Sitelinks.

Often, this aspect of paid search is overlooked, and that is understandable. Google gives you the option to add extra links within your ad, take up more page real estate, and can, consequently, have a significant impact on your your click through rate.

Once implemented, you may see your clickthrough rates on your top branded terms jump from, say, 15% to 21% (hypothetical). At this point, you are probably feeling pretty good about yourself. You have an increase in qualified traffic, you see your conversions increase, and you have good news to deliver to your client or boss. You may not feel the need or desire to try experient with these because, why change something that is broken? But, if you are always trying to improve your bottom line, you need to be constantly optimizing.

So we’ve been experimenting…

I have a very zen approach to online marketing, design, and usability. More often than not, less is more. So short, concise, and to-the-point sitelink copy would seem like the way to go according to my years of experience. However this was not the case once we started playing with our ads.

Before adding sitelinks, our main branded terms had a 15%+ CTR; once we added sitelinks our CTR increased to 21%+ and had a correlating increase in conversions and a correlating drop in cost-per-click (not exactly proportional, but dropped, nonetheless). But, after several months of running these ads with sitelinks, curiosity got the best of us, and we needed to know if we hit the ceiling. From vigorous testing, I knew that the ad copy was our most optimal (at least most optimal copy that was approved by the business), and the landing page was the most relevant, so the only thing left to change, from an ad perspective, was our sitelink copy. So, we added more descriptive anchor text to the sitelinks.

So we went from something like this:

Example short sitelinks

To something like this:

Example of sitelinks test

A few examples of things we did that worked included:

• Changing “Pricing” to “Pricing and Ticketing Information”
• Changing “Locations” to “Find A Local Store” or “Find A Store Near You”
• Changing “Book” to “Book A Room At XYZ”

And the winner is…

CTR before optimization

Test copy CTR

The test copy. Since increasing the length of our sitelinks our CTR has jumped up from about 24% all the way up to about 32%.

It has remained at about 32% since the test started.

So what?

Now I know that correlation does not always equal causation, and yes, I tested other variations. What should you take away from this? Don’t stop looking for ways to improve your ads.

Our results? We saw not only saw an increase in CTR, but also a drop in CPC, an increase in traffic and conversions, and an overall drop in CPA. So that shattered my whole less-is-more approach to sitelink anchor text. I suppose if Google is going to give you 35 characters to put in each sitelink field, then why not use them?

How are you optimizing your paid search sitelinks?

Photo credit: <bigfoto>
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Amazon or Zappos.

Tagged as: content, optimization, paid search, sitelinks