Announced in Fall of 2009, Ad Sitelinks is a new feature that lets you include additional links to deeper content within your Google text ad. Per Google’s blog here:
“Rather than sending all users to the same landing page, Ad Sitelinks will display up to 4 additional Destination URLs on your search-based text ad for users to choose from. By providing users with more options, you can create richer, more relevant ads that improve the value of your brand terms and other targeted keywords.”
They use Priceline as an example:
Ad Sitelinks, which I don’t believe to be available for all advertisers just yet, can be found under the Ad Extension section of your Campaign settings. The many benefits for AdWords advertisers include ability to:
1) Show FIVE links in your ad, instead of one
2) Promote specials offers (e.g. holiday promos, free shipping, 10% off first purchase, etc.), increase awareness of and/or push new products, etc.
3) Potentially control additional ad real estate in the results pages, a great advantage if you’re in a highly competitive vertical
See Chris Zaharias comment in this Rimm-Kaufman blog, which includes links to a few case studies showing how advertisers actually increased their CTR via Sitelinks.
NOTE: Not all ads qualify to display Sitelinks in results and you can read more about Google’s “quality criteria” here.
TRACKING:
My Google rep forwarded me a detailed guide for tracking each ad sitelink separately, which I’ve summarized below:
To track each sitelink separately you will want to append an identifying query parameter to the destination URL of the sitelink. As an example, if my current landing page URL is http://www.ppc-buyers.com/quote, then I would append URLs as follows:
Sitelink 1: Get Free Quote – http://www.ppc-buyers.com/quote?sitelink=quote
Sitelink 2: Our Services – http://www.ppc-buyers.com/quote?sitelink=services
Sitelink 3: PPC Packages – http://www.ppc-buyers.com/quote?sitelink=packages
Sitelink 4: Landing Page Optimization – http://www.ppc-buyers.com/quote?sitelink=landingpages
Tagging your links will result in your landing page URL’s being recorded with the additional sitelink parameter, which means you can view stats in Google Analytics. It will appear as a separate entry in your Top Content reports and you will also be able to view stats in the AdWords section of the Traffic Sources section in Analytics.