Back in June 2010, Google introduced sitelinks, allowing advertisers to include links to further pages on their site within one ad.
For example if an advertiser sells a product by a particular brand, they could set up an ad to show for searches for that brand name and then include links within the ad to individual products by that brand:
Google claims that the click through rate for ads containing sitelinks is 30% higher than those without and has been working on the feature to try and improve it further and allow advertisers to easily include more information within their sitelinks.
The new enhanced sitelinks incorporates text from other ads within your account into your sitelinks if they are closely related. For instance if a keyword or phrase is being used as, or can be found within a sitelink, can also be found within any of the other ads within your account, Google could show the sitelink as the headline followed by the two lines of description from the ad in question.
Here is the example Google gives:
The two lines of description after each individual sitelink are all from ads within this advertisers account and Google has automatically matched them to the sitelinks as some of the phrasing overlaps.
For example “Order Online” appears in the original headline of the first ad, “Store” appears in the original headline of the second, “Deals” appears in the original headline of the third and “Returning Customer” appears in the second line of description for the last one.
As with the normal sitelinks they will only feature on ads that appear above the Google search results and if your existing ads show with two or three lines of sitelinks.
If the user decides to click on one of the sitelinks within your ad, instead of the main headline, it will cost the same per click as if the display URL in the same ad was clicked.
This is an interesting concept and if Google does a good job of matching the sitelinks to ads it could work well. However I do feel that there could be potential for mistakes to occur as it is automated and out of the advertisers’ immediate control.
We’ll have to wait and see how well Google does…
