Prevent Traffic Leaks & Grow Business with Siteplug

As an advertiser leveraging digital marketing and affiliate to extend your brands reach and grow your business, it is crucial to ensure those searching for your company can quickly, easily, and correctly find you.

We recently caught up with Bharat Sharma, Vice President – Business Development of Siteplug, to discuss how his company helps brands to maintain and grow business by preventing traffic leakage.

CJ: How long has Siteplug been in business?

Bharat: Siteplug has been active since Jan 2015.

CJ: What markets or brand verticals does Siteplug serve?

Bharat: Siteplug services over 800+ brands across all geographic locations and verticals. Our top verticals are travel, e-commerce, finance, and dating.

CJ: Tell us more about the Siteplug business model.

Bharat: Siteplug helps brands gain competitive advantage by avoiding traffic leakage through what we refer to as Site Direct, Site Suggest, and Quick Links. Site Direct redirects all domain typos back to a brand’s homepage at the cost of CPA. Site Suggest prevents competitors from bidding on a brand’s terms by recommending the initial brand name when users start searching online. We do this with the help of our direct integrations with browsers, launchers, OEMs, and various other applications. Using our discovery model Quick Links, brands can reach over 100M+ users globally and generate sales by promoting their brand widgets across all desktop and mobile search applications.

Siteplug helps brands to eliminate loss of revenue to competitors and save millions by protecting all of a brand’s trademark terms such as typo domains, misspelled keywords, etc, without impacting any of their SEM activity. The best part is we charge only when these clicks generated by Siteplug convert into sales for our brand partners (aka CPA.) See this video for a quick overview of how Siteplug works.

CJ: What exactly are traffic leaks?

Bharat: Every brand spends money to promote and create awareness about their website. When users start searching for a brand online, they either type in the brand keyword or the domain name. Traffic leaks are when users trying to reach a brand, get distracted, and end up transacting with a competitor brand due to competitor ads on the internet.

CJ: How big of a problem are traffic leaks, and why should brands pay attention to this issue?

Bharat: While searching for a domain, up to 20% of users make typo errors. These are traffic leaks, which are often further monetized by parked domains which have competitor ads. While users are searching for a brand keyword on popular search engines, over 50% of the users are exposed to competitor ads. These are traffic leaks caused by distraction.

Brands spend over 50% of their budgets on popular search engines for their branded terms. These search engines also allow competitors to bid on competitor brand keywords. Overtime this will become a bigger problem for brands, as the cost of buying these search terms will increase as more competitor ads are plugged in.

CJ: What are some solutions that brands can implement to mitigate this problem?

Bharat: There are three solutions brands can implement today:

• Buy All Typo Domains: Each brand loses traffic from over 5,000+ variations of typos, which include linguistic errors, pronunciation errors, typographical errors, phonetical errors, etc. If a brand buys 5,000+ variations, it can cost anywhere between $500K to $1M to buy all domains and another $50K/year for maintenance—not to mention the cost of resources.​
• Legally Acquire all Variations of Typo Domains: The cost of registering a UDRP against each domain is an expensive and a tedious process, with no guarantee of winning these domains back.​
• Siteplug Site Direct, Site Suggest, and Quick Link: Siteplug redirects all possible typo domains to a brand’s homepage without buying or selling any domains, only charging partners on the sales generated. Brands at max will spend anywhere between $2K-$5K per month with Siteplug, which is less than $100K in three years. That is about a tenth of the cost as compared to the above solutions, with a guarantee that we will recover 99% of domain errors.

CJ: Do you have any success stories you can share?

Bharat: Siteplug has grown by over 100% every year, in the last three years. In regards to CJ, we have scaled our overall sales from $7Mi in 2016 to $30M in 2017 and expecting to scale this to over $50M in 2018. Along with us, our brand partners have seen scale as well. To highlight a few stories:

• TripAdvisor – We have doubled sales in 2018, compared to 2017.
• Marriott – Scaled global sales by 25% in 2016/2017 and maintained conversion rates of greater than 10%

CJ: What are some other recent digital marketing trends that you are seeing in the space?

Bharat: Buying online media has gotten more expensive over the years. According to the last five-year trend, the value of an online consumer will be at least 2X the current cost by 2020. With all the tools and data available today, brands are evolving. This has resulted in more performance driven approaches such as affiliate marketing or focusing on sales rather than branding across the globe.

This a great opportunity for CJ and their brand partners. Brands can leverage the services provided by CJ and also get access to a global publisher base that delivers unique performance solutions. We are certain that brands partnered with CJ will get exposed to a lot more opportunities in the near future.

CJ: What are next steps if a brand wants to partner with Siteplug in the CJ network?

Bharat: Once we have been approved for a program, we can use the text links and begin promotions. It takes us less than 24 hours to go live. If a brand has any additional questions, feel free to reach me at bharat.s@affinity.com, or contact Sagar Joshi – Head of Sales, North America at sagar.j@affinity.com, or visit siteplug.com.