Sitelinks, and Ad Extensions in general, have become one of Anvil’s favorite items in the AdWords tool chest.  They offer a relatively easy way to stretch our clients’ messaging past those pesky text ad character limits, claim a tiny bit more real estate on the results page, and help us distribute special offers and limited time promotions across multiple campaigns.

But, they do have three major limitations:

• If you have multiple links in a single sitelink, there is no link-level reporting, and thus stats are aggregated.  You might have several sitelinks set up for a single campaign, but you will have no idea which one of those generated clicks and conversions.
• As soon as a sitelink is modified, much like a text ad, it becomes a new sitelink and click data is reset to 0.  If you have multiple sitelinks for a given campaign, and if just one of those changes, you’ll lose visibility on all the others!
• Sitelinks aren’t included in AdWords’ new Automate tool.   Given that sitelinks are especially well-suited for timed promotions, being able to schedule them to turn on/off would, arguably, be even more useful than for text ads.

Whine whine whine…I know I know…but, all of these headaches could be alleviated if only AdWords allowed us to organize our sitelinks differently.  As it is now, a group of sitelinks can contain up to 10 links, and a single group can be associated with multiple campaigns, but, a single campaign cannot include more than one active sitelinks group.   Let’s say I need to distribute a promo for “free shipping” across several campaigns.  If I add “free shipping” as a new link in those campaigns’ existing sitelinks groups, I lose all my data on the other links in those groups.  And of course, the “free shipping” data I start collecting will survive only until the next link needs added.

But, if I could add “free shipping” as a new, 1-link sitelink group, and then associate it with the eligible campaigns, on top of any other, existing sitelinks, then (1) those existing sitelinks aren’t disturbed and (2) I have granular data about the “free shipping” promo across all campaigns and lasting the full life of the promo.  Seems to me like “stackable” sitelinks wouldn’t be that hard to engineer, right?  Anyone come up with a great way to manage multiple, changeable sitelinks within the current setup?