Marketleap

» see marketleap.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Marketleap was a search engine marketing agency in San Francisco, running from about 2000, and the agency part of it was ordinary. It sold search optimization and paid placement to clients like Kaiser Permanente, Primedia, Tyco Electronics and SBC's SMARTpages directory. The tagline, which survived unchanged in the title tag for the next seventeen years, was "Trust, Search, Succeed". None of that is why anybody remembers the name.

What Marketleap did that mattered was give three tools away. The Link Popularity Check told you how many pages across the major engines pointed at a domain and let you line it up against competitors. The Search Engine Saturation tool counted how many of your pages each engine had actually indexed. The Keyword Verification tool told you where you ranked for a term, so you could stop typing it into Google yourself and scrolling. These were free and needed no account, and in the first half of the 2000s they were standard equipment for anybody doing this work, at a time when the paid alternatives were expensive and the engines offered almost no visibility of their own.

On 12 July 2004 Digital Impact signed a definitive agreement to buy the company, for $1.5 million in cash plus 1.25 million of its own shares and options, with up to 200,000 more riding on revenue milestones. Digital Impact was then bought by Acxiom, the data broker, in a deal announced in March 2005 and valued around $140 million. Two acquisitions in eight months turned a San Francisco agency into a line item inside one of the largest consumer-data companies in the world.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the line acxiom left up ~

Here is what marketleap.com said for years afterward, captured in October 2010 and reading identically in 2008 and 2016. The top of the page: "Marketleap is now Acxiom Digital." Then a paragraph about Acxiom Digital serving Global 2000 enterprises including Comcast, Marriott, Gap and HP. And then this: "Acxiom Digital is maintaining this site as a free resource for the search engine marketing community."

Underneath it, still working, the three tools. There is no obvious business case for that sentence. Acxiom sold enterprise marketing services to very large companies and had nothing to gain from free rank checkers used mostly by consultants and small webmasters, many of them competitors. Somebody inside a data broker made a decision to keep a dead agency's utilities online as a public good, and then somebody kept making that decision, year after year, through a corporate reorganization and a brand change. The page carried a Google Analytics tag and a one-pixel beacon from indextools.com, so the traffic was being counted. Whoever was reading those numbers kept signing off on the hosting bill.

~ how it finally went dark ~

The archive dates the end to a ten-month window. On 7 November 2016 the front page is still 3,385 bytes, still carrying the tools under the Acxiom Digital line. On 30 July 2017 the same URL returns 793 bytes under a new title: "Zeta Impact". Acxiom had sold its email and digital marketing arm to Zeta Interactive in 2014, and at some point between those two captures the new owner replaced the page with a corporate stub. From 2018 the domain served parked pages of between four and eight hundred bytes, and today it does not resolve at all.

Seventeen years is a long run for a brand whose company was sold after four. The arithmetic of this grave is that Marketleap existed as a business for roughly four years and as a bookmark for thirteen more.

~ what replaced it ~

The tools stopped being necessary before they stopped working, and the engines did it on purpose. Google launched Webmaster Tools in 2006, which gave site owners their own index coverage and link data straight from the source, making a third-party saturation checker redundant for anybody who controlled the site. At the same time, personalized and localized results made a single global answer to "where do I rank" meaningless, so a keyword checker that returned one position was answering a question that no longer had one answer. By 2016 the category had moved to subscription platforms costing a hundred dollars a month and up, and a free page of three form boxes belonged to a different internet.

I came to this one as an outsider in the right trade. I have been a computer engineer through the whole period this covers, and I have never done search marketing for a living or run a site that needed to rank. What draws me to the grave is the maintenance, not the product. Somewhere in Acxiom's hosting there was a line nobody deleted for more than a decade, serving a tool under a dead brand's name to people who mostly had no idea the brand was dead, and that is a quieter kind of generosity than any company would get credit for.

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