“Enhanced Sitelinks” available for other countries

By Alouette Edens on 19 September 2012

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In February 2012, Google announced their renewing sitelinks: “enhanced sitelinks”. These new enhanced sitelinks will combine the present sitelinks with related ads.  As a result of this, the ad surface will be trebled!

Google points out that earlier tests showed that these enhanced sitelinks could make ads more useful and could lead to an increased CTR concerning the ‘old’ ads. This week Google announced rolling out the new sitelinks in other countries where AdWords is available.

How does it work exactly?
Ads in an account, that are related to the sitelinks given in a campaign, will be combined automatically. The first and second description line of an ad will be placed below a sitelink. Google shows the example below as a further explanation:

You’ve created the following sitelinks for your pizza restaurant campaign:

Next to the ads above your account also includes the ads below:

With the enhanced sitelinks your ad could look like this:

How can you get these new sitelinks?
Google states that you can prepare your account for these enhanced sitelinks with the steps given below:

1. Enhanced sitelinks can only show when your ad is above the organic search results. If a “top vs. other” report shows that your ads have few impressions in a top ad position, you can try to increase your Quality Score by increasing your max CPC bid, or a combination of the two.
2. Add 6-10 sitelinks, each with an unique landing page.
3. Have multiple active ads in your account with the same landing page URLs as your sitelinks. The bare minimum  is one ad to match each unique sitelink.

The enhanced sitelinks will be generated automatically. Therefore, they will not appear all the time and they might vary in appearance.

The consequences of the enhanced sitelinks
Google mentions that the CTR will increase. There are blogs published in the USA where they notice  an increase in conversions as well.  These results are not very astounding because your ad surface has been trebled.  Besides that, the ad looks more like an organic search result.

But are there some downsides? Google generates these sitelinks automatically so  what happens when Google combines an ad  you do not agree with? Besides this,  Google reports the sitelinks in the same way as the ‘old’ sitelinks. So, Google AdWords won’t show which ads are combined with which sitelinks.

So…
I’m very enthusiastic about this new feature and above all curious to see the results! Although I’m not a big fan of automated features in Google AdWords, the new feature will make the sitelinks more important for your ads!