Increase Your Revenue by 20% – The Impact of Paid Site Links

Paid Site Links?

In November last year, Google, introduced paid site links to their ever-growing list of ad formats.

This format produces some definite PPC benefits; you take up more SERP real estate increasing CTR, the links can allow expensive terms to be shown against cheap brand traffic, you can deep link which increases usability and conversion rates.

The Impact on Paid Search

Since implementing these site links for a large travel brand recently the CTR on brand terms rose by 14 points.  Not only did this drive a huge amount of additional traffic, the resultant improvement in quality score decreased the CPC by 17%.  Truly a paid search dream, more traffic at a lower CPC.

How is SEO Affected?

As the paid ads now took up more space and were receiving more clicks from the brand related queries, it is unsurprising that brand clicks on SEO decreased significantly.  In fact it was approximately halved.  On high value terms the negative impact of this would appear huge if considered in isolation to paid search.

Analysis in Synergy

The key questions around this type of activity are not simply around the impact on visits, but also on revenue.  Overall between the 2 channels the clicks increased by 12%.  The increase in revenue was even more pronounced at 20%.

Look at the Whole Picture

These results highlight the important of SEO and Paid search being run in synergy.  Without access to the paid search data some SEOs would have been screaming for the site links to be taken down.  Similarly without understanding the decline in natural traffic SEMs could have been losing cash overall yet been totally blinded by their own perceived gains.  By looking at the whole picture we were able to deliver true value to the client.