Sitelink Clicks Perform 20% worse Than Headline Clicks (Unless You Do This)

This article was done with data from Opteo. The author has received neither incentive nor payment from Opteo at any time.

According to the $5 billion in spend I analyzed across hundreds of thousands of campaigns, you’re (probably) wasting money on your sitelinks.

In fact, the median sitelink click has a more than 20% worse CAC than headline clicks.

The good news? I reverse engineered why 13% of sitelinks perform better than even headline clicks.

Sitelink Efficiency: It’s not great

For all but the lowest spending campaigns, sitelink clicks tend to perform worse than headline clicks.

When binning campaigns by spend, sitelink performance starts relatively similar to regular ad headline click performance, but jumps to over 35% worse with the campaigns spending the most amount.

Similarly, we can see that CVR of clicks from sitelinks (right) drops significantly for higher spending campaigns.

Cost Isn’t The Enemy: Impression Share Is

When we bin campaigns by their “search exact match impression share,” there’s a clear trend. The closer you are to capturing the most amount of volume, the more likely your sitelinks are to be underperforming.

Perhaps surprising is how CPC drops the higher the search exact match impression share. The main driver of higher CAC is actually the conversion rate.

Here’s How To Make Sitelinks Which Perform Even Better Than Headline Clicks

Using rapidfuzz, I scored the top search terms in a campaign based on how well they matched the top 20 search terms within that campaign.

I ended up with a couple hundred million rows like this:

Then, I filtered the campaigns to only which campaigns had both a sitelink which matched a search term and a sitelink which didn’t match any search terms.

Using this filtered set, I analyzed which sitelinks tend to perform better.

13% of sitelinks matched a top search term in the campaign. The sitelinks which matched performed 17.1% better than sitelinks which didn’t match search terms.

What do these have in common? How can you make your own sitelinks which perform 20%+ better than headline clicks?

A sitelink which narrows intent from a search term, tends to win. Let’s look at the matching table again:

Someone’s looking to send money. The best your ad headline can do is (probably) to say “Send Money Anywhere.”

But your sitelink? Surface the likely specific intent behind the vague keyword and you can win big.

What To Do Next

It should be overwhelmingly clear that there are issues with the conclusion:

“Drop some new sitelinks in your campaign which match search terms and see a 20%+ improvement in sitelink performance.”

As someone who’s run successful campaign experiments with meaningful improvements by only changing sitelinks, here’s what I’d recommend:

1. Only send traffic to pages which you know convert. The classic mistake is to set up a sitelink pointed to an “About us” page. That doesn’t work.
2. Start with campaign sitelinks. Have a sitelink for each major search theme. You can point all these to the same URL through using this sitelink trick (I wish I could find and credit the person who originally found this, this has been a “hack” for more than a decade at least)
3. When you’re really wanting to have some fun, start adding ad group sitelinks. If you have an ad group for “1 Bedroom Apartments NYC,” make sitelinks for ”>$2500 1 Bdrm Apartments”. Or anything else which narrows intent