Ask Dr. Paine
Your measurement questions answered.

This month: Measuring Business Trade Press

Email your questions to Katharine Delahaye Paine.

Question: I'm a business to business firm that caters to a narrow audience. There are only a handful of publications that even cover us, so we don't get much press coverage. How should I be measuring my success?

Answer: If there are only a few publications, chances are they're pretty important. First of all, I'd check to see how many pages per issue are devoted to your particular line of business. Then I'd start by tracking what your share of ink is in those pages versus the competition. I'd also look at your share of favorable and negative coverage, share of favorable positioning on issues like "good quality," "strong financials," and "solid management team."

I'd also look at a measure that we call "cost per minute spent with prospect." If you are using a variety of ways to reach your prospects, i.e. trade shows, advertising, sponsorship and PR, I'd take the quarterly budget for each activity, divide it by the total number of contacts you make in that quarter, and then divide it by the average length of time a customer spends with your brand during each event. For example, if going to a trade show costs $50,000 and 1000 people come through your booth and spend an average of 5 minutes each the cost per minute spent with prospect is: 1000 people x 5 minute each = 5000 contact minutes. $50,000/ 5000 = $10 per minute spent with contact. An ad costs $25,000 and is seen by 10000 people who spend 30 seconds reading it would total 10000 x .5 = 5000 contact minutes. $25,000 / 5000 = $5 per minute spent with contact.

Question: Cost per minute for reading an ad? Seems a bit far-fetched to me. Isn't a coupon or "call this number for a sweet deal" the standard way to measure ad readership?

Wouldn't a more valid indicator of relative effectiveness be comparing some actual behavior or result? Like, if sales wants to compare ads with a trade show, then the comparision would be in actual leads: "leads from coupons" to "leads from trade show contacts."

Answer: Yes, leads are the way people used to measure ad effectiveness: soooo 1999. The problem with measuring coupons is that you can't compare the effectiveness of an ad with PR or trade shows since PR and trade shows don't have coupons. So if you're trying to show that PR or sponsorship or whatever is more effective than advertising, you need a way to compare the two that DOESN'T include counting column inches or coupons. Ergo... cost per minute spent with prospect. You can also use leads, but most editorial doesn't come with referral numbers, except in high tech pubs.