The Importance of Valuing Your Online Business Assets for a Sale

Online Business Assets To Include in Your Valuation

The value of your online business assets is just as important as the value of your company’s real estate or cash assets. The ability to use online channels to reach new customers and retain existing ones is an integral part of business health and success. As a seller, presenting your online assets to your buyers can enhance the sale value of your company.

The results of online marketing are particularly measurable. A website may deliver leads, e-commerce sales, or fulfill customer service needs. Website traffic, social media efforts, and email open rates can be quantified with great accuracy at little to no cost. This information can be shared with potential buyers to help persuade them of the value of the overall business.  In any event, it may help you verify your current online marketing strategies and consider new ones that could enhance the sale value of your company.

Six Examples of Online Business Assets That Increase Company Value

Domain Name

Website domain names can have value in and of themselves. There are many websites that will provide an estimate of the value of a particular domain name. Further, domain names are regularly bought and sold on auction websites. Thus, comparable values may be easy to estimate. There are also a number of firms that specialize in valuing them.

If your domain name has the online marketing strategies, it may have a higher value:

• Short length
• Easy to understand
• Ends in ‘.com’
• In-demand keywords

Prime Search Position

Achieving and maintaining a top-searched website in an industry is an art. Many marketing managers do not have a list of keywords for which their website has a ranked search position. However, this information is readily available to a registered owner of a website through Google and Bing webmaster tools. These tools show keywords and search positions, along with the volume of impressions and clicks with upward or downward trends. The market value of those keywords on search can be found on search engine marketing (SEM) platforms like Google AdWords.

The revenue collected from these assets depends on website visits and the outcomes of those visits. This data can be collected in Google Analytics. If those search visits are not effective at producing revenue-related outcomes, management may be able to find ways to improve return on investments (ROI). Thus, this evaluation can be used to identify how your search position can be an asset.

Links From Other Websites

The most important factor in searching for a website is the number and quality of external links. Other sites linking to your content indicate that it adds value. Third-party tools, such as Majestic and Moz can provide information on the quantity and quality of competitors’ links and their search engine marketing strategies.

Untracked or Hidden Online Assets

A website may also contain untracked or ‘hidden’ assets. Websites may have stand-alone electronic documents such as PDF files independent of the core website itself. If a search strategy is not well-optimized, these PDFs may not be linked appropriately to maximize the connection to the rest of the website. Additionally, the use of PDFs made available on the web is not tracked by web analytics programs, but the PDFs may be listed on other websites and in search engines. Thus, websites with many PDFs (typical of more technology-based companies) often have hidden and underutilized assets in their publicly available PDF library.

Email Addresses

Email lists may have value, especially if the company is regularly sending out emails through a legitimate bulk email vendor. The company will be able to identify how many of the email addresses are valid and how often the recipients open the company’s emails. Company email lists may have professional addresses, which become invalid over time as people change employers. Therefore, being able to show a clean, relevant list enhances the value of an email list.

A regular presence in people’s inboxes is a significant indicator of the goodwill value of a brand. Click-through from the emails to the company’s website shows how engaged the audience is with the brand.

Social Media and Community Value

Online followers on platforms like Facebook, X, and Linkedin are another type of online business asset. The reach and level of engagement can be tracked with varying degrees of automation.

Relationships with influencers — social media, bloggers, journalists, and other thought leaders — can be demonstrated by showing engagement and interaction with these individuals. Interactions such as the ‘like’ or ‘upvote’ buttons, comments on content, or echoing and linking to content are all indicators of social media marketing initiatives and their performance. Many of the social media platforms and third-party services show reach and engagement with your clientele.

How To Reveal Value

Assessing online assets is an important part of due diligence when creating a valuation. The value of online assets can be useful in determining and enhancing the value of a brand in connection with preparing for a sale. It can also be used to provide insights to the management team on which assets are underperforming or under-leveraging the brand in online platforms.

Consider the areas discussed in this article with your team as you evaluate the potential sale of your company. If your company is starting the valuation process, implementing an efficient strategy may provide additional support to convince potential buyers that there is strength in your brand.

We think you’ll also like:

1. Business Valuation Is More Art Than Science
2. 19 Questions You Need to Ask to Build a Killer Marketing Strategy
3. Four Reasons Effective Marketing Strategies Require Patience

[Editors’ Note: To learn more about this and related topics, you may want to attend the following on-demand webinars (which you can view at your leisure, and each includes a comprehensive customer PowerPoint about the topic):

1. Digital Assets and Bankruptcy
2. Digital Assets as Collateral: UCC Article 12
3. What’s it Worth? Valuing a Business for Sale

This is an updated version of an article originally published on July 28, 2021. This article was most recently updated by the Financial Poise Editors.]

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