Google have officially announced that Ad Sitelinks are now available in an embedded format. Although this will only affect your AdWords campaigns if you already have Sitelinks enabled, it means that Sitelinks can now be embedded directly into the description lines of your ad text, rather than being displayed below your ads.
How might this affect your ads?
Firstly, in order to actually have the links embedded as your ad text, the Sitelinks you set up need to match or be similar to what’s in your ad. Google will then automatically use your ads text to link to the specified pages of your website, rather than displaying the Sitelinks underneath the ad.
Google believes that embedding the links in this way will entice more users to click on your ad. The reason being that potential customers can simply click on the part of the ad that they found to be most relevant to their needs, which consequently may not always be the headline.
However, one advantage to the basic Sitelink format was that when they are displayed below your ad, the amount of space your ads have on the search engine results page is increased. This can ultimately lead to standing out from your competitors with an extra element to the normal ad format.
Why the change?
As we’ve mentioned in previous posts, we believe that Google is attempting to improve the look of paid advertisements. This is evidenced through the many changes ad formats have undergone lately such as the first description line of your ad displaying as part of the ad headline, destination URLs displaying only in lowercase and automatically including “www.” in every destination URL to make ads look more like organic results.
And now, Sitelinks will be embedded within ad text. It will certainly be interesting to see how embedded Sitelinks will affect click through rates and overall campaign performance.
Stay tuned!
