“Cool, but do I really need Sitelinks?”

In short, yes! These have two major purposes.

1. They offer your customer additional relevant information as they complete their buying journey.
2. They make your ad listing larger. More screen real estate gives you a better chance of getting your potential customer to click on your ad in the search listings.

Imagine the situation where a customer was searching for “handbags.” Including sitelinks to collections like “clutches,” “crossbody bags,” “purses,” and “best-selling handbags” will direct them to results that are more relevant to their actual needs. The sitelinks make the customer more likely to click and ultimately make a purchase.

“Awesome. So which Sitelinks should I include?”

Ideally, you’ll include sitelinks that give your customers additional information to help in their buying journey.

Here are some examples of sitelinks you may want to include:

• Bestseller collections
• <insert upcoming holiday> gift guide
• Individual product collection pages
• Promo or sale landing page

You’ll want to avoid links that appeal to folks who are unlikely to make a purchase. There’s no reason to pay for ad clicks to these pages

Here are some examples of sitelinks you should avoid:

• Job posting pages
• Help and Support pages
• Returns pages

What about automatically-created sitelinks?

We typically avoid the automated sitelink setting inside of our Google Search Ads. This can sometimes lead to sitelinks with no or poor descriptions. Additionally, Google will sometimes pick out less relevant pages like the ones I suggested avoiding above. One example of a situation where you may want to consider automated sitelinks is if you have a huge number of collection pages that wouldn’t be feasible to manually add sitelinks for each. An example of this was a clothing brand we worked with that sold dog-themed prints. Thousands of collection pages were dedicated to various breeds and clothing style combinations. It wouldn’t have been feasible to add all of these as individual sitelinks manually, so we left on automated sitelinks to allow Google to find relevant links for individual search queries.

So how do I measure Sitelink success?

 When you go in to review your sitelink performance, you will see the same type of report that you get for campaign or ad group performance. There’s a catch, though:

In the Asset Report, Google isn’t reporting results (clicks, conversions, conversion rate) for each individual sitelink extension, but rather it’s giving you these metrics for all clicks that occurred when that site link was showing.

This means that if you had two sitelink extensions visible and someone clicked on the main ad headline before purchasing, both of the visible site links would get credit.

Do yourself a favor and turn on the “This Extension vs. Other“ segment.

This will show you your metrics just for the situations when someone actually clicked on the individual sitelink.