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Google is testing images in Sitelink extensions

Spotted on mobile, the extensions display in a swipeable carousel.

Ginny Marvin on November 22, 2016 at 11:31 am

Image extensions have come and gone and come again. Google tested them in 2013, but they never got off the ground. Bing Ads brought its own version of image extensions out of beta just over a year ago. Now, Google appears to be giving images in text ads another spin. This time in a type of Sitelinks test.

Images appearing with Sitelink extensions

In a screen shot provided by The Zebra, a mobile ad for Quotewizard.com includes a swipeable carousel of sitelinks with accompanying images. It’s not clear if this test is also running on desktop.

The inclusion of images in these extensions is interesting, as is the use of the carousel for another extension. Last week, Google changed the display format of Price extensions from a list to swipeable carousel.

For comparison, this is what standard sitelinks typically look like when they display in position one on mobile.

google-adwords-mobile-text-sitelinks-11-22-16

An example of standard text Sitelink extensions

I’ll be interested to see how these image Sitelinks (~~what I’m calling these for now~~ Update: I’m told they’re called Visual Sitelinks) perform compared to standard text Sitelinks. We’ve reached out to Google for comment and will update if we get a response.

About The Author

Ginny Marvin

Ginny Marvin is Third Door Media's Editor-in-Chief, managing day-to-day editorial operations across all of our publications. Ginny writes about paid online marketing topics including paid search, paid social, display and retargeting for Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and MarTech Today. With more than 15 years of marketing experience, she has held both in-house and agency management positions. She can be found on Twitter as @ginnymarvin.