also be offering more detailed reporting, which will aid future strategy decisions. AdWords enhanced campaigns is allowing customised sitelinks for mobile so it is possible to choose specific sitelinks to show on mobile devices, a store locator sitelink could be particularly relevant for mobile PPC as users who are out and about could search for their nearest store to visit.
With legacy campaigns, that is those that have not yet been upgraded to enhanced campaigns, sitelinks have needed to be more generic to cover an entire range of topics that are covered by the keywords in a campaign: the same sitelinks had to be used for all ad groups within a campaign. To have different sitelinks for different sets of keywords it was necessary to add more campaigns. Google AdWords’ enhanced campaigns aim to reduce the number of campaigns that are required and to improve the relevance of advertising on the search engine result page, which can only be good. Right?