Google launches Enhanced Ad Sitelinks

By now most PPC managers are familiar with Sitelinks and (hopefully) will have them enabled on their campaigns in order to increase CTR.
There have been a number of setbacks for PPC ads. With the EU cookie law looming, there have been restrictions on remarketing campaigns plus the addition of ‘why these ads?’ texts which are potentially putting people off clicking on them.

In what could be seen as counteracting measures; Google launched Enhanced Sitelinks today, which allows PPC ads to take up significantly more room in the top three positions.The Enhanced Sitelinks“incorporate text from ads in your account that are related to your Sitelinks”.Great news for PPC Managers as, not only does it allows your ads to dominate more of the search results, it also allows the presence of exclamation marks in the Sitelink text, and more than one exclamation mark in the entire ad; something that used to be against AdWords policy.
Not only this, but it doesn’t take a genius to notice a similarity between the new Sitelink layout, and the existing organic listings layout. Considering 62% of searchers are unaware of the difference between paid and organic results (Pew Internet & American life Project), could this be a strategy to encourage people to click on the Paid results without realising it? The only differences being the amount of text underneath the Display URL as organic searches aren’t restricted to 35 characters.
No word from Google yet as to how this will be reported on; surely the ad text it pulls through will affect the CTR? Will it always pull through the same text for the same Sitelinks? When you change your ads will this affect the data being shown for the Enhanced Sitelinks? With this change, fingers crossed we will see an upgrade on the reporting side as well; currently you can’t get data for each site link (despite being told by Google they would be rolling this out over a year ago now!). Google have said that the Enhanced Sitelinks have resulted in ‘significantly higher’ CTRs than the original Sitelink format. So for now, us here at YOMA are eager to see these figures for ourselves!