Sitelinks are one of the most underused assets in a tour operator’s Google Ads account. They sit beneath your main ad and link directly to specific pages on your site – and when used properly, they can significantly increase both click-through rate and the quality of traffic landing on your pages. Used badly, they dilute your message and send potential customers to pages that don’t match what they were searching for.
Google will only show sitelinks when your ad is performing well and holds a sufficiently high ad rank – so getting them right is a signal-quality issue as much as a copy one. Here’s how we approach sitelinks for tour operator accounts, and the mistakes we see most often.
Determine your goals
Before adding any sitelinks, consider what you want them to achieve in the context of your specific campaign. For a tour operator, the answers will vary significantly depending on whether the ad is running on branded or non-branded terms, what destination or product type is being promoted, and where in the booking journey the searcher is likely to be.
A brand campaign for an escorted tours operator might use sitelinks to surface specific departure types: “Family departures”, “Solo traveller groups”, “Guaranteed departures”, “Request a tailor-made quote”. A destination-specific non-brand campaign might link to itinerary detail pages, a departure calendar, or a reviews page. The goal is to give searchers a shortcut to the most relevant content – not to pad out the ad with options that feel generic.
Think about your overall strategy
Sitelinks should reinforce, not distract from, the main message of your ad. If your headline is targeting high-intent searchers for a specific tour – “Guided Nepal Trekking Tours | Expert-Led Small Groups” – your sitelinks should support that intent with links to relevant content: the specific itinerary, the departure schedule, customer reviews, and perhaps a FAQ page. Linking to your homepage, your general “About Us” page, or unrelated destinations will waste the asset.
Create landing pages especially for your sitelinks
Each sitelink should lead to a landing page that directly matches its description. If your sitelink says “2025 Departure Dates” but links to a general tour overview page, you’ve broken the user’s expectation and will likely lose the click or the conversion. For operators with structured itinerary pages and a departure calendar, this is usually straightforward. Where it’s not, it’s worth building a dedicated page rather than pointing the sitelink to the closest available option.
Use a combination of sitelinks
Sitelinks can serve multiple purposes within a single ad – and mixing informational and transactional links can capture users at different stages of their decision. What we’ve found works well for tour operators is a mix of: one itinerary or product-specific link, one social proof link (reviews, awards, ATOL protection), one practical link (departure dates, group sizes, what’s included), and one direct-response link (request a brochure, get a quote, contact us). This covers the main questions a prospective traveller will have before clicking.
Don’t feel like you can only use Google
Microsoft Ads (formerly Bing) supports sitelink extensions in the same way as Google, and for some tour operator audiences – particularly those targeting older travellers or the corporate travel segment – Bing’s audience skews in ways that can make it worth the additional setup. The sitelinks you’ve built for Google campaigns can usually be replicated directly in Microsoft Ads without requiring new copy.
Don’t forget about them
Sitelinks are set-and-manage, not set-and-forget. Review them at the start of each major booking season – the sitelinks that made sense during January’s summer-sun enquiry peak may not be right for autumn ski campaign activity. Departure date links need to stay current. Seasonal offers should be updated or paused when they expire. Check performance regularly using the Ad Extensions report in Google Ads: CTR, conversion rate, and impressions per sitelink will tell you quickly which ones are pulling their weight.
Be concise and informative
Google allows up to 25 characters per sitelink description line, but shorter, direct copy tends to perform better. “Guaranteed Departures” outperforms “View our guaranteed departure schedules” – the former says exactly what it is without wasting characters. Avoid generic phrases like “Learn more” or “Click here” which add no information and signal nothing about what the traveller will find.
Don’t assume all your sitelinks will show
Google decides when to serve sitelinks based on ad rank, relevance and predicted performance. Even if you’ve set up four excellent sitelinks, they may not all show – or any may show – if your ad rank is low or the search query doesn’t trigger them. This is another reason to keep your overall account quality high: better Quality Scores, tighter keyword targeting, and strong landing page relevance all improve the conditions under which your sitelinks appear.
If you’d like a review of your current sitelink setup or want help building out a full ad extensions strategy for your tour operator account, get in touch.