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Bing Ads Academy – Creating and Optimising Sitelink Extensions

This year we have released new ad formats into Bing Ads, one of which is Sitelink Extensions.

Sitelink Extensions are additional links that you can create to appear in your ads, helping to take your customers to more specific landing pages of your website. They allow you to promote certain products, services, or sections of your website, that the searcher can then choose from to help ensure they land on exactly the information they are after. Sitelink Extensions have the option to both increase click-through-rate and conversions.

As you can see in the above example, the Sitelink Extensions are advertising the other products available to the searcher, giving the searcher the option to not just click through to the homepage but instead to what they are after.

Bing Ads Sitelink Extensions will appear in the search engine results on tablets in addition to desktops. They may also appear on smartphones that are set to desktop mode (when viewing a page), but is not available for hifi/lowfi devices in mobile view mode.

Creating your Sitelink Extensions-

You can enter up to 10 Sitelink Extensions for each of your campaigns. These extensions will apply to every ad group and ad within that campaign so you need to ensure that the Sitelink Extensions you choose will work well with the ads and keywords in each of the campaigns ad groups.

When choosing what text to use in your Sitelink Extensions, we recommend that you-

  • Keep them short
  • Use offers
  • Include a call to action 

You can set Sitelink Extensions up both in the Bing Ads User Interface and the Bing Ads Editor. In the UI you will find the Ad Extension tab within the campaign view.

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When you click through to the Ad Extensions tab you will then need to click on ‘Create’.

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You then have the option to select which campaign you would like your Sitelink Extensions to be for, and can then enter each of your Sitelinks. Each link text, the text that is seen in the ads for each Sitelink Extension, can be up to 35 characters long, and the URL for the Sitelink Extensions can be up to 1,024 characters long.

When you are entering the Sitelink Extensions within the UI, the order in which you add them will be the priority order assigned to them. When displaying an ad, Bing Ads takes into account your priority order and which links are most relevant to the ad to determine which links to show. Although you can enter up to 10 Sitelink Extensions per campaign, Bing Ads will only show up to 6 in your ad at a time.

In the Editor tool you will also find an Ad Extension tab. As with the UI, when you navigate to this tab you will need to click ‘Create a Sitelink Extension’ to create your Sitelink Extensions. When you create the Sitelink Extension in the Editor Tool instead of adding them in order of priority, you now assign them a priority ranging from 1-10, with 1 being the highest priority. As with all work you do in the Editor tool you will need to sync your account for your changes to go live.

To save time you can also use the Multiple Changes function in the Editor tool at the Ad Extension view to add multiple Sitelink Extensions at one time. By entering them first in Microsoft Excel under the column headers – Campaign, Sitelink Extension Link Text, Destination URL, and Sitelink Extension Order – you can then copy and paste them into Multiple Changes and import them into the Editor tool in one go.

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If you are importing an account using the Import from Google feature (as mentioned in Import from Google AdWordsblog) any Sitelink Extension you have in your Google account can be copied over in bulk. You can also use the Import from Google File option for bulk uploads from Google.

A key thing to note is that Bing Ads will only show Sitelink Extensions in the mainline (the positions above the organic listings) and only for high quality ads and campaigns. Therefore, make sure to add Sitelink Extensions to your highest performing campaigns. You may find it will take some time for new campaigns to start showing Sitelink Extensions due to the time required for the campaign to build up a history and quality score.

Editing Sitelink Extensions –

Once you have created your Sitelink Extension if you for any reason need to amend or delete your link text or URL it is very easy to do so.

In the UI you will need to select the radio button next to the link text and click Edit. This will then give you the option to edit both the link text and URL, or delete them.

In the Editor tool you can edit your ad extensions in bulk as you do with your keywords and ads, editing both the link text, the URL and the priority order.

In the UI under the Ad Extensions tab you are able to link previously created Sitelink Extensions to other campaigns. If you have previously created Sitelink Extensions, when you select ‘Create’ you will see a drop down of your previously created Sitelink Extensions and you can then select them to link to your other campaign.

Reporting on Sitelink Extensions –

There are 3 reports available in Bing Ads to help you evaluate your Sitelink Extensions performance –

  • Ad Extension by Keyword
  • Ad Extension by Ad
  • Ad Extensions Details

The Ad Extension by Keyword and the Ad Extension by Ad reports will give you performance data of the ads and keywords that have shown with Sitelink Extensions. This allows you to see how well each of your Sitelink Extensions are working with each of your ads and keywords and if you should amend or delete any of them.

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The Ad Extensions Details report will give you the performance data for the Ad Extensions themselves. This report will only tell you the clicks that the Sitelink Extensions themselves have received so you will see more clicks in your ad performance report, than in your Ad Extension Details Report.

To ensure that your Sitelink Extensions are working as well as they could be, we recommend that you regularly pull each of the reports above to see how they are doing. If any of your Sitelinks Extensions aren’t performing as you would like you can then amend them, amend their priority order or look to assign them to a different set of keywords and ads.

Remember the 10 Sitelink Extensions that you add need to work for each keyword and ad in your account, and they will only appear if you campaign has a good quality score and sits in the Mainline. Once you have set up your Sitelink extensions you can look forward to a higher click-through-rate for your ads, and we hope, a higher conversion rate as well.

Read & hear more about Sitelink Extensions

Other posts that appeared in the Bing Ads Academy series:

Bing Ads Academy – Importing your Google AdWords Campaigns into Bing Ads

Bing Ads Academy – Using Device Targeting on your accounts