Enhanced Sitelinks from Bing have now reached the shores of the UK after launching in September in the US. This update marks a trend in Bing Ads moving towards some of the features of Google AdWords, but what does it mean for your paid advertising in Bing?
The Benefits
Enhanced Sitelinks will enable you to add two lines of additional descriptive text to Sitelink Extensions. These additional lines of text give you more opportunity to convey your value proposition, persuade consumers and describe the product or services giving them a better idea of what to expect on the landing page. This creates two distinct benefits for your adverts. Firstly, the additional copy will be more likely to entice consumers to click on your Ad and not the competition, improving your Click-Through Rate. The secondary benefit is that consumers will have more information about the link they are clicking on, better aligning their expectations for the landing page, which can in turn increase the time spent on the landing page and ultimately the campaign conversions.
Eligibility
Enhanced Sitelinks appear to only be eligible for brand terms across both Google and Bing. I believe that this update is a direct result of companies complaining about competitors bidding directly on their brand. These Enhanced Sitelinks take up more spacing creating a very large ad that dominates the search results page whilst simultaneously pushing competitors down and so lessening competition for your brand terms.
Bing advises that whether “Enhanced Sitelinks serve depends on a number of factors, such as the relevance of your ad, relevance of the Enhanced Sitelinks, user location, space available on the page, and so forth. As always, we are experimenting with different algorithms to provide the best user experience as well as advertiser ROI.”
How Will My Ad Look?
We are among the first to take advantage of this new feature in Bing for ThoughtShift client Gopak. So you can expect ads which used to look like this:
To look like this:
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