Yesterday, in Paid Search Sitelinks - The Inside Story, Part I, we discussed the issues surrounding Google's new beta platform for PPC sitelinks. Today, let's talk about workarounds to the problems, and what this new system can add to your site's ROI potential.
The Workarounds
You've got your four links appearing below your main ads - links that Google has picked for optimization heaven. However, your highest sale volume link isn't appearing because it's CTR is half a percentage point lower than another. The fix is relatively easy - you simply need to work around the system instead of going through it like good boys and girls. In your campaign settings, select the six ads you don't want appearing and delete them. That's it - by removing Google's say over your sitelinks, you remove the need to optimize the titles of the links and the pages they go to. After all, you know best pages within your site for conversion, so you should be able to make a very educated decision about how your site's PPC campaign is displayed in Google.
Campaign settings mean that you're up a certain creek without a paddle if you've structured your account with many ad groups within a single campaign. Firstly, you need to do a bit of restructuring to get the sitelinks for the right campaigns; this may mean building out a campaign with a single ad group, just to make it more tightly targeted. Also, consider this: brand searches are, for the most part, the results that pop up with sitelinks in the natural search results. Your brand results in the natural SERPs are going to be pushed down if you're using paid search sitelinks, so you need to act like a consumer and focus primarily on your brand terms initially. This isn't to say that generic terms (like "insurance", "vacations", "clothes", etc) couldn't be optimized for paid search sitelinks - über-generics are perfect for this beta - it's just good to get a feel for the way searchers interact with your new campaign setup on a safe term first.
Finally, keyword tracking. Honestly, there isn't much of a workaround here. As my confidential informant told me, "the idea here is to increase overall sales." Although tracking results at a keyword level is great and very much recommended in any PPC campaign, treat it like the cherry on your sundae instead of the nuts and track your paid search sitelink results at a campaign level. You should have already split your campaigns out very granularly already, so this tracking will act as close as possible to tracking at the keyword level anyway.
In the Future
How cool would it be if Google came out with a heatmap of SERPs with paid search sitelinks? If they want to keep pushing SEO down (and let's be honest, it's not a money maker by any stretch of the imagination for them), this would be a great case study to analyze eyeball dwell time on PPC sitelinks.
Overall, putting two and two together (more links, more prominence) should make your campaign tick along very nicely. Presumably, the more prominence given to five links from a single advertiser should push it well over the edge in terms of campaign expectations and ROI on brand terms and über-generics.
Are you considering opting in to Google's paid search sitelink beta? Have you already been doing it and found a way to track more granularly than campaign level? If you have, or have any questions about the program, let me know by filling in the comment form below - I'll see if myself or my secret Google snitch can answer them for you.
