In a new twist in Adwords testing, Google has started to show Ad Sitelinks in the Adwords area of the page. This is a test that they announced back in November http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/11/increasing-choice-and-relevancy-in.html. Until now, Sitelinks have been an entirely organic phenomenon and it is interesting that Google are testing a paid version in the Adwords area.
As you can see from the screenshot below, the Sitelinks are for the brand site, not for the site that is ranking no1 organically. This should draw additional clicks to the advertiser site, particularly as the Sitelinks are quite sales-oriented (free shipping etc). As Google point out in their blog, the option to set up Ad Sitelinks will only appear for advertisers whose ads a Google-determined quality threshold.
There are a few Adwords tests running in Google UK at the moment, as we have also seen instances of the insertion of Google Shopping results in the Adwords yellow box in the last few days too, although these have been hidden behind a plus box and require a click.
So despite Christmas, or perhaps because of the holiday season, Google are ploughing on with tweaking their interface to make it better for PPC advertisers.
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