There is a lot to be said about the power of branding your company online, but also understanding how that branding is perceived and accepted. Search engines are one of the key methods that you are found online, yet what kind of information can you find about a business with online search engine knowledge?

I decided to write this piece on a business that finds other people’s information – Intelius.com. I figured that Intelius would have a good understanding search branding, and found in my review that even $50m revenue companies are failing basic steps of online brand control.

From Hoover’s business information “Intelius is among the next generation of private eyes. The Web-based company can find anything about anybody - for a price - by using public databases and commercial records. Intelius offers criminal background checks, people searches, a cell phone directory and property and neighborhood reports. Its IDWatch is an identity theft protection system that monitors credit activity. The company gets most of its business by advertising on major search engines like Yahoo! and Google. Intelius formed in January 2003 and filed to go public in January 2008.”

FINANCIAL INFORMATION
^(Hoovers)

At LinkedIn, there are 43 professionals listing employment or affiliation at Intelius. Including the Co-Founder: JOHN K ARNOLD, AGE 44, Co-Founder & Executive Vice President at Intelius, Inc. and Owner, Arnold Network Holdings, UrbanKind.

That is rather dry information from my perspective. So you have to start looking at comparison sources of data about how this company needs to control brand and what the brand is worth to them.

If you go to Google and search for “Intelius”, they show up for most of the first page results, included the first five to six results that go directly to them, followed by results to some positive reviews and comparisons.

However if you look at the Google screenshot, a variety of competitors are purchasing the Intelius keyword directly from Google to provide optional products and services. They appear in the right hand column – and Intelius has taken the option to purchase that keyword from Google as well to out bid competitors and have the top slot.

This choice doesn’t come without cost. We can go into the back-end of Google and see that roughly 125 to 153 times a day Intelius is PAYING $4.38 to $6.57 per visitor for its own name. Even on the conservative side, Intelius is spending $250 to $1000 a day to make sure competitors don’t steal eyes away from it. That is a yearly loss of $90k to $365k.

REPUTATION AND BRAND IMPACT

When we start looking at reputation issues and do a search for “John Arnold at Intelius” and unfortunately find they have an issue with a disgruntled customer on line two, who has posted a complaint at Rip Off Report, “They charge good money for limited and false information, absolutely a fraudulent business. They will steal your money. Customer service is as good as an answering machine, and they do not return calls.”

All I can say is “Ouch”. How many clients a year do you think it costs this company when the CEO’s name and company search results are “they are frauds”?

That negative result is countered only slightly by the fact that if you dig into the results on Wikipedia for Intelius you can find they have won some awards:

• 2006 Ernst and Young finalist for Entrepreneur of the Year
• 2006 Stevie Award for Best New Company
• 2007 CODiE Award finalist for Best Online Consumer Information Service
• 2007 Stevie Award finalist for Most Innovative Company

This positive information could be used in a social media campaign to help repair the damage of bad commentary, which probably shows up on dozens or even hundreds of long-tail searches for employees and services linked to Intelius.

TRAFFIC INFORMATION

The overall traffic numbers for Intelius show they have been steadily climbing in traffic over the past twelve months. Roughly eight to nine million people interacting with the site on a monthly basis. If we correlate that data to the $55 million in revenue last year, we can come to the simple conclusion that Intelius produces roughly $ .57 in revenue per visitor on the site, or a net revenue of rough 4.5 cents per visitor.

SEARCH ENGINE INFORMATION

Looking at the organic trail of search engine results to the right, Intelius has roughly 12,000 links pointing back at the URL. It has a good overall footprint with most search factors. The domain is roughly seven years old, has a decent page rank of six with Google, and in the top 5000 web properties according to Alexa.

We can almost immediately come to the conclusion that the number of link results from Technorati (a blog search engine) means that a majority of the 12,000 links pointing at the URL are advertiser based links, or indicate an affiliate program.

As we compare the search engine results against the eight million visitors per month, we immediately have to examine how those visitors are arriving. I do not believe that the numbers on the right would justify that much organic traffic through search results, so I turn to other information for the advertising budget that Intelius has going on with paid search results (below)

The daily advertising spend for Intelius ranges from $10k to $45k, but it looks like that spend has taken a significant decline in the past six months. That is more than likely due to restructuring of the company’s spending to make IPO numbers more favorable.

ADVERTISING SAMPLES

Intelius has a wide market to shoot at, so it is expected to see a variety of ads running across different pay per click systems such as Google and Overture. Some of the example text of their ads can be seen to the right, ranging from home property research, unlisted numbers, criminal background checks, and individual ad targeting. One of the scarier items here is that Intelius seems to be buying advertisements based upon individuals actual names. I would be led to believe that they probably have a script of massive Google PPC campaigns running that have automated private name entries.

COMPETITORS IN THE MARKETPLACE

Here is a simple and abbreviated list of organic and advertising competitors for Intelius. Each of the companies in this list could be cross compared to Intelius’s data, creating a very detailed and fairly accurate picture of what niches exist between the market players and where competitors could aim for.

CONCLUSION

Obviously, there is a lot of readily available information that exists online about any company. Larger corporations that have millions (or billions) of dollars in revenue have thousands of possible points of information online, while smaller companies may only have a handful of very important details that need to be strategically leveraged.

In any case the information needs to be confirmed or weighed appropriately. All the information above was provided through online databases and systems drawing from millions of pieces of information - meaning there is always room for error and the statistical modeling needs to take that into account when providing a course of action.

If you are interested in learning how to plan your own business or professional plan of action, take a moment to read through our consulting services and contact us for more information.

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