The Financial Times has a terrifically-titled piece by Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson today – A want to break free – which looks at how the news industry could properly monetise online content.
“How much would you pay to read this page? At around 2,000 of the roughly 50,000 printed words in a typical copy of the Financial Times, it should in theory be worth about 4 per cent of the newspaper’s cover price – 10 US cents, 17½ euro cents or eight pence.
To readers particularly interested in the subject, perhaps, it may be worth more. To others, though no journalist would like to admit as much, it will be worth nothing.”
While the debate over how to monetise online content is an interesting one, that’s not what this post is about. I’m more interested in Andrew’s comment that an article is worthless to some readers, and hence they don’t read it. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a little while; it it possible to calculate how many people have read an article online and use that as a way of measuring PR?
The FT has more than 860,000 unique monthly visitors, according to Gorkana, but I refuse to believe that all those people read every single article on the website. While some articles will be read by thousands of people, many won’t. Simply because some topics are more niche.
So, here’s the big idea. If the media were to share website analytics such as the number of unique hits each article gained and how long those visitors had spent reading each page, PR’s could provide their clients with an accurate number of views for each piece of online coverage. But what’s in it for the press? Well, they could sell this data to PR’s, via a clippings agency perhaps. The press get an extra revenue source and PR’s get a way to provide clients with more advanced measurement. Win-win? What do you think?
I see what you’re saying, but I think traffic analytics are a bit anachronistic when it comes to measuring success on the web. The vast majority of page views last less than a minute, and most of those only a few seconds. So I don’t think they really say anything.
And it might be more trouble than it’s worth. Traditional media is all about circulation figures anyway, rather than views of individual articles, so more detailed results might be less than complimentary in some cases.
Would it be more useful to focus on other factors instead, like click-throughs, social media activity, increased traffic to client sites from search engines, etc? Or is that easier said than done?
Ultimately, the only way you can truly measure (positive) PR’s commercial value is to talk to everyone who read the publicity and get them to tell you honestly whether it influenced them (or not) to make a purchase. Doing that would cost far more than than the PR itself.
People holding PR budgets need to be rational (and a little brave) and appreciate that measurement will best come from collecting all the data you practically can, looking at all of it in context and then taking a view on value. If we pursue a holy grail of the ultimate measurement approach blindly, we’ll be kidding ourselves. PR can be far better measured than ever before, but its limitations must be understood.
[...] Can you measure PR in hits? – Speed Communications [...]
A big idea and a good idea – and one I too have espoused for many years – I began asking the big media owners back in 2002 if they would consider making viewing data on individual pages available (even for money) – on the basis that it would be good to understand exactly how many page views a particular story got, etc. Every single one of them said no – and have continued to do so ever since – the most usual reason being “that’s commercially sensitive data”.
As Dan points out above, I suspect the truth is that in the majority of cases, the actual viewing figures for a single story will be low – at least compared to the overall readership figures for a site. The 80/20 principle is almost certainly at play. Take The Guardian – it has over 13.3 million indexed pages. However, probably 20pc of these pages account for 80pc of the page views – in fact it is more like 1/99. So even if you get a piece of coverage on The Guardian site, chances are only a small percentage of people are likely to see it. And of those who see it, does it actually make them think or do anything differently?
Here is another way to look at – take the BBC site. The BBC home page has a Page Rank of 9 (that’s big). However, check any individual BBC news story page and most of the time, it will have a page rank of 0. That applies to most big media sites. If – as some believe – Google’s Page Rank algorithm takes into account page views, then this seems to bear out the fact that even getting coverage on a big media site isn’t necessarily as great as it might first appear – that is, if you have grown up used to the idea of big numbers being the measure of PR success.
That to me is one of the problems – a fear of small numbers. I know some clients will look at, say, The Guardian Tech’s Twitter account numbers – 500K+ – and then say, “Pah, only 1500 people click through on story links – less 0.4pc CTR.” But at least you know 1500 have clicked through to the story – you have no idea just who has read or been influenced by a print version story (unless you’ve created a specific phrase that could be tracked in terms of increased search volumes).
So yes – would be great if publishers revealed individual page view numbers – however, I can’t seem them doing it any time soon – because they too think advertisers will be scared by small numbers. But surely better to have a smaller, more relevant, more engaged (and measurable) readership for a specific story than to cling to the notion that a big OTS number will actually do anything for you?
google analytics also provide great data about website statisitics*:”
the best website analytics that i know is none other than google analytics”:*