Google’s Ad Sitelinks in Action

April Nelson - November 25, 2009

Google’s Ad Sitelinks can help boost your campaign’s performance!  Sonya Wood’s blog post last Friday talked about the beta program Google AdWords has rolled out, called Ad Sitelinks.  With initial tests running on a handful of our clients’ campaigns, early numbers are showing promising results.

The most significant impact in AdWords stats has been on click through rate and conversion rate.  The chart below taken from the Account Snapshot section of AdWords compares November 9 — November 15 when Ad Sitelinks was in place, to the prior date range when additional links were not being used.  While the click through rate (CTR) for this client’s entire campaign portfolio dipped slightly, the campaign utilizing Sitelinks in the ad copy showed an increase over 66%.

Figure A.  All Online Campaigns

Another notable metric that has been impacted is the conversion rate.  Please note the company being featured in this post is an ecommerce website that has historically seen increasing conversion rates throughout the month of November and December.  This is evidenced by Figure A above where we see a 68% lift in conversion rate for the portfolio of campaigns under this account.  This increase was significantly higher for our test campaign utilizing Ad Sitelinks — a stellar 80% lift!

Figure B.  Ad Sitelinks Campaign

Beyond AdWords, we have seen additional positive impact in site usage through Google Analytics.  By providing multiple entry points to the website we have been able to drastically decrease the bounce rate for this campaign — by 49%!  Based on the strong preliminary results yielded by implementing Sitelinks on a single campaign, we have since implemented the option on a number of campaigns within this client’s account.  If your AdWords account has been white listed for this beta opportunity, I strongly encourage you to take advantage of it.