Reach Machines » Links as Currency and What it Means for Online Marketers

June 18, 2008

Links as Currency and What it Means for Online Marketers

Filed under: analytics, marketing strategy, metrics — Tags: links linking brands — bstraley @ 10:04 am

Jeff Jarvis and Scott Karp have both written extensively on the ascendancy of links as a primary form of currency on the Web. In the Buzzmachine post to which I linked above, Jarvis makes the point that the business of online media is to acquire and aggregate links. Links are what build awareness, drive traffic, and power the growth of one’s online presence. The more you have “out there” on high value sites and locations, the louder and more compelling your “voice”.

In the context of online marketing, the same rule of thumb applies. A simple but incredibly effective method of measuring the effectiveness of a brand’s online presence is to study the number, rate of change, and “quality” of backlinks (ie links pointing to the brand site). Powerful insights are to be gained by doing this. For example, benchmarking a brand’s backlinks against its competitors will provide a reliable proxy for market share more often than not. Interestingly, we’ve found several exceptions to this heuristic where a particular brand (T-Mobile) has a much smaller number of backlinks than the leading competitors and yet the traffic to its site is disproportionately high. The theory we’re using to explain this difference is that T-Mobile’s online and offline advertising efforts are driving an incrementally higher amount of direct navigation traffic (typing in the URL to the site v. clicking on a link) to their site.

As awareness of the need for “web presence” analytics as a complement to site analytics increases, so will the need to measure, track, and analyze the quantity, reach, and numbers of links “out there” on the Web and the value they represent to specific brands, industries, and markets.

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