The biggest online advertising platform, AdWords, received lately few updates and improvements: Ad sitelinks can be further enhanced (when eligible), AdWords Help Forum has been redesigned and relocated on a new domain and the platform is also now allowing users to block certain advertiser ads from the search results.

Enhanced Ad Sitelinks

About a week ago, Google introduced a new possibility for advertisers to increase their ad performances with enhanced sitelinks. Google are stating that this feature was one of their strongest performing experiments recently and the sitelinks can provide a 30% higher click-through rate for the ad.

The new enhanced ad sitelinks feature is essentially enlarging the old ad sitelinks look and adding them descriptions. Here’s how the new enhanced ad sitelinks suppose to appear on the search results with two lines of sitelinks (it can also appeared with three):

There are two conditions to be eligible for the enhanced sitelinks:

• The ad must appear above the search results (which is traditionally more expensive).
• The sitelinks ads must be active and must be related to the main ad.

New AdWords Community Site

Since that last few days, visitors to Google’s old AdWords Help Forum can see a big message at the top of the page, announcing that the forum has been moved to the to a new site at AdWords Community and the old one can now be used as a read-only archive.

The new site design is much more aligned with all the recent redesign changes Google made to its different products and it also presents new features such as “Top Starred Contributions” and “Top Starred Authors”.

Update: Google has now officially announced on the launch of the new AdWords Community in a blog post.

Option To Block Ads From The Results

Over the last weekend, the blogger Andrew Girdwood has discovered a new option for AdWords ads that allows to block all of the ads from specific advertisers. Whenever a user is clicking on some AdWords ad and then return to the search results (hitting the “back” browser’s button), the “Block all ads from…” option will appear beneath the ad.

Andrew is suggesting that this option might affect the Quality Score which I totally agree with, and he also suggests it might affect SEO signals, which I DON’T agree with. I believe that there is still a separation between AdWords and the organic search team, although there are others (sometimes even Googlers) that don’t think so.

Here’s a screenshot taken by Andrew Girdwood of the block ads option under a Netflix ad: