Around one year ago Google announced that sitelinks could be added to Google AdWords ads. What's the effect of this feature on users' click patterns?
A company I have been working with activated sitelinks in their AdWords ads on search for CompanyName. They also ranked #1 organically on this search phrase. From experience it is smart to advertise with the company name as long as the paid clicks are cheap and give the AdWords campaign high quality. But was it right to activate sitelinks as well?
Having activated sitelinks, the company soon experienced a substantial change to their click profile for users coming from Google. Sitelinks were disabled for the company name after 11 days, it was time to dig in and investigate the effects.
The two following graphs show the traffic from Google where the search keyword is CompanyName. The first graph shows traffic from Google AdWords and the second traffic from organic Google. The effect on traffic from Google is obvious.
During the period with sitelinks enabled, traffic from Google AdWords dramatically increases, while the organic traffic decreases.
Below is a comparison of the traffic before AdWords sitelinks where enabled and the traffic during activation. Both graphs show traffic from Google on CompanyName search. As you can see; between the periods the total traffic from Google on search phrase "CompanyName" is up less than 1%. The periods have comparable traffic quantities.
In the period when AdWords Sitelinks was active there was a 91% increase in traffic from Google AdWords, shown by the next graph. This translates to about 2700 hits per day for this single search term.
Finally the following graph illustrates what happened to organic traffic during the same two periods. The traffic is down almost 25% on searches for CompanyName, where the last period is the one where sitelinks was enabled in AdWords.
Pretty pictures are one thing, but often the numbers can be more persuasive:
The statistics show that the number of visits from organic search is down by roughly the same amount that the traffic from paid search is up.
Assuming a CPC of 0,30NOK (about 5 cents) on CompanyName in AdWords, means 300.000 NOK ($ 50 000) per year in extra Google AdWords cost if our client activates Google AdWords Sitelinks. With no traffic increase to show for it!
Considering Google allowed purchasing of competitors names in our corner of the world about two months ago, this will probably drive the CPC for company names up significantly.
Increased cost for the company aside, the changed click pattern is also noteworthy from a SEO perspective. During the period without AdWords Sitelinks the ratio between organic and paid results was 78/22, which is close to what SEO's consider a normal distribution. When AdWords Sitelinks where active the ratio changed to 59/42. Google has drastically changed the click pattern by allowing Sitelinks in AdWords ads, at least in this case.
Are Sitelinks something to avoid? Of course not! There are many solid and valid arguments for ads using the company name with Sitelinks enabled. The clicks are often cheap, they always have high CTR and ranking. This is the foundation for a well managed AdWords account of high quality, good ranking and nice click prices once the whole account is considered.
Please let us know if anyone else has similar experiences with Google AdWords Sitelinks.
I love posts that can save me money but one that can also make me a smarter SEO, well thats just golden. Thank you!
Hey Petter thanks so much for this post! I love seeing all the data presented like that. I am a PPC junkie and have heard similar stories of organic share loss, but like many people above have mentioned we all know it comes down to the ROI and goals. The great thing about Site Links is you can highlight the page of your choice. They are ideal for seasonal buys and promotions, which would take too long to gain any traction on the organic side.
But you made a great case for staying on top of how they affect each other, as marketers we should always be aware of how our different channels are lacing together, and possibly cannabilizing each other.
Thanks for this awesome post!
What about conversion data? How does Sitelinks effect cost per leads when segmenting Adwords and if you combine all search traffic is cost per lead more expensive with or without sitelinks?
It seems like bidding on branded terms is always a trade-off, and collecting this kind of data is a great idea. On the one hand, you don't want to lose branded search; on the other hand, you don't want to just pay for something you could get for free.
It'd be interesting to see some data now that Google allows you to track CTR on sitelinks. I haven't seen a good case study on that data.
Anyone surprised that it means higher CPC for branded terms!? Love the numbers and graphic trend, great insights to act on with SEO+PPC campaigns.
Could be worthwhile to do the same test with a slightly worst organic position, like 3-5 and watch the effect on CTR.
That sounds like cynicism to me. Google wanting to make more money from people upping bids? Whatever will people think of next? ;-)
LOL Ben.
Nice post, good thinking about a specific issue and finding conclusions.
I would just like to say a few things:
First, this is showing that a some 25% of your organic traffic is coming through branded queries, right? Thats much higher then lots of other websites will see.
Second, what is your conversion rate on branded organic traffic vs branded adwords traffic? Are they going to the same page? If your adwords landing page is a higher converter then you would have more justification to do sitelinks.
Third, that branded high QS adwords campaign with high CTR is helping out the rest of your adwords campaign in the form of lower CPC. This is probably a hard one to measure but could again give you more reason to cough up the dough for the sitelinks.
Fourth, the value of your conversion would be a big factor. Nice health conversion value may suggest that 1% increase in traffic is worth X dollars to offset some of the costs.
Great post! Something that you didn't mention is that you can also use sitelinks on generic terms. Something that could get the advertiser more real estate on the SERPS. Also sitelinks are great if you have special offers or if you want to divert traffic to certain pages! Moreover it improves the CTR and as a result the Quality Score for that particular campaign and the whole account.
PPC + Solid Research = Good SEO.
Since Google states states that quality score - and thereby cost-per-click - is mostly influenced by clickthrough rate (CTR) does your historical data show what happened to your cost-per-click during the time you activated Sitelinks? Definitely something to look at for non-ranking terms. Thanks for sharing the data!
Good fresh post
I'm not sure on the impact for a number of my clients as mostly using landing pages for many of the AdWords campaigns, but agree the AdWords sitelinks are cheaper but they also have a very good CPA rate which needs to be taken into consideration.
If you are losing traffic by the 24% margin you should be checking how it is affecting your number of goals that is when I would be concerned and do a bit more testing, but look at even what type of sitelinks are shown and if you can test and optimise them to reduce the impact on traffic.
The one important factor that you are not looking at, nor is the original poster - is the protective effect that sitelinks have against brand bidders.
Lets look at a typical brand CPC keyword scenario:
WITHOUT SITELINKS
You bid $0.25 on "company name" and have a CTR of 10%, your QS reads as 9 or 10 on the frontend.
Un-scrupulous affiliates can brand bid against you for $0.25< and appear with a decent frequency %, sucking sales out of your organic and ppc funnels and getting either a % of sale value or a CPA. Both of which are generally more expensive than direct PPC (and most certainly more expensive than organic).
WITH SITELINKS
You bid $0.25 on "company name" and have a CTR of 30-35%
Un-scrupulous affiliates need to bid $1-$1.20< to attract the same share of voice (thanks to the magic of QS), thus making it less attractive for them to do so. The very act of buying the higher CTR protects your brand space in paid search.
If you have an affiliate program, its a must.
(EDIT: if anyone is experiencing this, my suggestion is to bid $10 per click, and have the sitelinks)
Great point Martin. Depending upon the companies position in the marketplace, brand protection is a definite use for sitelinks.
Excellent point! Didn't think of that.
Excellent point here Martin. This is worth a try especially that for one of my clients competitors are bidding on their brand name.
Thanx for tips!
Nice perspective, however, if you are running an affliate program, you should forbid them from bidding on your company related keywords.
This is a tip that can save thousands or ten's of thousands of $$ per year on affiliate-escalated PPC costs. Thanks!
Great example. Thank you for walking us through that and posting screen shots. The impact is significant. I would love to see actual dollar figures. If the overall traffic was higher and your CPC went down, it may still be worth it to gain the extra visitors. Likely not, but it's possible. Looking forward to more from you!
Thanks for commenting and further elaboration.
First of all, some clarifications. I do not run their AdWords Campaigns. This is done in-house. I work with this company on organic search and analysis. The company rank #1 organic and with Google Ads, and both rankings were with Sitelinks.
As I said, we only investigated the effect of Sitelinks on the specific CompanyName, because we noticed the big change in click patterns and AdWords costs. I didn't even look into versions of CompanyName. Already here, there is a weakness in the analysis, as AdWords by default is tracked wrong in Google Analytics. It's the keyword in the AdWords Campaign that is tracked in analytics, and not the search phrase.
There's a lot of questions about goals and conversion. The thing is that this site has visitors as their (sole) goal. It's not an affiliate site, but their main goal is still traffic. So to give any deeper analysis of the traffic they are getting is difficult. Other than the fact that Sitelinks where costing them a lot of money, and didn't give them any kind of traffic boost. At least not in the short term.
However, its noteworthy that their Google AdWords Campaign did much better in the period with Sitelinks activated. CTR went from 5,15 % to 7,77 % overall, and every other default “KPI” in Analytics did better, expect total cost and average time on site.
On this particular search phrase, CompanyName, every key factor in Google AdWords became better, expect of course the total cost. The bounce rate went down with nearly 50% on this specific keyword in Google AdWords. The CPC on this particular keyword is down by nearly 60 % in the period with AdWords Sitelinks, so it's fair to say that the quality of the AdWords Campaign is getting better by having Sitelinks activated. I have not seen the QS of the account, but I assume it had a positive effect.
The only negative consequence in the AdWords Campaign is that this particular keyword is eating a much bigger part of the budget due to this. So relevant search terms, that don't have good organic rankings is getting less clicks from Google AdWords.
About competitive bidding: This is a very small business in Norway. Basically, it's not done. Last election some of the political parties where making bids on competitive parties or names of politician from other parties. This was made into a big case in the media, even though their ad texts where nothing else than “also read what we have to say about this and that”. Still, it made the news for a few days. “The dirty battle of the Internet”. So the discussion about Sitelinks against competitive bidding isn't an issue here (yet).
So back to the point I found most interesting; the fact that Google AdWords were stealing clicks from organic search with this feature. All in all, it didn't give the company any more traffic than before. So my main issue, with my SEO focus, is the change in click patterns. Does it mean that googlers don't recognize AdWords Sitelinks as AdWords ads?
"Does it mean that googlers don't recognize AdWords Sitelinks as AdWords ads?"
It wouldn't surprise me. Google results seem so inconsistent these days - sometimes you get just basic organic results with basic ads, then sometimes you get ads with site links or organic results with sitelinks, then sometimes they insert results from google shopping, or google images, or videos. And these 'other search' results aren't always between the ads and organic results, sometimes they're in the middle of the organic results. It's a wonder some users know what's an ad and what's not...
@Petter:
1. "It's the keyword in the AdWords Campaign that is tracked in analytics, and not the search phrase." - Not true: Traffic Sources > AdWords > Keywords > Segment "Matched Search Query".
2. "The only negative consequence in the AdWords Campaign is that this particular keyword is eating a much bigger part of the budget due to this. So relevant search terms, that don't have good organic rankings is getting less clicks from Google AdWords." - Mustn't happen! Always separate your branded terms campaign-wise from the rest and allot them a budget of their own.
Hey Peter, I have not seen results like this with my clients. in fact I have seen quite the diffrent outcome. Interesting nonetheless. Great post :)
-Ian
Great post indeed! And useful to see real datas.
Not have much more to add that others has not already written, but here my 2cents: PROMOTE THIS POST ON MAIN BLOG ;)
Ok ok no need to yell! :)
Yeah Jen, G. really did go over the top with the upper case. Tsk, tsk...those noisy Italians.
Beware or I call the Corleone guys, or everywhereist to defend my italianess ;)
Sorry for the fault of netiquette Jen, but i was simply "enthusiast".
Stellar post Petter! It really gives one pause before committing funds to PPC.
While there are a ton of variables, given your exact situation and dismissing the need for brand protection, it would be a great way to show that customer that they'd be better off increasing their SEO spend that would give them longer and better value returns.
THis post totally deserves to be bumped up to the main blog. How 'bout it Jen?
very interesting, and surprising the effect that sitelinks has on click patterns. I am sure we will see more of this from google
Great post. Its' a good thing you do both the SEO and PPC for your company.
I would imagine if you only did PPC for them, you'd be really happy with buying sitelinks while the SEO person would be really stressed out.
Awesome post! Great example of why SEO and PPC need to work together. I'm going experiment with using sitelinks for exact match phrases I know affiliates are bidding on.
Sitelinks can be very effective, they should increase the CTR, which will int urn decrease the cost of your ads. They need constant optimisation & Fine tuning. The only thing you can have problems with is tracking them accurately.
Interesting to see organic traffic decreasing, thanks for the analysis.
Interesting idea, adwords sitelinks are quite a triumph for Google. They must be in all their success!
This is a great post. For some reson I hadn't read it before. I haven't enable site links because I feel the landing pages in the sitemap are less relative to the user.
Despite being around for a year or more, sitelinks have only been introduced to countries like the UK in the past couple of months and are still being rolled out to other countries.
Could it be that because few advertisers actually make use of sitelinks in their ads, this helps them stand out from the crowd by looking different from the pack and that is why an ad with sitelinks enables get clicked on more often?
If so, then sitelinks is a goldern opportunity for advertisers that may not be around for much longer as people use them more often and searchers get more accustomed to seeing them.
Well, here's the rub...
In case anyone's been paying attention, in the last year Google has been making changes and releasing products like mad that increase their ability to monetize the Adwords platform.
By allowing competitors to bid on brand terms, as is mentioned in the article, this drives up what have historically been cheaper terms (also mentioned in the article). Now Sitelinks may be the only way to differentiate YOUR ad for YOUR business versus your competitor's ads for YOUR business.
So the CPC's increase from more advertisers bidding on brand names and the numbers of clicks increase due to the brand using sitelinks. Result? More clicks at higher CPC's equal much more money for Google. Simple Math.
Google are no dummies :)
Really good post, I have some projects running Adwords site links and other specifically not but it's good to see someone else's data and opinions on these.
Great Post! Studying PPC always leads to more information to make you a better SEO as well.
Our first tests showed quite clearly that it's a matter of which sitelinks you choose. Initially we just duplicated the organic sitelinks on CompanyName. Result: CTR on the ad was doubled, CPC was down by 25% (!) - but traffic and revenue from organic and paid listing combined was still the same. After redefining the ad sitelinks, thus complementing the organic sitelinks, things looked bright: Although the organic listing's performance was slightly lower, the overall performance of CompanyName was much better. Final result: Virtual cost per query +3%, but Revenue per query was +6%. So, AdWords sitelinks on branded terms are something we definitely recommend.
Great Work, and something we have assumed for some time. I think this theory can even carry over to ad words having negative impact on all of your organic clicks. We have been putting this in practice some, to try and sort results, but I greatly appreciate the effort put forth in this post.
I would like to know where the ads showed up on Google. Was the data skewed because the ad showed on the top of the page above the organic listings? What if the company name ad only appeared on the right side of the screen? Would the results be the same?
Hi, interesting post. Did the site that ranked #1 have organic sitelinks? Could it be that the sponsored listing with sitelinks was simply more attractive and/or helpful than the organic listing?
The sitelinks have really helped our Adwords campaigns for our brand name. We're now paying about $1.50/click instead of about $4/click for our brand name. The number of clicks on our ads is almost exactly the same but our conversion rate has tripled using the sitelinks. Also we don't see a significant drop in our organic traffic when we run the ads with sitelinks. It's been a win-win for us!
Ted
The Sitelinks can work as a great "fishing net" catching customers using generic-, and unique brand terms beyond many other things. Great post Petter!
Excellent post Petter.