Free clicks from the attribution link
People click the attribution line. Not many as a proportion, but a small proportion of a very large number is still a traffic source, and without whitelabel it is somebody else’s.
The number
Industry data puts it at roughly 3 percent of total Shopping ad clicks landing on the "By" link rather than on the product listing. Fifty clients collectively producing 500,000 Shopping clicks a month therefore send in the region of 15,000 clicks a month somewhere.
Without whitelabel, that somewhere is your CSS provider’s comparison site. With whitelabel, it is yours.
What kind of traffic it is
Unusually good traffic, and unusually easy to misread. These are people who were shopping for a specific product, on a results page, and chose to look at the service behind the listing. They arrive with commercial intent and no idea who you are.
It is not brand traffic and it is not going to convert on an agency services page. Treat it as shopping traffic that happens to be on your domain.
What to do with it
- Let it shop. The comparison site exists and is populated; the simplest use is to let the visitor find the product they came for.
- Affiliate monetisation. Outbound clicks to merchants can carry affiliate parameters where your agreements allow it.
- Lead capture for merchants. A merchant-facing route on the site reaches exactly the audience that would buy CSS from you.
- Brand reinforcement. The visitor has now seen your name twice in one session, in a commercial context.
Keeping expectations honest
Nobody should buy whitelabel CSS for this traffic alone. It is a second-order benefit that becomes material at scale and is worth nothing at five clients. It is worth stating precisely because the alternative is not no traffic. It is traffic to a competitor’s domain.