[New Data] Higher Klout Scores Mean More Successful Websites

The recent launch of Marketing Grader is a boon for me because it gathers a ton more data than its predecessor, allowing me to analyze all sorts of stuff I couldn’t before.

One such area of exploration, is the relationship between a brand’s Klout score and the successfulness of its website. Among its 38 metrics, Marketing Grader analyzes the Klout score of a brand’s Twitter account, the number of domains linking to the brand’s website (as reported by SEOmoz) as well as the number of unique visitors it gets (as reported by Compete).

When I analyzed the relationship of these numbers I was surprised at what I found.

Brands with higher Klout scores tended to get more visitors and more links. And when they have really high Klout scores (like above 70) they get far more traffic and links than other sites. Of course this isn’t causation, but correlation. It means that Klout may be a surprisingly effective measure of overall online marketing success.

The data tells us, not only only does Klout-measured social media influence translate into more traditional measures of web marketing effectiveness, but also that the web is a very winner-take-all kind of place. There are essentially two kinds of brands online, those with a ton of influence, traffic and links and those with very little.