How-to: Bulk-update sitelinks (and more) in the AdWords UI

For strong paid search campaigns, sitelinks are an absolute no-brainer. The lift they give already strong ads is proven, and they boast many other benefits: they take up more space, making your ad stand out over your competitors; the searcher can go directly to a more specific page if that was their intent; and you can add more than one link relevant to a keyword.

That last benefit is what got me to write this guide today. In most cases, advertisers use campaign-level sitelinks, and once they know which six sitelinks work for them, they remain pretty much static. If they need to make any changes, sitelinks are shared across the whole campaign so the change will only need to be made once and will apply to all ad groups in the campaign. Easy.

It’s not so easy if you need your sitelinks to be unique at the ad group level. And until recently, there was no good bulk tool to support ad group sitelinks outside of 3 rd -party platforms.

Google has been making a big push to add a lot of the bulk formatting functionality we get in AdWords Editor to be available in the AdWords UI. Some think they may be phasing the Editor tool out entirely, I don’t think the UI is anywhere close to where it needs to be for power users, but it’s definitely making noticeable strides.

One of the features they recently added was bulk sitelink uploads, which is also supported at the ad group level. To access this, go to AdWords’s “Reports and Uploads” section, then access the “Uploads” subtab.

Once you get to the page, you’ll see an upload area and not much of anything else. Google has kept this page very vague for now, but fear not, it’s actually a pretty powerful bulk tool for ad group, keyword, creative, extension, targeting, product uploads, or changes.

To prepare a bulk sheet to upload here, go to the ad extensions tab in AdWords and click “download spreadsheet template” from the edit dropdown.

This will return you a bulksheet template complete with instructions on how to make it work!

The tool was a huge lifesaver for me personally, as my team was tasked with updating over 40k ad groups with six sitelinks, which ends up being a 240k row bulksheet. This would not have been possible to do by hand in the UI or editor.

If rumors are true, this bulk tool will see a lot of additional functionality down the road! Save yourself some time and start putting it to use.