Additional links are one of the oldest ad extensions. It is very easy to add them, but it is not always clear whether they need to be added. Let’s look at the pros and cons of this expansion in Yandex Direct and Google Ads, as well as General recommendations on the use of additional links, the selection of pages to them and writing texts.
Advantages of sitelinks:
- The ad takes up more space on the user’s screen — the CTR is higher.
- You can use more text fields to convince the user that your offer meets their needs.
- If the user is limited in resources (poor Internet, little time), additional links help them make a faster decision about whether they are interested in your offer.
Disadvantages of sitelinks
- They can reduce the conversion rate, because they can distract the user from the main goal
- If they are present, it is difficult to control their impact.
Since the search engines themselves earn more, provided that advertisers have a growing CTR (this is the main reason why the CPC rate decreases when the CTR increases), then all advertisers are definitely recommended and inspired that using sitelinks is good. Yes, well, but only to influence the clickability of the ad, very few people think about what happens next.
Let’s look at an example. Take this ad:
Let’s assume that our goal is to fill out a contact form or order a callback. If the user didn’t immediately call the phone number specified in the ad and went to the site, our task is to make sure that they make a conversion on the site (complete the goal), i.e. fill out a form or order a call. Using A\B or MVT testing, you can select the best landing page (in terms of conversion rates) from the ones available on your site, and then work directly with it.
So, you have one landing page, the link to it leads from the title. Why do we need more links, because they will lead the user to other pages, and, it would seem, reduce the conversion rate? But here comes the aspect that is individual for each site — for some, additional links can increase the conversion rate and for others, they can lower it.
Lower your conversion rate
– additional links can be found on sites where the conversion occurs almost without the user viewing additional pages, in addition to the landing page. These are single-page sites, sites for quick interaction (for example, calling a taxi or tow truck), and so on.
If you advertise a single-page site or a special landing page, you can include links to individual ad blocks in additional links.
This does not mean that such sites should not use sitelinks in ads, but you just need to understand that “scattering” visitors across the site’s pages will lead to a decrease in conversion. In this case, you should probably use the link text as additional space for the ad text, and use the addresses of alternative landing pages as links.
Increase your conversion rate
– additional links can be found on sites that have almost no conversion without the user viewing additional pages in addition to the landing page. In other words, when users go to the landing page, they still go through several pages before making a conversion.
How do I identify these pages?
Find the average number of pages viewed for users who made a conversion. If it’s 3-5 pages or more (depending on the size of the site), then it’s time to look for your pages that affect the conversion rate. You can find them, for example, by viewing the most visited pages on the site when sliced by users who made a conversion. Or collect site paths for a fairly large control group of users who made conversions, and analyze what they have in common.
It is important to understand that if these pages affect the conversion rate, then you need to optimize them too, and not just the main landing page.
Let’s go back to our example:
Now it becomes clear why the ad uses sitelinks, and why they are exactly the same. Probably users looking for a dealer to buy a car are interested in these options before buying:
- Special offers
- Credit Calculator
- Contacts
By the way, you don’t have to use all the links if you don’t know how to use them. You can use three, two, or even one.
And even better, if you test several ad variants with different additional links, with different texts in them, and with different landing pages. This will give you more insight into what your potential customers need.
About increasing the clickability of additional links
The text of additional links is the same tool for optimizing and interacting with the user as the main ad text or title.
For example, instead of the boring text “Delivery”, you can specify “Delivery within a day”. For the vehicle evacuation service, describe the tariffs “Passenger cars from 1500r”, “Trucks from 2000r”.
Statistics of help requests
Take the target query that you create ads for, and we select additional links for. Enter it in the Yandex keyword statistics service.Open Yandex. Direct or Google Ads and view the report for lower-frequency phrases that contain your query. Make sure that your additional links are broad enough and correctly cover the range of additional user interests that are reflected on your site.