ROI for Linking

How could I theoretically figure this out?

[justdave]

I was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on how I could show direct ROI from a proposed link building program? I.E. we are proposing link building and we want to show what the ROI of a link building program will be (aside from search engine benefits). Basically, if I acquire 200 links could I expect 5 click-throughs to the client site? Obviously the worst case scenario is no clicks. What is the best case scenario? Thanks for any help.

[redzone]

Well, if you append tracking parameters to the end of your URL's that are displaying in the links, and track each of them seperately as a "campaign" in an analytics system, then you would know your ROI..

As for your "worst/best case scenarios", you can only speculate. There are too many intangibles: quality of content where the links reside, traffic to sites where the links reside, text link creative, relevancy of text ad to content. Do I need to go on? :)