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All Eyeballs Are Not Equal
Here's how to deal with the tricky problem of comparing OTS for print vs. online.

by Katie Delahaye Paine

Increasingly, organizations are including online sources in their media analyses. Whether it's adding the online version of a newspaper like www.nytimes.com or a blog like Engadget, the practice is causing havoc with those of us trying to calculate Opportunities to See, (OTS). Also known as impressions, OTS is a common metric that is used not only in the calculation of share of discussion, but also in message analysis, as in "Total Opportunities to See a Key Message," and in analysis of influencer programs as in "Total Opportunities to See a particular authority or spokesperson."

The problem comes when you try to put website numbers on the same chart as print media. It just doesn't work. Here's why: The circulation of The New York Times is 1.1 million, the OTS for www.nytimes.com is 11,405,000 (worldwide it's 22 million). So, first of all the eyeballs you reach in print may or may not be the same ones you reach online; you may be duplicating your reach. Secondly, it is much more accurate to compare data between print publications, e.g. the Los Angeles Times vs. The New York Times, because the audiences are calculated in a similar way. Print media is audited by the Audit Bureau of Circulation and the circulation figures for most publications are published in a variety of directories like Standard Rate and Data Service (SRDS). If you are tracking broadcast coverage, there's Nielsen and Arbitron.

However, when it comes to calculating OTS online things get a bit murkier. Virtually all data today comes from either Nielsen Net Ratings or comScore. Nielsen has the power of the Nielsen brand behind it, comScore claims greater accuracy and data on 8000 publications. They both use huge panels to track online behavior and rank the various sites.

The problem occurs if you are using multiple vendors for your online clippings, because chances are good that they don't all use the same numbers. For years KDPaine & Partners has relied on PRtrak data. They use comScore and we've generally found the data to be very good. But ironically, their parent company VMS is obviously using a different source, since their numbers don't match the ones from PRtrak.

Frankly, for the purposes of media content analysis, it just doesn't matter. Consistency is far more important. If you start with one definition of OTS, stick with it. What you do not want to do is switch sources in midstream.

So our recommendation is to define OTS as Unique Monthly Visits: The number of actual people that visit a site during a month (if 1 person visits 10 times during a month, that's 1 unique visitor).

And if your provider doesn't give you Unique Monthly Visits, you may have do additional calculations. For example, CyberAlert's data come as a percent share of population. So if a site claims that it is reaching 5% of the U.S. population every month, you need to do the math: The current U.S. population (right now it's 295,734,134) times 5% = 14,786,706.

You know you need to measure your results, but chances are there’s never been enough money in your budget for evaluation. Until now.
KDPaine & Partners’ new Do-It-Yourself Dashboard system combines a Web-based application with professional consulting to enable PR professionals to customize their own PR dashboards. Look here for more information.

1. You’ll learn how to use hard numbers to prove the results of your PR efforts.

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