NLA introduces new PR measurement tool

The NLA today announced a new product called Article Impact Measurement. This is an interesting development in the evolution of PR measurement.

Alongside other functionalities, the headline act of this product is that national newspaper publishers (excluding the Mail and the Express) have opened up their website traffic data so that PR agencies and in-house PR teams can see how many people have read a specific page URL.

Therefore the regular client question of, “how many people have read this story”, is no longer subject to a broad brush reply incorporating very large monthly ABC website wide readership figures; this technology drills down to specific pages.

This seems like an important step in the right direction when it comes to reliable, robust numbers to demonstrate successful online media outputs for PR campaigns.

The service also includes a range of other KPI’s but many of these are already available in the market from a range of suppliers.

One of the challenges for the NLA is that stories are often global and the NLA is a predominantly UK focused body. Another issue is that currently this service only includes the nationals, but if successful it will most likely be rolled out to the regional press.

There is an interesting sub discussion behind this service. The data that publishers own, regarding who is reading their content, is potentially very valuable for PR practitioners. For example, imagine if for a specific campaign, across specific URLs, you were able to build a picture of the geographic and demographic breakdown of who had read that story across the national newspaper websites? That would be sought after data.

However, currently the revenues being generated from the NLA licences are not sufficient for large publishers to be able to make the business decision to invest time and resource to service this need. Whether there will be a tipping point that will mean this revenue stream becomes sufficiently viable for publishers to supply the PR sector with deeper, richer data remains to be seen.

AIM has been developed in consultation with UK media monitoring agencies and will be available under licence from media monitoring and evaluation agencies.

Data captured by NLA Article Impact Measurement includes:

• The total number of views of an article, provided by 10 national newspaper publisher websites
• The count of Tweets and Retweets of an article plus total reach (follower count)
• The number of times an article is republished, and on which third party websites

David Pugh, Managing Director of NLA media access, told PRmoment: “Coverage in UK newspapers remains critical to PR success and we know it is highly valued by agencies and their clients. AIM marks a big step forward in assessing the real value of individual articles.”

PR agencies and in-house PR teams cannot purchase AIM direct from the NLA, it is available from thirty odd media monitoring and evaluation firms in the UK.