Marketplace · Travel & experiences
Paid search was bidding on supply the platform already ranked for.
This marketing & margin audit identified $66k in wasted annual spend in a Marketplace business, evidenced, senior reviewed, and delivered in 6 days.
The business
A travel and experiences marketplace ran substantial paid search across branded and category terms, treating it as a core demand driver. The platform also ranked strongly in organic results for many of the same terms, but paid and organic were managed and measured in separate silos, so the overlap between what each channel actually captured was never examined.
What triggered the audit
Paid search spend was high and stable, yet incremental bookings didn’t obviously track it, suggesting paid might be buying clicks organic already won. The audit ran a paid search pause test on terms where the platform ranked organically, measuring how many of those paid clicks were genuinely incremental.
What the audit found
Much of the paid search was cannibalizing the platform’s own organic listings. On branded and high intent category terms where the marketplace already ranked at or near the top organically, paid ads were capturing, and charging for, clicks that would otherwise have gone to the free organic listing sitting directly beneath them. A pause test on those terms showed bookings barely moved when the ads were switched off, because users simply clicked the organic result instead. Because paid and organic were measured in separate silos, paid took full credit for demand organic would have captured for free, and the self cannibalization stayed completely invisible. Netted across the affected terms, roughly $66k a year of paid spend was buying clicks the platform already owned organically.
What we changed
Cut or reduced paid bidding on terms where the platform already ranks strongly organically, keeping only genuinely defensive spend against real competitor threats.
Ran pause tests to quantify incremental paid value per term, so bidding follows measured lift rather than habit or last click attribution.
Unified paid and organic reporting into one view, ending the silo that let paid claim demand organic had captured for free.
Redirected the recovered budget to terms where the platform lacks organic presence and paid search is genuinely incremental to bookings.
The result
The published chart shows cannibalized clicks on brand and category terms falling from about one in three to about one in thirty after the overlapping paid activity was removed. That chart does not report total demand or the duration of the pause test. $66k a year recovered by stopping paid search from buying clicks the platform already won organically, an annual figure equal to 11× the $5,950 Audit + Sprint fee. For any marketplace or brand, the silo is the culprit: paid and organic measured separately let paid claim free demand. If you bid heavily on terms you already rank for, a pause test may show most of those clicks were never incremental. A fixed fee audit runs it in days and redirects spend to where paid actually creates demand.
From kickoff to signed off findings: 6 days.
What the client said
$66k a year of wasted spend cut in 6 days
Paid clicks the site already won organically: ~1 in 3 → ~1 in 30
“We were bidding on terms we already ranked for. Alex paused paid search on those terms in a test and bookings barely moved. Roughly one paid click in three we would have won for free. That spend now goes where paid actually adds demand.”
Alex PopSenior Auditor · signed this audit off