Following on from its new enhanced sitelinks feature, Google is now making it even easier for advertisers to include sitelinks in their ads, by providing suggestions for where they could be added, under the ‘Opportunities’ tab in AdWords.
Sitelinks are only eligible to appear in ads that qualify for a spot at the top of the search engine results page. So if Google deems your ads to be performing well enough, it will now suggest which campaigns you could add sitelinks to, if you don’t have them set up already.
Once logged into Google AdWords and within the Opportunities tab, advertisers will now see up to four tabs on the page, offering suggestions on the following:
- Budgets – suggesting how an advertiser could increase the exposure and traffic to their site by increasing the daily budgets of restricted campaigns.
- Bids – suggestions on how an advertiser could increase their CPC bids, and therefore average position and CTR, for particular keywords.
- Keywords – suggestions for additional keywords that are currently missing from particular ad groups, that could help an advertiser get more impressions and clicks for their ads.
- Sitelinks – lists the campaigns that an advertiser could potentially add sitelinks to and suggests ‘at least’ how many to add.
Google also provides information about the potential number of extra clicks, impressions and the potential cost of each ‘idea’, based on the previous week’s data.
When clicking on the ‘Add at least X sitelinks’ links within the sitelinks section, you will see a pop-up screen where you can add up to six sitelinks and preview how they will appear alongside the ads within that campaign.
Like most of Google’s suggestions, or ‘opportunities’ they are primarily made to encourage advertisers to spend more, which ultimately means more money for Google. Consider this when implementing changes, because what’s best for Google, isn’t always best for the advertiser.
The main issue with the sitelink suggestions is that they can only be added at campaign level, i.e. not all sitelinks that would be suitable for one ad in the campaign would be suitable for another. Unfortunately Google does not seem to take this into consideration when making its suggestions.
