There are so many ad extensions a PPC advertiser can use to enhance their search advert I had to split the range of PPC ad extensions into a part 1 and part 2 article. With this in mind, it can be quite a daunting task to choose which ad extension is best for your PPC campaign and advert. Ad extensions are generally there to improve the advert, to make the chances of getting a click and a conversion much more likely (which is what advertisers always want). However, ad extensions are not perfect and will have benefits to using certain ones and drawbacks too. Therefore, without further ado, here are the pros and cons to what can be considered the most used ad extension in pay per click advertising: the site links extension.
To summarize the site links extension first, it is an extension that displays extra links to web pages of the advertiser’s choice below the description of a search advert such as the below example:
+ Enables the Advert to be More Contextual
One of the main problems with adverts is that there is only one landing page the web user can land onto. Unless your PPC campaign is absolutely perfect and hits a niche target market with the best keyword targeting method too, the chances are that not every web user will be happy landing onto the landing page you chose. Landing a web user onto the right website but wrong web page can potentially affect the conversion rate and success of your overall campaign. Therefore, by including the site links extension, you are enabling your search advert to hit a wider market, even if you are aiming niche. The choice of landing pages for the web user to land onto has just increased 4 fold, enabling a happier web user once they have landed onto the landing page (as they will more likely be on the right landing page for them).
– CTR of Site Links Extensions can be Poor
An inherited problem with the site links extensions is the fact that they are just links: nothing more and nothing less. For this reason, it is a lot harder to advertise web users to click onto a site link extension as opposed to the title link of the advert. This is because the description for the majority of search adverts is geared up to getting the title link clicked on and not the site link extensions: the site link extensions are there to merely compliment the search advert and not take over it.
Therefore, it can be quite a challenging task to get a healthy enough CTR to make site link extensions worthwhile to the structure of your search adverts.
+ Increases Advert’s Real Estate Space
Ultimately, the main reason site link extensions are great is because it increases the overall space the advert takes up on search engine results. The great thing to this is that there is a direct correlation between the size of adverts and how much a web user engages with them – the larger the advert the better. Therefore, anyway that can increase the size of an advert should be taken up in a heart beat.
An example of this is the above image, where Sainsbury’s have seemed to have used the site link extensions for this exact reasons (since all the links are very very similar).
