PR measurement is changing – there’s no doubt about that. Maybe not as quickly as many of us would like, but PR pros and agencies are more aware of the need to measure reach accurately and determine the impact of news content. The tools available are constantly striving to find better ways to figure out and report more accurate numbers.
Cision recently released Digital Reach, a service that aims to calculate the extended social reach of a news site or blog. In the past, circulation figures included the concept that any magazine or newspaper was usually read by 2 or 3 people beyond the subscriber or buyer. Social media has extended this concept exponentially. We know that once a good story is published online, it gets shared.
The idea behind Digital Reach is to find and calculate, as correctly as possible, the reach of a news site or blog. Until now, when a brand was mentioned online all we had to go on was the unique visitors per month (UVPM) to that site. And, if the site was in a specific section of the site or on a sub-domain, (many blogs are a sub-domain on sites like wordpress.com) it was not possible to get a correct UVPM figure for that publication. Digital Reach tracks UVPM more accurately and can provide a number for the average sharing value that site gets.
Digital Reach delivers a number for each publication using a formula based on a statistical model that expresses the relationship between a site’s unique visitors per month and its share counts. The resulting figure is the new estimated Digital Reach for Unique Visitors per Month in the Cision Media Database.
This is certainly a move in the right direction. However, bear in mind that this is still a broad overview figure. Not every piece of news content gets shared as many times as very other story. But at least it does give you an indication of the potential reach of a site or blog.
You do need accurate reach and influence scores to make a list of good bloggers or news sites to pitch, but remember to take it a step further. You need to be tracking what happens after the content is posted. We’ve seen time and again that a bigger site or blog, with a reach score in the millions, gets trumped by a smaller blog with a more engaged and active readership.
Digital Reach is definitely a step forward in terms of PR measurement. It’s good to have a more accurate reach figure. But you have to learn to go beyond UVPM – you have to know what those visitors did once they saw your content. Did they stay on the site or leave? (bounce rate) Did they like, comment, watch a video, download content? It’s all about engagement and actions taken.
