Over time, the definition of what constitutes an effective Google Ads account structure has significantly changed.
In the early days before widespread machine learning techniques, the focus was on account structures with tight keyword lists that could be manually optimised. The introduction of smart bidding strategies allowed marketers to loosen the reins, trusting Google to interpret a broader keyword list and automatically increase bids for searchers with high conversion intent. In recent years, the Hagakure Structure has become the preferred method for advertisers with a mix of Broad Match keywords, automatically generated ads & URL based targeting allowing Google’s machine learning techniques to do the heavy lifting.
While the structure of accounts may have changed significantly, the overall goal hasn’t - ensuring that searchers have the best experience possible when seeing an ad by including information that’s relevant, timely and related to their query. Along with ensuring the ad itself is as high quality as possible, Sitelink Extensions are an extremely useful element of any account that can significantly boost performance and the likelihood of a conversion. A well run account will strategically use sitelinks to highlight the most relevant aspects of a business for each search and in this week’s post we’ll look at a few examples of how these can be used for success.
1) Moving Searchers Down The Funnel
Whatever the business, sitelinks should be implemented across an account to allow searchers the opportunity to visit additional pages that are also relevant to their search. These can be implemented at the account level or applied to specific campaigns to show pages related to that keyword grouping.
When using sitelinks, the best approach is to think one level down the funnel from the keyword itself. Using Nike as an example, a user making a branded search sees sitelinks for the different product ranges that Nike has - Men’s, Women’s, Kids & Nike Training. This allows Nike to hedge their bets on the intent of the search, ensuring that a user can easily navigate to the category that’s right for them despite not knowing their gender, age or specific category interest.
At a branded search level, this is great. A user can easily navigate to the page that’s relevant to them and browse through the range. What about if they already have a clear idea of what they’re looking for beyond just searching the brand name?
Here, we can see how this strategy is applied for a higher intent search where the user is specifically searching for Men’s Running Shoes. Linking to the general Men’s page wouldn’t be appropriate here as it contains non-shoe products while the Women’s and Kids page is no use as the search is specific to Men. Instead, Nike has applied campaign level sitelinks to highlight shoe category pages such as Running Shoes along with links to the product pages for specific models such as the Vaporfly 3.
2) Increasing Ad Size
It sounds obvious, but it’s important to remember - using extensions increases the physical size of your ad on the results page. In the examples above, Nike’s sitelinks add an additional eight lines of text below their main ad, pushing the next highest competitor further down the results page and making them less visible to searchers. For mobile searches, this can often result in the next competitor completely disappearing from view, ensuring that the top ad is the only business visible to searchers.
In competitive spaces with high CPCs, physically pushing competitors off the page can make all the difference between a high performing account and one that’s struggling for conversions, particularly when other competitors also have well written ads and are using their own extensions.
Of course it’s important to have well written, relevant sitelinks and, all things being equal, an ad with high quality sitelinks will outperform one with poor versions. However, the benefits of implementing sitelinks to simply increase the size of your ad can’t be overstated and are another key reason to ensure these are running wherever possible.
3) Following Google’s Best Practices
Ask any marketer their thoughts on Google’s Account Optimisation Score and you’ll understand why there’s a healthy level of cynicism in the industry. The automated recommendations can range from somewhat useful to flat out dangerous for an account and the optimisation score percentage is almost entirely dependent on how many of these recommendations are enabled.
While the majority of the recommendations are open to interpretation, some of them are easy fixes that will help to improve optimisation score and lead to higher account performance. One that continually comes up is the recommendation to implement sitelinks and other extension types within an account.
Google (along with other ad platforms), tends to reward advertisers who follow best practice in their accounts with lower CPCs and better long term account performance. Implementing extensions is a simple way to boost optimisation score, signalling to Google that an account is up to standard and providing users with an engaging, high quality ad experience. Along with improving optimisation score, these changes will also boost account performance leading to long term sustainable gains from a relatively low effort change.
While some recommendations should be taken with a grain of salt, implementing extensions isn’t one of them and should be a priority action when the recommendation comes up - if it hasn’t been already done.
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