Why Would An Advertiser Use Sitelinks?

Sitelinks are powerful extensions that allow people who view your ad to access multiple parts of your website from your ad message. This means that instead of a single link to a predetermined landing page, potential customers have the option to choose between several different link destinations.

This discussion will take a look at the sitelinks extension and how and why advertisers should use this feature in their PPC campaigns. You can add this sitelink extension:

Ad & extensions – > Extensions – > Sitelink extension.

What Does An Ad With Sitelinks Look Like?

To understand how sitelinks change the appearance and performance of your ad messages, here are two ads for different human resource management tools. The first example is a normal search ad, while the second option utilizes the sitelinks extension.

This is an example of a normal search ad:

This is a search ad with the sitelinks extension enabled:

What Are The Benefits Of Sitelinks?

To understand why an advertiser would use sitelinks, it’s important to evaluate the benefits of this type of extension.

More Link Destinations For Customers

Again, one of the most immediate benefits of sitelinks is they provide customers with more possible destinations to arrive at from your ad. This makes your ad more enticing because not every customer will be drawn to the deal highlighted in your headline and description.

Some customers are still in the discovery and research phases. They need more time and answers before they are ready to convert. In the above example, for instance, the customer can explore case studies, webinars, client testimonials and other resources before converting.

Improve The Customer Experience

Offering an exceptional customer experience is a competitive differentiator for many businesses. With sitelinks, potential customers can navigate your site from the moment they see your ad. This reduces friction and improves the customer experience by providing relevant answers (and links) for everyone that sees your ad content.

Better Ad Performance

With more options for viewers to choose from, ads with the sitelinks extension enabled tend to be more relevant and see higher clickthrough rates. In turn, these traits raise the advertiser’s Quality Score and lowers their CPC on ads.

In fact, any type of extension has the power to improve your ad performance by a few points because they add value to your ad experience. More value means the content is more attractive to potential leads.

Improve Legitimacy

Sponsored ad content, no matter where you see it, has the tendency to come across as spam or shady. Some Google users will avoid ad content altogether and scroll straight to the organic results. With sitelinks, your ad comes across more professional and legitimate.

Users don’t have just a single link to follow, but the option to pick between several, which shows that this is a site with many different pages. Some Google users won’t even be able to tell the difference between an ad with sitelinks and a normal, organic listing!

Decrease Bounce Rates

Since customers can visit sitelinks that are relevant to their needs and questions, it’s far less likely that they’ll bounce back to the SERPs. This keeps bounce rates low and preserves your ad budget.

You are far less likely to pay for bad clicks when you have sitelinks enabled.

More Visibility

There’s something to be said about your ads being physically larger with sitelinks enabled. You get at least one line of added links, which not only helps your ads position higher, but also makes them more visible on the SERPs.

More real estate is always a good thing when it comes to advertising.

What Types Of Businesses Benefit From Sitelinks?

When you consider the many benefits of sitelinks, it is easy to see why they are one of the most popular ad extensions. And, they are practically universal. As long as you have a company website, then you can, and should, extract value by using sitelinks.

The Dos and Don’ts of Sitelinks

Now that you have a clear idea of why an advertiser would use sitelinks, you may want to enable them for your own campaign. Before you do, here are a few things to keep in mind:

DO Keep Your Links Short And Succinct

Character limits are very limited in PPC marketing. Some advertisers agonize for hours over how to fit that perfect ad copy into such a small space. Sitelinks mean you can add text to your limited ads, which is enough to excite any PPC manager.

However, in this case, less is more. You want to have short and to-the-point sitelinks. Longer links and descriptions will detract from the ad’s legitimacy and appearance.

DON’T Rely Solely On Sitelinks

Sitelinks are, without a doubt, one of the more popular ad extensions available. But, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Google won’t always display your ads with sitelinks. Thus, it is a good idea to enable at least four extensions, as this will increase the likelihood that your ad messages appear with added value and features.

DO Routinely Check Your Sitelinks

Broken links will hurt your ads and customer experience. Even if you’re very confident that your ad links are in tip-top shape, it’s still good to be in the habit of routinely checking them and ensuring that they are working as intended.

DON’T Repeat Yourself

If you’ve mentioned a benefit in your ad copy or headline, you don’t have to repeat it in your sitelink extensions. It can come across as repetitive and spam.

Looking at the sitelinks example from earlier, there is no repeated information in the sitelinks.

It’s about adding value, not repeating the value you’ve already introduced!

DO Utilize Enhanced Sitelinks

Enhanced sitelinks add a text description to each link. This helps add even more visibility on the SERPs. Here’s an example of an ad from jeans collection example with enhanced sitelinks.

All that’s required is a little bit of extra text!

DON’T Use The Same Sitelinks For Every Ad

To get the most value out of your sitelinks, you should really cater the links to the ad itself. Not only will this improve relevance and customer experience, but it will help attract more clicks. This is especially important for searches with obvious intent. You want to meet those intentions with relevant links!

If you searched for hot coffee, you wouldn’t want a Starbucks ad to show you sitelinks for scones, right?

Conclusions

Why would an advertiser use sitelinks? Because sitelinks add new destinations for ad viewers to explore. There is a much higher chance that one of those links will be relevant to their needs or questions at that time. Thus, ads that enable the sitelinks extension to perform better and lead to more successful marketing strategies.