Over a year ago, we launched Ad Sitelinks on Google.com as way to help you enhance your top-performing ads with additional relevant information. The results for Ad Sitelinks have been stunning, with the two-line format increasing clickthrough rates, on average, by over 30%.

We’ve also been impressed by your creativity. Since we launched Ad Sitelinks, we’ve seen you employ many different strategies when deciding which links to use in your ads. A willingness to test and experiment with different links has helped some advertisers, like Nationwide Insurance, get results that blow past the network average.

To help you get the most from Ad Sitelinks, we’re launching a serving enhancement designed to help improve your overall performance. In the past, we simply used the order in which you entered your Sitelinks to rank which ones to serve. For example, while you could enter up to ten Sitelinks for a campaign, we primarily used the top four for any ad in the campaign (as long as they met our policy guidelines).

We received requests from many of you to improve this logic by automatically determining which Sitelinks to show based on historical performance. We’re happy to say that, starting today, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Now, we’ll be using the historical performance of your Sitelinks to determine which ones to serve.

With this new serving enhancement, AdWords will automatically rotate your Sitelinks and show the ones with the best clickthrough rates more frequently. We’ll do this optimization at the ad group level, which means that although you’ll continue to set Ad Sitelinks at the campaign level, we’ll optimize which Sitelinks to show based on their performance for each ad group.

To make sure that you’re getting the most from Ad Sitelinks, check for the following:

1. Make sure that you have more than four Sitelinks entered so that we have options to rotate and optimize.
2. Include several shorter Sitelinks in your list, since our one-line Sitelinks format has a lower overall character limit than the two-line format.
3. Continue to rank your Sitelinks in priority order. We’ll continue to use your rank order as a factor, in addition to historical performance, when determining which Sitelinks to show with your ad.

To learn how to get started with Ad Sitelinks, visit this link in the AdWords Help Center.

Posted by Lisa Shieh, Inside AdWords crew