Whitevector: Audience Reach – A missing piece in web analytics
In the latest of our Research Focus reports, Whitevector looks at the importance of online audience reach in web analytics…
While analysing online discussions, it is relevant to estimate the net audience engaged in discussions regarding one’s own brand. When a marketer is familiar with the size and characteristics of the online audience to the brand, the strengths and weaknesses of a brand in online media can be identified, as well as the most influential online forums and blogs. Calculations of online audiences are often a bit vague, based – as they often are – around site visitor numbers and very broad viewing estimates. Thus, estimates concerning the attention paid to a brand in online environments are very volatile.
Today, the significance of social media is widely understood. Due to the lack of standardised social media audience measurement methodologies, social media’s role as a part of marketing strategy is often under-played since it is hard to make like-for-like comparisons with other media forms.
The proportion of consumers who have been exposed to a certain ad is often referred to as ‘net reach’, and this term can also be applied to social media. In social media, however, paid advertisements increase the reach only indirectly through the opinions expressed by consumers. Brand owners can control what an ad looks like and what it communicates but consumer opinions are formed as a consequence of a much more complicated process. The visibility gained in social media is therefore often referred to as ‘earned media’.
Online consumer discussions could at first seem to be an uncontrollable phenomenon that can potentially cause harm to brands, but several studies prove that consumers prefer to read product reviews created in online discussion forums by their peers rather than marketing material produced by the company itself. On the other hand, these different information sources are often seen to support each other: consumers combine the information received for example from a company website to the reviews articulated by other consumers in online chats. Thus, for a consumer brand a strong presence and high levels of reach in social media is a key element of success.
Reach measurement can be applied to online discussions using several different methods, and it is worth noting that these measurement techniques fit differently with different types of social media environments. Still, the underlying idea is to quantify the number of the people reading online discussions concerning the brand in question. In those cases where there are a lot of discussions about the brand in large and busy online forums, the reach of the brand is inevitably high. However, the reach also increases as a result of the ‘long tail’ of the discussions: if the brand is mentioned in many different blogs and forums, the overall reach achieved can grow surprisingly large. Whitevector’s method to calculate social media reach takes full account of the structure of the site, with no need for third party data.
As for any medium, calculating audience sizes for online forums and blogs is not problem-free – the required information from one or other ‘official’ source is not always available and the reliability of the data can vary. It is often particularly difficult to produce reliable audience size estimates for blogs.
Nevertheless, with a sufficient sample of blogs and forums and a proper and well-thought-through methodology, a marketer can estimate the audience size reached by of the brand. Then, the numbers are comparable with competing brands (eg how many people read Audi-related discussions compared to BMW-related discussions) and with other media forms (eg how many people read Audi-related discussions in social media compared to how many people see an Audi ad in printed media).
In social media, understanding mention and discussion volumes is essential. Reach measurement is in essence based on volumes, but it is to be remembered that when comparing competing brands, less volume can stand for higher reach, depending where exactly the brand is active within discussions. For a reference, see tables 1 and 2.
Anyone comparing reach figures for different media should take into consideration the way that each medium’s audiences are measured. Social media reach estimates should therefore be interpreted differently than, for example, the readership data relating to a magazine, or the viewing of a particular TV show.
Understanding how many people read online discussions about a certain product or a service makes social media more comparable with other means of advertising, and activities within other media, as well as complementing other web measurement methods, thus making the total picture more complete. Altogether, the quantifying of social media reach gives companies a better starting point to make digital marketing decisions.