Measurement of online visibility and its impact on Internet traffic

The Internet landscape is an increasingly crowded space where hundreds of thousands of companies are fighting for attention. Some of these companies are universally known (Yahoo!, Amazon) while others are more obscure (Literary Guild, Just Say Wow). Regardless of their level of Internet presence, all these companies are interested in improving their position, particularly now that managers are asked to justify their online activities. To help managers assess their online presence, and give them a way to compare their position relative to their competitors, this article aims to develop a measure of a company's online visibility. Moreover, this study seeks to understand what factors drive online visibility, and how. The visibility measure we develop captures the extent to which a user is likely to come across an online reference to a company's Web site. It is based on data collected from multiple sources that include search engine results, Web-site contents, and online directory listings. It is calibrated using a large-scale telephone survey, and is validated using data obtained from Web crawlers and Internet consumer-panel sources. In the latter part of the article, we show how managers can use the visibility measure to compare the online presence of their company to their competitors’. We also show how they can use this information to perform scenario analysis aimed at finding the best way to improve their online position.