I wanted to draw some attention to the Ad Extensions that are available within Google. These extensions are a great opportunity to build brand recognition and extend your messaging to searchers. Some advertisers use sitelinks to segment out different types of users. For example, Dell segmented out home users from business users and directed them to different, relevant, landing page experiences. You can direct people to the most searched-for content on your site, clearance items, special offers, seasonal promotions, enrollment forms and different product categories.
It is important to know however that there is a trumping order for these extensions so you may want to consider different strategies for each of your campaigns. Or you can add whatever extensions make sense for your business and let Google’s system determine when best to show them. Either way I would always test both options to see which performs better.
Below is an outline of the loose trumping order and Co-Triggers. Note that all of this is subject to change without notice by Google. Beta extensions will trump all others for short periods.
Loose trumping order
- Sitelinks
- Product Extensions
- Location Extensions
- One line Sitelinks
- Seller Ratings
Co-triggers
- Sitelinks (2- & 3-line) + Location Extensions
- Sitelinks (2- & 3-line) + Product Extensions
- Sitelinks (all) + Seller Ratings
- Sitelinks (2- & 3-line) + Location Extensions + Seller Ratings
- Location Extensions + Seller Ratings
All the above extensions are pretty straight forward to add, I have added some hyperlinks to direct you to further details. Sitelinks however are a little different because there are some best practices:
- Links with fewer than 15 characters tend to perform better than those using 35.
- Try to make the sitelink the same copy as the headline of the page you’re directing them to.
- Make the experience different; don’t direct all sitelinks to the same page.
- By adding all 10 links per campaign you have a greater chance of showing up for 1-, 2- and 3-line sitelinks. The volume of lines that will show is dependent on how ideal the answer is for a search query. You will usually see 2 – 3 line sitelinks on brand terms and 1 line on generic terms.
- Google will only show a max of 6 sitelinks, they will chose which 6 out of the 10 added, best match the user’s query.
- Always track, measure and optimize, don’t set up your sitelinks and leave it.
- When developing your sitelink strategy be sure to take a look at how your listing is showing organically so that you can use complimentary messaging.
- Quality score does impact whether or not sitelinks will show.
- Take into account broad match, the sitelinks in that campaign will need to cater for all possible keyword variations.
- There is another sitelink called embedded sitelink. This will trigger when your ad qualifies to appear above the search results and the text in your ad exactly matches one or more of your sitelinks.
If you are not yet taking advantage of these great features, I would suggest logging to your account and start setting them up.