Ad extensions are a great innovation to pay per click advertising since they provide advertisers a whole range of new ways to get the web user to interact with their search adverts and lead to a conversion. However, it is not always the best idea to use lots of ad extensions all at once and some only suit certain search adverts and applications. For this reason, some thought and consideration needs to go into what ad extension you use in your search advert. With this in mind, here are some tips and thoughts to using the site link extension.
 

What is the Site Link Extension?

The site link extension appears below the description of the search advert as clickable links. The maximum amount of links that can be displayed in the site link extension is four although you will see adverts range from 2-4 links.

Examples of site link extensions used in search adverts

Why Should You Use the Site Link Extension?

The site link extension has some benefits associated to it listed below:

• Increases space of your search advert – the site links extension naturally takes up some of the space of paid search results. Therefore, your overall advert size will increase in paid search results with the use of the extension. This will increase the chances of your advert being seen and clicked upon.
• Makes life potentially easier for the web user – if you choose the links for your site links correctly, you can make life a lot easier for the web user as you are enabling web users to navigate to the specific page they want quicker. This will reduce the exit rates on your site link landing pages and potentially increase your conversion rate.
• More room to entice web users – the text for each one of your site link extensions can be used to lure the web user into a click, such as using the rule of three for three site links.

Who Can Use the Site Link Extension?

Unlike other site link extensions, pretty much anyone can use the site link extension to their advantage. However, the only point to make on this is that you need to make sure the webpages that you are linking your site links to are actually going to be beneficial to your advert.
For example, you may have an optimised landing page that is doing pretty well. By introducing site link extensions with poor sub-landing pages will attract web users away from your main landing page and onto other landing pages that may not be as optimised as your main landing page. For this reason, it is important that the links are actually going to be useful to the web user – with each of the site links, you will need to optimise the web page in a similar fashion to the way you created and optimised your PPC campaign’s main landing page.