A friend in the PR arena asked about page view counts on the web and how they relate to press exposure. A client wanted a report on all of the page views on all of the sites where the client's content had appeared. A lot humongous web site traffic numbers were gathered but how, the friend wondered, could these giant numbers possibly be relevant to their client. And how do these numbers compare to the familiar print measure of impressions -- CPM?
This is the huge question of the web and has been since the first web ads were placed. To try to answer it briefly is almost impossible, and adding the context for publicity throws all of the ad-oriented discussion (and it all is ad-oriented) out of whack and in need of new definitions.
CPM is a term that is used for the web, but aside from the literal
"cost per thousand [impressions]", on the web it has several different
meanings from the old print standard, all of them depending on the
context of "impression".
In print, the term
impression comes from the act of printing; that is, to make an
impression with a press. For advertising, though, it is reduced to the
circulation numbers for the newspaper or magazine being measured. This
makes a vague basis for estimating how many times an ad might actually
have been seen. But on the web "impression" means pretty
much the exact number of times that an ad was fully delivered to a web
browser. Much closer to an actual human being actually coming in
contact with the ad or story or whatever. This is something that web
technology can readily count.
If a web site
shows an ad 1000 times that would be 1000 impressions. Similar to the
print idea but not at all the same. On the other hand, the web
technology can tell if those 1000 went to the same internet ("IP")
address -- i.e., "probably the same person" -- or if they went to 1000
different addresses ("uniques"). Because the technology can count such
things, the advertisers want the benefit of it, so "CPM" might mean
1000 unique IP addresses regardless of how many actual ad deliveries
(impressions) had been made.
A long time ago, in the old days of the web, web site ads were sold by CPM.
Nowadays
most ads are sold by CPC ("click") or by CPA ("action") rather than by
raw impressions. Only a fraction of a percent of the most influential
sites can sell by CPM or placement. Most Google ads, by far, are CPC.
When
a website publishes its gross page views, it is something like the
print "circulation" count. It's the total number of pages delivered to
a web browser from that site. But, 1000 page views could be 1000 pages
viewed once each, or it could be one page viewed 1000 times.
Using
that gross number to measure PR exposure is really tough. You need a
specific per-page count from the web server to know what sort of
exposure, if any, your piece received from that site. You can use the
pageviews numbers to compare the volume of traffic at different sites.
That might be helpful in estimating the comparative influence
of the sites that ran your piece. And you do get kudos for scoring on
the big sites -- the CNN's and such. But without the specific pageviews
for your piece, you're really not going to have a measurable sense of
how many people saw your story.
All is not
lost, however. Good estimates and even some actual counts are
available. For web and social media exposure, a communications
department or agency might want to go to another type of firm that
specializes in gathering all of the metrics that are out on the web and
digesting them into a usable form. Symscio (www.symscio.com) is one of
those. You can find a few more by Googling: "how to measure PR on the
web".
Another helpful place to go might be "Google Trends" (trends.google.com).
The main focus there is to help you see comparable trends in searches
for certain terms on the web, over some period of time. But a secondary
chart at Google Trends always shows you the "News reference volume" for
your search terms and that might be just the thing for a PR success
report.
For PR, why not divide page views by unique visitors for a more accurate way of reporting how many people are exposed to an article on a website.
And isn't it possible for web technology to report how many unique visitors there were to a specific story? And couldn't the website charge a fee for such a service if customers requested the information in advance -- or even offer it free as an enticement for advertising?
Meanwhile, the page view numbers I've seen are reported generally for a month. So for daily page views, why not divide by the number of days in a month? The figure, then, would more accurately compare to the daily circulation or readership figures for print media. Please comment.
Thanks for the reference Mike.
Beverly, applying accurate impression numbers is one of the more challenging aspects that we face. Unfortunately, there is no "silver bullet" that allows us to precisely report on a brand's true visibility (article vs. outlet exposure). In regards to internet visibility, we use the unique visitors per month figure that can be obtained from resources such as compete.com. We use unique visitors/month because:
1. It provides us with a consistent opportunity-to-see number, important for measuring trends.
2. It allows us to measure people vs. pages which run the risk of being inflated due to the depth of a website (blog vs. online newspaper) or the trick of chopping up a single story into multiple pages.
3. Also, generally speaking, there is only one page that we care about when reporting on brand visibility.
4. In regards to dividing monthly visitors to obtain a daily number, this does not take into consideration the loyalty of readers (visitors) and their repeat traffic.
Hope this helps,
Mike
Symscio
Hi Mike from Symisco,
Yes; very helpful. Thanks for adding your clarifying views.