Auditing Sitelinks? Here's a Quick Checklist to Make the Process Painless

Published: April 29, 2015

Author: Molly Shotwell

Sitelinks are a great, free way to get more real estate, get exposure for more landing pages, and prompt users to take more actions on AdWords ads. (For a list of Sitelinks options, check out the AdWords help page.) But there are a bunch of criteria to meet and considerations to take to ensure that your sitelinks show up. In this short guide, we’ll cover device requirements, ad group/campaign hierarchy, and factors that affect serving.

Device requirements for sitelinks:

Tablets and desktop:
-One-line sitelinks: 2 sitelinks per campaign or ad group
-Two-line sitelinks: 3 sitelinks per campaign or ad group
-Three-line sitelinks: 5 sitelinks per campaign or ad group

Mobile:
-1 sitelink per campaign or ad group

Ad Group/Campaign hierarchy:

By default, all ad groups use the campaign-level sitelinks.
If you also create ad group-level sitelinks, the campaign-level sitelinks will be ignored when ads from that ad group serve; only the ad group-level sitelinks will be considered. This is true even if there are problems with the ad group-level sitelinks, such as all of them being disapproved.

Factors that affect serving:

-Your keyword’s Quality Score and max. CPC bid
-The position of your ad on Google SERPs
-The relevance of the landing pages of your ads and sitelinks
-The relevance of other ads on the page
-Other ad extensions enabled in your campaign
-The search term used by a potential customer

Any other great things to look out for with Sitelinks? Let us know in the comments!