Google has introduced a advertising option you won’t want to miss! As part of Google’s Adwords advertising platform features of ad extensions, Dynamic Sitelinks has been made available to all businesses at no additional charge. Sitelinks help people reach a web page on your site by clicking to the very page specific to what they are searching — directly from your ad, with just a single click.
I discussed ad extensions in March with the article, “Understanding Ad Extensions in Google AdWords” as a means to improve your advertising performance. Ad extensions are advertising features to visually improve your text ads to people searching on a specific topic related to your business. Using ad extensions you maximize your budget, get more clicks, and improve the click-through rate (CTR) of your ads. More clicks means more traffic to your website and improved ad performance means higher keyword quality scores. Better keyword quality scores means lower cost per click, which you can read more about at “High Quality Scores Mean Lower Pay-per-click Costs“.
Dynamic Sitelinks are automatically generated and appear below your Google ad and will connect potential customers to relevant pages on your website. This is another ad extension feature adding value to your advertising campaign while saving time and simplifying campaign management.
The best part of course is the cost nothing if they’re clicked, visually enhance your text ads and give you more real estate space in the search results.
Dynamic Sitelinks Help Advertisers And Google
I cannot remember a time when Google did something for free without getting some benefit from their generosity.
This reminds me of the local business support center Google launched some time ago because businesses were not claiming and updating their local business listings. It was important to Google that this happen in order to serve accurate information to local consumers and generate more advertising revenue. The support center initiated outbound calls to businesses around the country as well as accepted inbound calls to facilitate getting this process going. To this day, too many businesses have not claimed or updated their listings (not just at Google, but around the web), so the support center is still available and has been enhanced with more services.
The same actually applies to the ad extensions. The adoption by businesses of ad extensions has not been very significant forcing Google to help businesses engage in these enhanced features that help both the advertiser and Google.
Example: When people search for used cars, they perform many types of searches and click on a variety of results during their initial research. At some point they will schedule a test drive with a local car dealership, which is best done through the dealership’s website. If they see a link that takes them right to the test drive page you will have helped the local consumer reach you quickly. Dynamic Sitelinks are available on both desktop and mobile searches.
Depending upon what study you read, there is within a 10% increase in ad CTR when a business uses ad extensions. If the customer clicks on the Dynamic Sitelink in your ad there is no charge, however, if they click anywhere else within the ad you will get charged. This is where ad extensions in general benefit Google because the increase in clicks means more revenue to Google.
Read more from this article at Web Marketing Today’s, “Dynamic Sitelinks Improve AdWords’ Performance“.
Most people will not know the difference and for this reason your Sitelink description should be compelling so they click that text copy instead of clicking somewhere else in the ad. This will be the benefit to you and thereby getting free clicks to your website.
Google does have some requirements for your ads to be eligible for itelinks. Most ads are eligible for Dynamic Sitelinks, as long as your advertising campaign is set to “Search Network with Display ” or “Search Network only.” This way, advertisers get Dynamic Sitelinks if their ads qualify. The advertiser gets that enhanced CTR and Google gets more revenue.
Benefits of Dynamic Sitelinks
I think you will find many of the benefits for Dynamic Sitelinks will apply for any Google Adwords Ad Extension.
- Matching your website pages with topics searched provides a direct link to what the customer is seeking.
- Augmenting your ads with additional and automatically generated ad extensions saves times without setup.
- Linking to high-converting sections of your website.
- Minimizes your time and work managing Google Adwords to make new text ads or edit existing ads to include Sitelinks.
- You will find you can easily change link text and web address whenever you want, keeping them current for sales and special offers.
- There is flexibility to add sitelinks to an entire campaign or a specific ad group, depending on which ads you want Sitelinks to show with.
- You have a choice to run Sitelinks for mobile and which devices you wish to run them. If you choose to run Sitelinks for mobile you can customize them for mobile separate from the desktop Sitelinks.
- There is additional flexibility to schedule Sitelinks with start and end dates. You can specify the dates, days of week, or times of day your sitelinks are eligible to show.
- You cannot manage what you do not measure. Detailed reporting is available to find out how many clicks occurred on your ad when Sitelinks appeared.
- If it is necessary to keep measurement statistics even if you edit your Sitelinks, then you will find the performance statistics are retained for you.
Start Using Dynamic Sitelinks
Keep in mind Sitelinks are limited to 25 characters in most languages, or 12 characters in double-width languages. Besides you really don’t want to get to wordy with Sitelinks. Give the customer what they want as quickly as possible before they decide to move on to your competitors.
Because Dynamic Sitelinks are free there is no reason to not use them. If you are concerned that Ad Extensions will increase your costs because they are more effective to generate more clicks, you might want to consider focusing your targeting, ad text copy and be more effective with your ad campaign.
A better CTR and more clicks will result in a higher quality score. Higher quality scores means lower costs per click and your ads are ranking higher compared to your competitors.
