AdWords Sitelinks were launched back in 2009. Hard to believe. After all this time, I still don’t see nowhere near enough advertisers taking advantage of this valuable AdWords Extension. Ad Sitelinks increase the ‘surface area’ of your ads, increases your CTR, and allows you to pander to multiple browser interests, or promote and direct traffic to several special offers. Today, I want to talk about a specific feature of Ad Sitelinks known as the embedded format.
What Are Embedded Sitelinks?
With the embedded format of Ad Sitelinks, no additional lines are appended to your ad. Instead, text in your ad that matches one or more of the sitelinks in your campaign will automatically be linked to that sitelink’s destination URL. Google states that with embedded sitelinks, potential customers can pick the part of your ad that applies directly to their current interests and visit the most specific page for that topic.
Normal Ad Sitelinks:
Embedded Sitelinks:
In short, the embedded format of Ad Sitelinks is Google throwing you a bone. For your ads to display with embedded Sitelinks, you must have gone to the trouble of entering in between 1 to 6 Sitelinks under Ad Extensions, your ad must appear in one of the top spots above the natural search results, and part of your ad text must match exactly one of more of your Ad Sitelinks. However! Embedded Sitelinks will only show for ads that don’t meet one or more of the requirements for one, two or three-line Ad Sitelinks (the good ones).
Make The Most Of Embedded Sitelinks
If you are in the process of fighting against a low Quality Score after launching an AdWords campaign, and you discover the only option available to you is Embedded Sitelinks, you can make the most of the situation. For example, if you have some compelling ad text (even the whole ad) copy and paste that into your sitelink extensions and make your entire ad a hyperlink to your chosen landing page. Doing this will help your ad to stand out just a little bit more.
Here is a quick example of how we set up our Sitelinks:
We placed all our desired Sitelinks (in case our Quality Score gets reassessed and allows us to display one, two or three-line Sitelinks) and then we copy and pasted key parts of our ad text as new sitelinks and directed those to landing pages which are most relevant to someone identifying with and clicking on that particular part of the ad.
Here is an example ad with a more tailored embedded Sitelink:
This allows us to direct people to our credentials and case studies of our past results if having an expert working on their AdWords campaign is important to them. And it should be!
You should always be making the most of every aspect of the features available to you in an AdWords campaign even if you are building towards a better feature. And like many aspects of online marketing, in-depth research and analysis is key to understanding the platform that you are working with. By gaining more insights you can make more informed decisions to refine your campaigns and achieve better results.