Measuring the value of a news placement online is complicated by
a variety of factors, not the least of which is semantic confusion
over terms like "impressions" and "hits."
For the record, a "hit" is every click a visitor makes on a Web
site - so if a visitor hits 12 different graphical items on the
site, he produces 12 hits. An impression is a count of every page
accessed on a site. More accurate is a count of average daily
visitors. The caveat: just as in the print world where coverage on
the front page is key, scoring virtual ink on a home page means
exposure to a different number of average daily visitors than
scoring ink on a sub domain page.
PRtrak, which is providing a relatively new method of measuring
online media coverage, has specific average daily visitor values
for both home pages and sub domain pages at the top 100 Web sites
in its database of 10,000. For the other 9,900, it applies industry
averages to sub domain pages - for example, on financial Web sites,
more than a quarter of visitors tend to go to sub domain pages,
while at community sites, only about 8 percent click deeper.
Numbers for all the sites come from comScore, which maintains a
database of 1.5 million Web users.
As if it weren't complicated enough, here's where it gets
controversial: PRtrak combines comScore's numbers with information
from SQAD, which compiles invoices from the major media buyers to
find out how much companies are paying for online advertising.
PRtrak compares 50 words of online coverage to a single banner ad
to produce an "ad equivalency" for the online ink. While some
measurement experts hotly dispute what they call an arbitrary
comparison of 50 words to a banner - not to mention the use of AVEs
- Angie Jeffrey, VP with PRtrak, says, "This is a pretty good place
to start," emphasizing that measurement of this medium is truly in
its infancy.
PRtrak will be providing the service through a variety of the
most popular media management software providers in the near
future.
Coming up in the next issue of PR NEWS, watch for numbers from
PRtrak and comScore on the top online newspaper sites to target
with your latest news.