Drill Tip: Measuring the Basic Impressions of a Blog Article
You successfully partnered with a blogger who just posted an article about your client. Great! Now how do you quantify the success of that placement?
Is it Unique Monthly Visitors (UMVs) of the blog? Is it the number of likes and tweets? Is it some combination of measures?
Though there is no lack of suggestions from the professional PR community, the challenge is determining which audiences are relevant when an article’s exposure can be several times multiplied with a single click. In fact, just last month the Institute for Public Relations tried to come out with their own solution to this problem but their recommendations left no clear indication of how arrive at a single metric for blog articles.
To come up with a basic reach number for a blog article, we thought it would be helpful to share how we approach the issue.
We start by visiting DoubleClick Ad Planner by Google and pulling the number of “Unique Visitors (estimated cookies)” for the website on which the article was posted. Google provides the best estimation, in our opinion, of traffic both including and excluding website visitors that allow cookies.
At this point, you have the number that would commonly reflect “impressions” for the article based on the IPR’s definition of the measurement. It’s in line with our experience that most hits come within the first month of an article being posted.
Though fairly basic, we can claim with confidence that this is a conservative reflection of how many users can be exposed to an article on a given site.
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Tagged IPR, pr, return on investment, ROI
Katie Delahaye PaineJuly 26, 2012 at 10:08 am
As one of the members of the Institute for PR’s Measurement Commission that contributed to the standards we released last month, I have to correct several inaccuracies in this post.
First of all, you totally have missed the point of the standards we put forth. The whole point of measurement, isn’t to count the number of eyeballs. What does it matter if you get 100 visitors per month or 1 million unique visitors per month if none of them do anything or buy anything? We believe that unique visits are the lowest level of output measures. What we are focusing on are the metrics that tell you whether you have made a difference to your business, metrics like engagement, changes in awareness, attitudes, and perceptions; and changes in desired outcome behaviors. We didn’t “try” to come out with our own solution, we put forth our recommendation on how to get the best, most accurate measurement of your performance. Among those best practices is a recommendation that focusing on a single metric or a single blog is irrelevant. And lest you think this is just one author being touchy about her work, our standards were based on the collaboration and agreement between a broad swath of organizations including the IPR Measurement Commission, AMEC, and the CPRF with representation from many major corporations including Southwest Airlines, Procter & Gamble and Dell. We have specifically collaborated with WOMMA, IAB, DAA, and other organizations because there is so much confusion in the marketplace.Lets take your suggestion as a perfect example of what is wrong and why we are all working together to provide better solutions. You recommend using DoubleClick Ad Planner. A great site, if it has information on the outlet or market you are looking for. Unfortunately, it has information on Forbes.com but not on http://blogs.forbes.com/shelisrael/ which in my world is a much more influential site. Secondly, unless I correlate the UVMs to something else, I have no idea whether that mention had any impact on my marketplace. Finally, you obviously didn’t understand the implication of the work of the Coalition. We put forth Content Standards in June, we are working together to finalize standards for reach, engagement, influence, sentiment and value by the end of the year. So rather than lead your readers down a false path to an easy, but flawed metric, you might send them to http://www.smmstandards.org to participate in the discussion.
Jared DegnanJuly 26, 2012 at 5:01 pm
Thanks for your comment, Katie! We definitely support and applaud the work of the IPR for pushing the industry forward toward more advanced, comprehensive measurement practices.
Our point was that using a simple measure is better than no measurement at all. In our client engagements we always recommend using not only multiple metrics but also correlation analysis with sales numbers to test, prove and optimize our methodology.