In mid-February, Google announced an expansion on its basic sitelink extensions – enhanced sitelink extensions. According to Google, while ads with regular sitelink extensions maintain a click-through-rate of 30% higher than those without extensions, enhanced sitelink extensions aim to increase this further by doing the following:
- Combining your text-based ads into one large ad and increasing visibility
- Including additional, relevant information to consumers, getting their attention and prompting them to click-through
The following is an example of an ad with regular sitelink extensions vs. one with enhanced sitelink extensions:
Regular Sitelink Extensions
Enhanced Sitelink Extensions
Google in fact stated that initial consumer perception of ads with these enhanced sitelinks was that the ads were more relevant and click-throughs were much higher than with regular sitelink extensions.
While there is no clear-cut way to implement enhanced sitelink extensions, and whether or not they’ll display is ultimately up to Google. However, the major search engine has noted a few tips to increase the likelihood of your ads displaying this new feature:
- Ensure that you have the standard sitelinks enabled and that they closely relate to each of the ads in your campaign
- Add up to 10 sitelinks to each campaign, again ensuring they bear as many similarities as possible compared to all of your ads
Image 1: Include link text and destination URLs that closely relate to your ads
It is important to note that while attempting to implement enhanced sitelinks, you ensure that all of the information being added is relevant to consumers as is the key to a successful campaign.
While this appears to be a feature that is still being rolled out by Google, as enhanced sitelinks begin to display on an increasing number of ads, it will be interesting to see if Google’s initial testing is substantiated in the way of increased click-through-rates and even conversions.
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Contributed by Yasmin Davila, eStrategist
