A few weeks back, Google announced a great new addition to adwords, letting advertisers to display sitelinks on their ads, similar to sitelinks which appears for organic searches. Adwords sitelinks allows an advertiser to add four additional links to deep content within the site and are particularly useful as they can show the customer a quicker way to get to important sections of the site. Unlike, Organic Sitelinks which cannot be influenced, Adwords lets the advertiser choose upto ten relevant links to be shown to visitors. It’s a handy addition as it gives the advertiser an option to highlight promotions and seasonal offers for a given site.
However, a point to note is that sitelinks do not automatically appear for all the enabled keywords. They only appear for an ad which occupies the first sponsored result for a search and also has a higher click through rate. Therefore, the probability of displaying sitelinks for an ad is higher for brand or sitename terms, where the advertiser enjoys a first position listing as well as a higher click through rate.
Nevertheless, enabling sitelinks on adwords fairly simple.
- Log on to Adwords Account
- Navigate to campaigns, then click on settings.
- Scroll down to the ‘Networks, Devices & Extensions’ Section
- For each individual campaign, click on ‘Show additional links to my site’ under ‘Ad Extensions’
- Specify the links you want to display for your ads. You can add upto 10 links, but Adwords will automatically show 4.
Now, how do you track these links? How will you know if the Adwords Sitelinks are bringing in any conversions? Well, since Sitelinks is a new addition to Adwords, Google hasn’t implemented tracking on sitelinks yet. The first time I enabled Sitelinks for Adwords, I was seeking out various ways to track these links on Google Analytics. When I contacted the Adwords team for answers regarding tracking, they sent a neat little document on how this could be done, which I have summarised below.
Advertisers must add a query string to the end of each URL which works as an identifier for Analytics. For example, if www.example.com/category/page is the URL, Advertisers must add ‘?sitelinks=page-identifier’. The URL will look like this:
www.example.com/category/page?sitelinks=page-identifier
Adwords Sitelinks Tracking on Analytics
Now some of the sites already utilise query strings in their URLs such as this:
www.example.com/category/page?id=22
In this case, advertisers have to append the URL to include both the queries as below:
www.example.com/category/page?id=22&sitelink=page-identifier
Once the identifiers are in place, you can track sitelinks on analytics by following these simple steps:
- Log on to Analytics
- Click on the relevant website profile
- Once you are in the dashboard, click on ‘Traffic Sources’ on the left navigation menu, which expands to show different options. Click on Keywords. It displays the list of keywords from the Adwords Campaign.
- Select the filter ‘Landing Page’, which can be found below the tabbed menu and you should see the keywords which brought traffic to the site and the corresponding landing pages.
Hopefully, Adwords Sitelinks should improve CTRs and eventually result in higher conversions.
