The Illusion Of Choice, or, All Roads Lead To Rome

Chances are that, for any given product or service you’re trying to sell, there’s one landing page on your site that’s the most likely to convert PPC traffic. Maybe you have a few pages that are good at it, but in my experience, most clients just have one that can do it acceptably, with each subsequent page having a huge dropoff in results. If you are in this situation, know that few things would be more worth your time than improving that page’s ability to convert traffic, but that’s another rant altogether. 

Ad extensions are a path to many abilities some consider to be unnatural. I like to create my ads so as to give the illusion of choice. Let’s say I have my 1 landing page for acoustic guitars. The ads will link there, but I’ll also use that same URL to create 4-8 sitelinks, with each sitelink appearing to be something different. Consider this ad unit example:

Acoustic Guitars For Sale | Guitars Starting At $99 | Your Next Guitar Is Here

Description 1

Description 2

Sitelink 1 All Acoustic Guitars

Sitelink 2 Starter Acoustic Guitars

Sitelink 3 Acoustics That Look Cool

And so on and so on. Think of your target audience. What questions do they have? What do they need to be educated on before making their purchase that they might not be aware of yet? Take this opportunity to be the resource they rely on to get that information. And don’t claim to have the info and not actually have it. Put it on the website! Make content that is genuinely useful. That’s part of winning the long game, organically. Assuming this helpful content is actually on your landing page, those sitelinks help people learn what to expect. Often I make these sitelinks without actually expecting people to click on them in any significant amount. My goal is for my ad unit to be genuinely more informative and useful than every other ad unit on the screen, and I’m hoping that my target audience will notice that, and then click on the headlines or sitelinks. If they all go to the same page, it doesn’t matter which one they click.

Now this is just one tool in the toolbox. Most of the time, sitelinks are wildly different, and truly ought to go to different URLs. It wouldn’t make sense for About Us, Contact Us, Store Locations and Current Sales sitelinks to all go to the same homepage, would it? No, they should all go to the relevant pages. But once you drill down to an individual product or service, then the ‘all roads lead to Rome’ strategy makes more sense. Of course, this tactic is a response to a sub-optimal website situation.