To better understand this full value, we wanted to look at the long-term accumulation of the two types of links on which we report: Direct links from publishers to our client’s content on their domain Secondary links that link to the story the publisher wrote about our client’s content While direct links are most important, secondary links often provide significant additional pass-through authority and can often be reclaimed through additional outreach and converted into direct do-follow links (something we have a team dedicated to doing at Fractl). Below is a visualization of the way our content promotion process works: So how exactly do direct links and secondary links accumulate over time? The typical result: A large initial spike with consistent accumulation over time This campaign, featuring artistic imaginings of what bodies in video games might look like with normal BMI/body sizes, shows the most typical pattern we witnessed, with a very large initial spike and a relatively smooth decline in link acquisition over the first month. The less common result: Slow draw up to a major spike In this example, you can see that sometimes it takes a few days or even weeks to see the initial pickup spike and subsequent primary syndication. Zooming out to a month-over-month view, we can see resurgences in pickups happening at unpredictable intervals every few months or so. Zooming out, we saw a similar result as the other examples, with multiple smaller spikes more within the first year and less frequently in the following two years. Links generated directly to the blog posts/landing pages of the content we’ve created on our clients’ behalf are only really a part of the story. When a campaign garners mainstream press attention, the press stories can often go mildly viral, generating large numbers of syndications and links to these stories themselves. Their over-time distribution follows the same pattern, with 50% of results being realized within the first month and the following 50% of the value coming over the next two to three years. The value in the long tail By looking at multi-year direct and secondary links built to successful content marketing campaigns, it becomes apparent that the total number of links acquired during the first month is really only about half the story.
Content marketing that generates mainstream press is likely 2X as effective as originally thought. Additionally, the long-term ROI is potentially many times higher than previously reported.
I’ll caveat that by saying this applies only to content that can generate mainstream press attention. At Fractl, this is our primary focus as a content marketing agency. Our team, our process, and our research are all structured around figuring out ways to maximize the newsworthiness and promotional success of the content we create on behalf of our clients.
Though data-driven content marketing paired with digital PR is on the rise, there is still a general lack of understanding around the long-term value of any individual content execution. In this exploration, we sought to answer the question: What link value does a successful campaign drive over the long term? What we found was surprising and strongly reiterated our conviction that this style of data-driven content and digital PR yields some of the highest possible ROI for link building and SEO.
To better understand this full value, we wanted to look at the long-term accumulation of the two types of links on which we report:
- Direct links from publishers to our client’s content on their domain
- Secondary links that link to the story the publisher wrote about our client’s content
While direct links are most important, secondary links often provide significant additional pass-through authority and can often be reclaimed through additional outreach and converted into direct do-follow links (something we have a team dedicated to doing at Fractl).
Below is a visualization of the way our content promotion process works:
So how exactly do direct links and secondary links accumulate over time?
To understand this, we did a full audit of four successful campaigns from 2015 and 2016 through today. Having a few years of aggregation gave us an initial benchmark for how links accumulate over time for general interest content that is relatively evergreen.
We profiled four campaigns:
The first view we looked at was direct links, or links pointing directly to the client blog posts hosting the content we’ve created on their behalf.
There is a good deal of variability between campaigns, but we see a few interesting general trends that show up in all of the examples in the rest of this article:
- Both direct and secondary links will accumulate in a few predictable ways:
- A large initial spike with a smooth decline
- A buildup to a large spike with a smooth decline
- Multiple spikes of varying size
- Roughly 50% of the total volume of links that will be built will accumulate in the first 30 days. The other 50% will accumulate over the following two years and beyond.
- A small subset of direct links will generate their own large spikes of secondary links.
We’ll now take a look at some specific results. Let’s start by looking at direct links (pickups that link directly back to our client’s site or landing page).
The typical result: A large initial spike with consistent accumulation over time
This campaign, featuring artistic imaginings of what bodies in video games might look like with normal BMI/body sizes, shows the most typical pattern we witnessed, with a very large initial spike and a relatively…
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