What are Breadcrumbs you may be wondering… remember the story of Hansel and Gretel who wanted to find their way home?! That’s exactly it. During May 2012 Google are set to launch their Breadcrumb trail as a set of links that will help searchers understand and navigate a site’s hierarchy.
Currently Ads are formatted with Headline, Display URL and then the Ad Description as shown below. In many cases advertisers include /Keyword to the end of their Display URL in order to make the URL appear more relevant to the searchers query, and boost the likelihood of acquiring clicks.
Breadcrumbs will help make ads appear even more relevant and user friendly. They do this by enabling the searcher to understand exactly where they’ll be directed within a website and what that journey will entail, prior to clicking on an ad. Every Breadcrumb will be clickable and charged at the same price to that of a searcher clicking the Ad Headline. This will help direct searchers to the most relevant page dependent on what they are searching for. Not everyone follows a logical route when searching for a product or service, and so providing more options is likely to increase Click Through Rates.
Now it wouldn’t be ideal to set up Breadcrumbs without testing the performance would it? Fret not! Google will also be launching a new segmenting option to enable you to view the overall total number of clicks on Breadcrumb links. To view this you’ll need to go to the Ads tab, and select the Segment button and choose to segment by Click Type. The Click Type will appropriately be called Breadcrumbs. Unfortunately within these reports it isn’t confirmed Google will identify exactly what Breadcrumb is working best, but then again we can’t have everything.
It will be really interesting to see the Breadcrumb performance in comparison to Headline, as you may very well find that you haven’t been directing searchers through to the most relevant pages after all. And so it is advisable to keep an eye on Conversion Rates if you decide to go live.
If you wanted to make sure your ads are eligible to display Breadcrumbs there’s a few things you need to be aware of:
The HTML code below explains a Breadcrumb for a product page on a Shoe Website:
<a href=”http://www.exampleshoes.com/shoes”>Shoes</a> ›
<a href=”http://www.exampleshoes.com/shoes/womens”>Women’s Shoes</a> ›
<a href=”http://www.exampleshoes.com/shoes/womens/black”>Womens Black Shoes</a>
To Using the HTML above the Breadcrumbs will display like this:
Shoes > Women’s Shoes > Women’s Black Shoes
Breadcrumbs can hold a number of variant properties which can be labelled using microdata or RDFa mark-up.
If you would like to discuss how to improve your paid search performance using the latest Adwords updates please call David for an informal chat on 0207 592 1841
Breadcrumbs will help make ads appear even more relevant and user friendly. They do this by enabling the searcher to understand exactly where they’ll be directed within a website and what that journey will entail, prior to clicking on an ad. Every Breadcrumb will be clickable and charged at the same price to that of a searcher clicking the Ad Headline. This will help direct searchers to the most relevant page dependent on what they are searching for. Not everyone follows a logical route when searching for a product or service, and so providing more options is likely to increase Click Through Rates.
Now it wouldn’t be ideal to set up Breadcrumbs without testing the performance would it? Fret not! Google will also be launching a new segmenting option to enable you to view the overall total number of clicks on Breadcrumb links. To view this you’ll need to go to the Ads tab, and select the Segment button and choose to segment by Click Type. The Click Type will appropriately be called Breadcrumbs. Unfortunately within these reports it isn’t confirmed Google will identify exactly what Breadcrumb is working best, but then again we can’t have everything.
It will be really interesting to see the Breadcrumb performance in comparison to Headline, as you may very well find that you haven’t been directing searchers through to the most relevant pages after all. And so it is advisable to keep an eye on Conversion Rates if you decide to go live.
If you wanted to make sure your ads are eligible to display Breadcrumbs there’s a few things you need to be aware of:
- Your AdWords Ads must be ranked in positions 1-3
- Breadcrumbs will initially be live for Desktop Devices
- You will need to Display a Top Level domain with no /keyword
- Your Landing page must have a mark-up from which Google can extract breadcrumb information. This basically means you need to provide the right information to Google so they know what Breadcrumb links to display.
The HTML code below explains a Breadcrumb for a product page on a Shoe Website:
<a href=”http://www.exampleshoes.com/shoes”>Shoes</a> ›
<a href=”http://www.exampleshoes.com/shoes/womens”>Women’s Shoes</a> ›
<a href=”http://www.exampleshoes.com/shoes/womens/black”>Womens Black Shoes</a>
To Using the HTML above the Breadcrumbs will display like this:
Shoes > Women’s Shoes > Women’s Black Shoes
Breadcrumbs can hold a number of variant properties which can be labelled using microdata or RDFa mark-up.
If you would like to discuss how to improve your paid search performance using the latest Adwords updates please call David for an informal chat on 0207 592 1841
