In late 2009, AdWords launched a new feature designed to ‘increase choice and relevancy in search ads’ by allowing you to provide additional links to deep content on your website.

If you are not yet familiar with sitelinks or you have seen it and wondered how to set up something similar in your AdWords campaign, the reason may lie in the fact that sitelinks is only available ‘for advertisers whose ads meet a certain high quality threshold.’ That is Google talk, in layman’s terms, if you are not spending enough money on your AdWords account, you shall not get access to sitelinks quite yet.

Here is an example of sitelinks in action, for the search phrase ‘hilton hotels’:

You can see the ad sitelinks in the top circled ad which happens to be the official Hilton website. Looking at the SERP result, the Hilton brand covers the most important page real estate with the paid search SERPs as well as the organic SERPs. Given the authority of the Hilton website, there are also organic sitelinks visible in the SERPs, which then bodes the question:

If the search is for a branded phrase, which indicates intent and knowledge of the Hilton brand and the organic SERPs are already strong, is it really necessary to spend more money on PPC sitelinks?

Warning: Proceed with Caution

Sitelinks may do wonders in increasing click-through rate (CTR) on branded and non-branded terms but is it capturing the right type of searcher?

Ad sitelinks will not be a panacea for all advertisers, so if you do implement this feature monitor and test carefully. You cannot simply switch on the ‘on’ button and leave it at that – if you do, you may see expenses increases without a direct correlation in sales increase.

Think about the following 3 factors when implementing site links:

• Organic links vs. paid links – the reality is that these new paid search ad sitelinks so closely mimic organic results that searchers may not themselves recognise the difference. This may result in repeat visitors who are perhaps already customers or not in the market to buy, clicking on your paid sitelinks.

• Beware of Tire kickers – suddenly you are giving searchers more options to click on your website. Even though this may have an initially positive impact in increasing your CTR, pay careful attention to your cost-per-acquisition. If this number starts to increase, you may have a problem on your hands.

• How optimised are your pages – traditionally you have one landing page link in your paid search ad, now you can have up to four. Before you go crazy adding sitelinks to your paid search program, consider very carefully the pages to which you will be driving the searcher. Will they capture the attention of the searcher, do they have a clear path and some type of call-to-action or will these pages ultimately lead to a wasted click?